Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1881 - Rick Rubin
Uploaded: 2022-10-12T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1881 - Rick Rubin' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-10-12. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1881 - Rick Rubin' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-10-12. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1881 - Rick Rubin

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Rick Rubin, ladies and gentlemen.
It's a pleasure to finally make your acquaintance.
Same.
Happy to be here.
I'm happy to have you here, man.
I'm excited to talk to you.
Beautiful place.
Thank you.
And if you see shooting stars across the ceiling, you're not tripping.
Every like 40 seconds or something, a star shoots across the ceiling.
So what's happening, man?
Just hanging.
You wrote a book.
I wrote a book.
I'm excited to read it, man.
Yeah, I'm excited for you to see it.
You've had a wild life, brother.
It continues to surprise me on a regular basis.
Does it?
Every time.
It's like one thing after another.
So much of it's unintentional.
I would say all of it's unintentional.
How so?
From the beginning, I never thought any of the things that I'm doing were
possible.
Or realistic.
And I just did things out of the love of them, thinking I would have real jobs.
And, you know, like the thing that my passion would be my hobby, and I'd have a
job to support
my hobby.
Yeah.
And it just magically turned out different than that without me knowing it was
possible.
That's the best kind of story.
I love those stories.
Because when someone just follows their passion, and it just leads them to
being one of the
baddest motherfuckers in music.
How did you get started?
I just started making, I went to, I was in a punk rock band first, and I
recorded a couple
of punk rock things with my band, and liked the feeling of being in the studio.
It was fun.
And hip-hop was just getting started at this time.
And I would go to, there was a club called Negril on 2nd Avenue in Manhattan
downtown.
It was a reggae club most nights, but one night a week it was hip-hop.
And this was when hip-hop was, it didn't really exist other than in the Bronx,
Brooklyn, and
it was this tiny little scene of people playing music in parks, really.
It was not a, it's hard to explain how small it was, how much of a sub-genre it
was in these
days.
So the fact that you could see it downtown was a big deal because it didn't
really exist
anywhere.
You didn't hear this music in clubs, you didn't hear, and there were very few
at this
time, 12-inch singles would come out, and there would be, I don't know, I don't
know
if there were more than 30 or 40 rap songs in the world at this point in time,
but there
were these clubs where stuff would happen.
And at this club that I went to called Negril, what you would normally only be
able to see
at a club in Harlem, like there was a club called Broadway International, and
there was a club
called the Disco Fever, was brought downtown and people downtown could see it.
So I started going every Tuesday night, that's when I was going to NYU.
And I just loved the music, and then I would buy every 12-inch single that
would come out when
it would come out, and none of them sounded like what it sounded like at the
club.
Live, it wasn't related at all.
How so?
Live, it was much more of a raw, it was like DJs and breakbeats, and it was
harder, whereas
the record sounded more like an R&B record, but with somebody rapping on it.
But it wasn't what we know as rap today, that's not what those records sounded
like.
They were live bands, they were made by people who made other kinds of music.
So they made them the same way they made other kinds of music when hip-hop was
really different.
So I started making hip-hop records really with the idea of I just wanted, as a
fan, to hear
what it sounded like in a club.
So it was almost like a documentarian style.
And I would just start documenting what I heard and making things that sounded
more like the
energy of a club, which was, again, different than these slick records.
And part of it was because I didn't know what I was doing.
I didn't have any training or skill, but that allowed, that was what allowed it
to be new,
was it wasn't doing it the regular way.
It was doing it the way of hip-hop, which didn't yet exist.
And so how did you get in with the artists and start producing stuff?
I started meeting them.
The first, my favorite group at the time was called Treacherous Three.
And they were on a label called Sugar Hill.
Their best, they'd put out three 12-inch singles that I loved.
Those were the best 12-inch, they still sounded like R&B records, but they were
the best of
the rap records you could get at this time.
Those first three came out on Enjoy records.
They had a red label.
And then they signed to Sugar Hill.
And when they signed to Sugar Hill, they put out an album, and it didn't sound,
it wasn't
good like the ones on Enjoy.
And then one night, Treacherous Three were playing at that club, Negril, and I
met them
after the show.
Kumo D was the lead rapper, you'd say.
And I went to Kumo D and just said, and again, I don't know anything about the
music business.
I don't know anything about what anyone does.
I don't know that there's such a job as a producer.
I don't know any of this.
I just said, I'm your biggest fan, and this, your new album doesn't sound like
what's good
about you guys.
And let's go, let's work together to try to make something that's as good as
you guys are.
And he said, well, we're signing to Sugar Hill, we can't really do that, but
you should talk
to Special K, another member of the group.
He's got a brother, Tee LaRock, who's a really good rapper, and you could do it
with him.
It's like, okay.
And that was the first record I made, was Tee LaRock.
Wow.
And so did they recognize once they heard that sound that, yeah, this is more
like what
we're doing in the clubs?
It ended up getting very popular.
It took a long time, probably took 10 months to really have impact in the New
York scene.
And it did.
It was a really popular song.
And what was the difference in the way you were doing the sound versus the way
the sound
was on Tee LaRock?
We could listen to it.
