(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Mon 9 February 2026 19:20, UK
Nothing that Rick Rubin ever made was done by accident.
Despite being known as more of a guru of rock and roll than an actual producer half the time he walks into the room, he was always the one who could see pieces of a song that most musicians would have never been able to pick up on when they were in that rehearsal room. He was the one you wanted if you needed to refine your material, but Rubin could also be a lot more hands-off whenever he worked with his artists as well.
Each artist is different whenever they walk into the studio, and as much as Rubin might have wanted the music to go one way, he was more than willing to work with the artist to get the sound that they wanted. Slayer might have been poised for stardom and could have easily kept going in a heavier direction with Rubin, but if they felt something didn’t work whenever he suggested something, Rubin understood that it was their career and that they should be able to do whatever they wanted.
Then again, some other artists truly needed to be pushed if they wanted to reach that upper echelon of artists. The Red Hot Chili Peppers were already a decent underground funk rock act when Rubin worked with them, but if you back look at the documentary Funky Monks, you can see Rubin’s real superpower in action, especially in the scene where he talks about Flea simplifying his bass parts until they finally hit on the classic bassline for ‘Give It Away’.
Because for Rubin, the producer was about more than a guy who swindled the knobs every now and again. He was a song doctor in many ways, but his ear wasn’t focused on making the most pop-flavoured music ever made. He was interested in music that sounded different or songs that had no set structure, so when he saw a band like System of a Down play for the first time, he fell in love the minute he heard them.
Their music was still indebted to the greatest metal bands of all time, but no one would have expected the kind of Eastern scales to end up on the charts. Their Armenian heritage bled through every single song they played, and when talking about the songs that ended up on Toxicity, Rubin was pushing the band to amplify those strange moments when they landed on tracks like ‘Chop Suey!’.
There was no other rock song that sounded like that at the time, and Rubin always wanted to give the people what they didn’t know they wanted, saying, “The singing parts of that song are so undeniable and where it goes from there is really dramatic and beautiful and technicolor. It’s wild. I remember talking to Serj [Tankian] going, ‘Really? This is how it goes?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah.’ He was saying, ‘I’m going to sing it then I’m going to repeat it.’ And I just said, ‘Okay.’”
Even if the band had it all figured out, you have to remember how much of a risk this was when Rubin worked on this record. This was a band that was getting banned from some of the biggest radio stations in the area because of how strange their tunes were, and yet when you listen to the final chorus of their signature tune, it’s still some of the most gorgeous harmonies to come out of the 2000s, let alone a band that was coming up in the era of Limp Bizkit and Korn.
It wasn’t going to be easy for most people to understand this kind of music, but that was always what Rubin worked best at. Nothing that he ever made was necessarily ready for primetime, but if you go back to everything from Public Enemy to Slayer to Red Hot Chili Peppers up until System of a Down, he thrived on making the most nonsensical musical ideas make perfect sense.