I know it’s an impossible question, but I’m going to ask it anyway, because you’ve helped create a lot of them: what makes a great song great?
I don’t think you can define what it is, but you know it when you hear it. It’s amazing that sometimes you might hear a song that, knowing what you know, won’t make sense—and yet it will still be great. There are songs that can transcend whatever genre limitations they have or style limitations they have.
So you don’t believe that, say, a great melody is necessarily part of a great song?
No, no. I think one of the things that really drew me to hip-hop was how you could get to this very minimal essence of a song—to a point where many people wouldn’t call it a song. My first credit was “Reduced by Rick Rubin.” That was on LL Cool J’s debut album, Radio. The goal was to be just vocals, a drum machine, and a little scratching. There’s very little going on.
Why was that so important to you?
There’s a tremendous power in using the least amount of information to get a point across.
Your next release was the Beastie Boys. How did that come about?
We worked on their debut album, Licensed to Ill, for a long time, two years in all, which is part of the reason the record is as good as it is. Each song really has a life of its own, because it might be a month between writing two songs. It wasn’t like “OK, we have six weeks to make an album.” It was natural—the natural flow of making a really good piece of work. I can remember at one point getting a call from Mike D really upset, like, “What’s going on? Why isn’t our record done yet?” I just said, “I don’t really have control over that. It comes when it comes.”
Usually young people are in a rush. Why did you feel like you could take so much time?
From the beginning, all I’ve ever cared about is things being great. I never cared about when they were done. Because I also feel like I want the music to last forever. And once you release it, you can’t go back and fix it, so you really have to get it right. And that takes time.
Time can’t be a factor.
The things that can’t be a factor are time, chart position, radio success, sales—none of those things can get in the way of something being great. All they do is cloud the picture.