Rick Rubin is a difficult person to dismiss out of hand. He is, for one thing, perhaps the most famous living music producer. He cofounded Def Jam Recordings, and was a significant figure in the early days of hip-hop as it crossed from the underground into the mainstream of pop culture.

He played, as a producer and record executive, a decisive role in the ascent of a whole roster of major musical acts of the 1980s and 1990s: LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy. He produced Slayer’s Reign in Blood, inarguably among the definitive metal albums. He produced Jay-Z’s 99 Problems. He is generally credited with engineering the late-career resurgence of Johnny Cash, whose American Recordings series he produced.

It was Rubin who convinced a reluctant Cash to record the stripped-down acoustic cover of the Nine Inch Nails song Hurt. There are, to be sure, many mediocre and indeed terrible records with his fingerprints on them – he’s worked with a whole roster of butt-rock mainstays, from Limp Bizkit to Kid Rock – and many serious music fans take issue with what they deem a dry and characterless production style. But you can’t really get around Rubin as a significant figure in the history of pop music.

In recent years Rubin, who is now 63, has parlayed this reserve of cultural capital, along with his correspondingly immense personal wealth, into a late-career resurgence of his own. In 2023, he published The Creative Act: A Way of Being, a sort of design-object coffee-table book about creativity as a way of being, filled with thoughts often so expansive and open-ended as to be essentially empty of substance. With his long grey hair and his voluminous white........

© The Irish Times