Like, if you listen to it, you'll hear the difference.
I can describe it, but if you listen to it, you'll really understand.
Okay, tell Jamie what to pull up.
Okay.
So a typical rap record at that time would have been Curtis Blow the Breaks.
So if you listen to that, you'll hear what rap sounded like.
And then after that, we'll listen to Tee LaRock, It's Yours, and you'll hear
the difference.
Okay.
Jamie will find it.
So this to you, and how old are you at the time?
Just starting, so first or second year of school, whatever age that is.
Certainly 1920.
Something like that.
Wow.
Look at your hands, everybody.
Have you got what it takes?
Because I'm Curtis Blow, and I want you to know that these are the Breaks.
Breaks in a bus.
Breaks on a car.
Breaks to make you a superstar.
Breaks to win and breaks to lose.
These here breaks, wrap your shoes.
And these are the Breaks.
Break it up, break it up, break it up.
You see your guitar, you hear bass, you hear drums, and it's a band playing,
and it sounds
like it's at a party.
And then there's rapping on top of that.
And now play It's Yours.
Mmm.
This is just a drum machine.
Commentating, illustrating, description giving, additive expert, analyzing some
other musical
myths, seeking people of the universe.
This is yours.
Oh, and there's scratches open.
Now, you haven't really heard that on records yet, because it was what would
happen live in
the DJs, the DJs were the musicians, but to people who made other kinds of
music, the DJs
were only playing back a band, so they assumed the record's supposed to be a
band playing, and
my assumption was that's not what it was.
It was the DJ playing a drum machine and playing parts of records, that that's
what was exciting.
That was the music of hip-hop.
The rapping on top could be the same, but the music of it was different.
Who was the first person that started scratching?
I think, um, I don't know that much about it, but I believe it was DJ Kool Herc
is the, considered
the inventor, but I'm not sure if that's true.
I wouldn't, I'm not the best person to ask.
What a wild idea.
And revolutionary.
It's like, it changed the way people thought about music, and particularly like
hip-hop music.
It became part of it.
It comes out of the idea of the break, starting with the break.
So, the break is, you have a song that has all different parts in it, a
traditional song,
but there's one little part in it that has a cool drum beat, or a cool little
percussion
part.
And what a DJ would do in those days was they would play just that little snippet
of the
song, might be four seconds, and they would have two turntables, and they'd
play four seconds
here, and then four seconds here, and then four seconds here, and four seconds
here, to
create a longer piece out of this four-second loop.
But there was no such thing as a sampler then.
So, it only happened through live playing it.
Hmm.
And then when did people figure out sampling?
And when did, there was a lot of times sampling was maligned, right, in the
early days.
People didn't sort of understand.
They were like, oh, you're taking other people's music.
But it was not just that.
It was a creation of new music with samples.
It's a long conversation.
The first part of sampling is the way it was used in hip-hop in the early days.
So, I was saying we would use a snippet of a record, and then sometimes we
would even
create a tape loop.
So, you would take a little piece of music on tape, and then have it come back
around,
and you'd edit it and splice it.
And there's at least one song on the first Beastie Boys album that uses that
technique.
But it was about extending these pieces of music to create something new.
And hip-hop from the beginning was always a form of montage.
It was finding things and making something new out of it.
It wasn't finding things to make it sound like it sounded.
It was finding something and changing it into something new.
That's what was exciting about it.
And this montage process is the basis of hip-hop.
And up until the time of It's Yours, we didn't really hear it on the records
because people still
were making records using traditional methods, non-hip-hop methods.
Did you get a sense, like while this was all happening, of how that was, this
is like a completely
new music genre.
This is a whole new music scene.
Like, it must have been very exciting.
It was, being part of it was very exciting and loving it was exciting.
And there was a disconnect between that and the outside world.
Because the outside world didn't recognize it, didn't even recognize it as
music, much less
than something that was good, you know, like, oh, that could be good.
It was viewed as this other thing, not music.
Other thing?
Yeah.
That's how it was described.
I can remember being in, um, once, uh, Def Jam happened and we started having a
lot of
success putting out music, and I'm still probably at NYU, um, labels would come
around and want
to be involved in one way or another, and, and one label asks, like, what do
you attribute
the success of this to?
After all, it's not music.
Now, these are people in the music business who are wooing us, wanting to work
with us,
and they're telling us they don't hear it as music.
That doesn't even make sense today, right?
No, no, no.
Now, it's, it's, the world has changed.
The world has changed.
Wow.
But it was a completely alien underground form of music, and because people
were rapping
instead of singing, that was one piece that didn't, wasn't understandable.
And then because the music was like, it's yours, where it's, it's a drum
machine, there's no
melody, there's no, it's, it was too foreign at that point in time for people
to understand
it as songs.
Wow.
It's hard to, it's, it's, it's shocking, it's, it's ridiculous.
And, and in, in some ways, like, there's a song I produced with, um, Run DMC
and Aerosmith,
Walk This Way.
Yeah.
And the whole purpose of doing that was to demonstrate, this is music.
This is music, and this is not only is it music, it's familiar music.
You're just not, you're not seeing it.
Like you're, you're