Stunt 2009: Week 6 – Rick Rubin

*This is a companion piece to a similarly-themed article on Karen’s site which, all things being equal, should be published at roughly the same time.*

Only seven of these ten songs were available on Spotify but here’s the playlist anyway.

1. **I Need A Beat** LL Cool J – next…

2. **Rhyming & Stealing** The Beastie Boys – You either “get” the Beastie Boys or you don’t. Their appeal can not be explained in words. I know this, because people have tried to explain it to me in the past.

3. **Rock The Bells** LL Cool J – I’m clearly not the target audience here. Expecting me to enjoy listening to LL Cool J is like expecting a tortoise to enjoy a cigarette.

4. **Walk This Way** Run DMC – I kinda half-liked this song until I actually listened to it.

5. **Cross Your Heart** The Red Devils – by comparison to the previous 4 songs, this slow blues number is fantastic. But only by comparison. It contains a moment that is so bad that it is hilarious – the harmonica solo opens with a 20 second long note. That’s one high note, held for 20 seconds. Impressive lung capacity, maybe, but what were they thinking? Why do you want to punish your listeners so badly?

6. **Under The Bridge** Red Hot Chili Peppers – this is the best thing that the Red Hot Chili Peppers have ever done. And it’s fantastic. It’s perfectly paced and not too busy. It’s a great advert for Rick Rubin’s production skills. I never feel the need to skip to the end.

7. **The Beast In Me** Johnny Cash – it’s a nice song, but considering that this playlist is supposed to be all about Rick Rubin (producer), I don’t see the point in including a song that’s just vocals and one acoustic guitar. It’s hard to get that wrong really.

8. **By The Way** Red Hot Chili Peppers – I went through a phase of liking RHCP once, but it has long since worn off. Listening to this song, I feel like it’s crying out for a really delicate acoustic cover version that would blow the socks off of the original. In a moment of curiosity, I searched on YouTube but all I could find were cover versions of people playing it on an acoustic guitar, but in the same style as the original. Maybe I should step up and take the challenge.

9. **Hurt** Johnny Cash – I love this song. Especially how the vocals clip slightly, and not in a warm analog way, but in a harsh digital way. Over the course of the song, the clipping gets more and more noticeable, until the last chorus, when it sounds like the microphone is breaking. It’s so wrong, but it feels so right. The acoustic guitar is double-tracked with the channels panned hard-left and hard-right, but whereas standard doubletracking technique is to get the two takes as close as possible, on this song they are clearly intentionally different. It contributes to this song’s effectiveness.

10. **Oh Mary** Neil Diamond – the acoustic guitar is double-tracked in exactly the same fashion as the previous song. This is quite a beautiful song, as long as you’ve got the time to sit and take it in – it doesn’t go anywhere fast.

So, in conclusion: there’s a few songs in here that I like, and you can’t deny that Rick Rubin has breadth, but this playlist hasn’t had much depth. There’s only four songs that even registered on my adequatometer.

The next week’s playlist

Random number: 336
Two playlists on this page, the randometer then fell on the second one – Nina Simone. The book says:

> She set her heart on being a classical pianist and never wanted to be a singer at all. But, despite her reluctance, she could sing her laundry list and make it sound soulful becoming one of the great vocal stylists of the last fifty years. These ten span jazz, blues, pop, swing and soul.