Legendary producer
and Def Jam co-founder Rick Rubin surprised those who old enough to remember the
days he was involved in hip-hop, by working with Jay-Z on his Black Album.
Jay-Z, the first
hip-hop act that Rubin has worked with in over 15 years, managed to snag the
rapper for his farewell album. Rubin produced the song "."
In a rare interview
featured rollingstone.com Rubin, who
founded Def American and signed the influential Geto Boys, before changing his
label name to American, revealed why he decided to leave the hip-hop.
"When I started
there really was a community of people who were doing it for the art,"
Rubin said. "With the success of our records I started hearing a lot of
records that sounded like our records, and it didn’t really feel like being
part of a creative community anymore. But since then there have been a lot of
things that have been revolutionary and great in hip-hop. N.W.A would be a great
example of a band that really radically took it to the next level in the time
since I left hip-hop."
Rubin said that
his admiration for N.W.A. was so great, that he visited them in the recording
studio as they were recording one of hip-hop’s most influential albums, Straight
Outta Compton.
Rubin said that
he would have signed the group to his label, but they were already signed to
Ruthless/Priority.
Rubin gave two
reasons as to why Def Jam was such a successful label. He said that their early
records were the first to capture the true spirit of hip-hop and that early
hip-hop music wasn’t structured the way it is today, until Def Jam came along
and introduced a few changes to make the music more marketable.
"At the point
we got involved in hip-hop, a song would be between six and nine minutes long,
and it would be more like a Jamaican toasting record — it wouldn’t really have
a chorus, it would just be rapping for nine minutes and telling a story. That
format would be more difficult for a suburban audience to digest. We picked
up strong songwriting from listening to the Beatles and applied it to this new
form of music."
Rubin is currently
working on a peace themed album, which features Weezer, System of a Down, Sheryl
Crow and others.
