The Creative Act by Rick Rubin: A recipe book stocked with laxatives for the blocked artist

The Creative Act – A Way of Being

Author: Rick Rubin, with Neil Strauss

ISBN-13: 978-1838858636

Publisher: Canongate

Guideline Price: £25

Heavy rock and hip-hop connoisseurs will know Rick Rubin as the Long Beach native who started the Def Jam label with Russell Simmons and went on to produce breakthrough recordings for the Beastie Boys, Run DMC, Slayer and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, among others. By the early 1990s he’d founded American Recordings and diversified into Americana, roots rock and boutique pop. But despite the industry clout Rubin always played the quiet man, the Buddha-like presence whose methods were as curious as they were effective: some clients questioned why they were paying top dollar for a guy who seemed to do little more than lie on a sofa with his eyes closed; others credited him with having a transformational effect on their songwriting.

Whatever your angle, the results are undeniable. As a label boss, A&R overseer and musical psychotherapist, he’s produced a ridiculous number of classic recordings in a diverse field of genres, from LL Cool J to The Cult, Tom Petty, Jay Z, Neil Diamond, System of a Down, Justin Timberlake, Black Sabbath, Lady Gaga, Eminem, Lana Del Rey, Metallica, Ed Sheeran and Neil Young & Crazy Horse. Above all else, he’ll be remembered as the man who rescued Johnny Cash from cultural obsolescence and reframed him as the OG king of outlaw country when the Nashville establishment had put him out to pasture on the county fair circuit.

You’d know absolutely none of this from The Creative Act. The only band that gets a significant mention is the Ramones, and even then, by way of analogy rather than anecdote. There are no studio stories, no industry insider asides, not so much as a single breach of doctor-patient confidentiality. Rubin has always comported himself as more of a holistic thinker — maybe even a mystic — than a deal-maker or technician. A Vanity Fair profile published a year after Johnny Cash’s death detailed how he and the singer would take communion every morning and spend as much time discussing spiritual matters as Louvin Brothers’ songs.

Now Rubin has decided to go full guru. The Creative Act is a recipe book stocked with laxatives for the blocked artist. Gleaned from interviews conducted by Neil Strauss (author of first-person journalism works like The Game and The Truth, as well as ghostwritten assignments for Motley Crue and Marilyn Manson), and distilled into a sequence of 78 elegantly-written short chapters (sample headings: Everyone Is A Creator; The Abundant Mindset; The Experimenter and the Finisher), this book belongs on the same shelf as titles like Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art and Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. It applies practical approaches to the occult art of ideas and inspiration, offering advice on how to maintain momentum on a project, how to deploy craft and graft, and how to navigate the unglamorous completion and editing stages. It is a wise, insightful work, but one that doesn’t shy away from promoting oblique strategies or games of chance in order to rewire a malfunctioning creative mechanism.

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The stories about how works get made and the rituals of the artists who make them are generally exaggerated, and often pure fiction

—  Rick Rubin

The one thing it’s not, however, is a rock ‘n’ roll memoir. A chapter named Apocrypha serves as a repudiation of historical hearsay and yarn-spinning. “The stories about how works get made and the rituals of the artists who make them are generally exaggerated, and often pure fiction,” Rubin says. “… We are the unreliable narrators of our own experience. So when an artist creates a work that comes together by an unseen hand, and the process is later analyzed, what we get is more storytelling. This is art history. Art reality is forever unknown.”

Maybe, maybe not. The term apocrypha can also refer to important works excised from the canon. The Creative Act might have been a richer, fuller book if the philosophical material had been braided with accounts of first-hand experience. Rubin has led an extraordinary life. He’s spoken compellingly in interviews, podcasts and documentaries about the creative process: how Jay Z will construct an entire verse over a looped beat without writing down a word of it; how random I-Ching moments can provide artistic epiphanies, such as when Serj Tankian improvised the stunning Why have you forsaken me? section of System Of A Down’s Chop Suey after Rubin suggested he open the first book that came to hand (the New Testament, one presumes). But Rubin the author bypasses such nuggets, favouring the instructive, or rather, suggestive, voice (the phrase “it may be helpful to…” crops up multiple times in the text). This reader would argue that there’s gossip and there are gospels. Christ and the Buddha weren’t shy of employing parables to get a point across. The Creative Act is a very fine book, but with a little more auto/biographical content and context, it might have been a pop culture landmark.

• Peter Murphy is the author of the novels John the Revelator and Shall We Gather at the River (Faber). He performs and records with Cursed Murphy Versus the Resistance.