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Rick Rubin: The Music Man


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I was late getting to this, but it's a pretty interesting (and lengthy) article on how Columbia hired Rick Rubin, hoping that he'll somehow save the record business.

 

September 2, 2007

 

The Music Man

By LYNN HIRSCHBERG

 

Rick Rubin is listening. A song by a new band called the Gossip is playing, and he is concentrating. He appears to be in a trance. His eyes are tightly closed and he is swaying back and forth to the beat, trying at once to hear what is right and wrong about the music. Rubin, who resembles a medium-size bear with a long, gray beard, is curled into the corner of a tufted velvet couch in the library of a house he owns but where he no longer lives. This three-story 1923 Spanish villa steeped in music history

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These were some of the parts that interested/amused/disturbed me:

 

This is the fourth male singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar that Rubin has heard today. The music is heartfelt, spare, poetic. "There were a lot of girls in the audience," Kusatsu says as the track begins.
At the end of their paid internships, the students took part in focus groups that were closely observed by Steve Barnett, Rubin's co-head at the label, and Mark DiDia, whom Rubin brought in as head of operations, as well as by other Columbia executives. The focus groups may have been the real point of Big Red
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He deserves a Nobel Prize for his production on Jay-Z's "99 Problems."

I MIGHT pay $6.95 a month to listen to any music at any time.

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