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Introduces Rick Rubin and the idea that originality is less about inventing something new than making something only you could make. Sets up the central question of what makes creative work feel distinctive.
Rick Rubin is one of the most legendary music producers alive.He's made records with Johnny Cash and Jay-Z, Adele and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and he has a shelf full of Grammys to show for it.In 2023, Anderson Cooper sat down with him for 60 minutes.He asked Rubin if he plays any instruments.
Barely.
He asked if he knows how to work a mixing board.
No.I've no technical ability, and I know nothing about music.
So, Anderson asked the only question that made sense after that.Then what are people actually paying you for?Rubin's answer is probably the best explanation of originality I've ever heard.I'll get to it.Because right now, everybody is trying so hard to be original.Unique aesthetic, unique sound.And somehow, the harder people try, the more everything starts looking the same.The trying is exactly what gives it away.Originality was never about making something nobody's ever seen before.There are 8 billion people on this planet.Whatever you're thinking of, someone has done some version of it.What makes something feel original is when nobody else could have made it quite the way you did.
Shows how Cobain tried to copy the Pixies but ended up creating a song that sounded unmistakably like Nirvana. Also explains how he kept collecting influences and turning them into something personal.
And Kurt Cobain is the best example of that I can think of, because his most famous song started as him trying to copy somebody else.Cobain grew up in Aberdeen, Washington, a small logging town where, by his account, there wasn't much to do besides be bored.As a kid, he was obsessed with The Beatles.Then as a teenager, he found punk, and he got obsessed with that, too.Loud, messy bands that most people in his town had never even heard of.And those two things don't really go together.The Beatles are all melody.Punk bands barely cared if you could even hear a melody under all the distortion.But Cobain loved both of them at the same time, and he never picked one.In 1991, he was trying to write what he called the ultimate pop song, and his strategy was simple.Copy The Pixies.
The Pixies had this thing where their songs would go quiet in the verse and then explode in the chorus.Cobain loved it.Years later, he told Rolling Stone, "I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies.I have to admit it."That song was "Smells Like Teen Spirit."And people didn't stop at the Pixies.Plenty of listeners have pointed out that the main riff sounds a lot like "More Than a Feeling" by Boston, a classic rock song from the '70s.Nirvana used to mess around with that riff live, so they clearly knew.So, on paper, the most famous rock song of the '90s is a Pixies impression with a borrowed riff, and it doesn't sound like the Pixies at all.It sounds like Nirvana.The second that guitar comes in, you know exactly what it is.Cobain could copy the structure, but he couldn't leave himself out of it.
The Beatles melodies that had been stuck in his head since he was a kid came with him, and so did his voice, which somehow sounded like he was screaming and falling asleep at the same time.He failed at copying the Pixies so badly that he accidentally made something only he could have made.And Cobain never stopped collecting.Even after Nirvana got huge, he kept using every bit of attention he got to point at the weird, tiny bands he loved.At the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards, he showed up in a homemade-looking shirt for Daniel Johnston, an outsider musician who recorded songs on cassette tapes in his parents' basement.When Nirvana did MTV Unplugged, a big chunk of the set list wasn't even their own songs.They covered The Vaselines, a small Scottish band, and brought out the Meat Puppets to play with them.The biggest band in the world used its biggest moment to show everyone its record collection.
A few months later, Nevermind knocked Michael Jackson's Dangerous off the number one spot on the Billboard charts.A band from a logging town with a song that started as an imitation beat the King of Pop.And copying is fine.Everybody starts there.
Explores how Bourdain rejected generic travel-show formulas and filled his work with his own obsessions, from foreign films to punk rock. His show felt original because it reflected his taste rather than a standard template.
Hunter S.Thompson, when he was young, used to sit down and type out The Great Gatsby word for word just to feel what it was like to write sentences that good.Years later, his writing sounded like a guy who drank way too much coffee and trusted absolutely nobody, which is exactly what he was.Where it goes wrong is how most people go about it now.Think about how people look for inspiration now.You scroll for an hour.You save like 400 TikToks into a folder called Ideas that you will never open again.You build a Pinterest board that looks exactly like everyone else's Pinterest board.Then you sit down to make something and wonder why it feels like you've seen it before.You have seen it before.You've been studying the same feed as everybody else, so you come out the other side with the same ideas as everybody else.
What you actually need was never in the feed.It's the stuff you notice that other people walk right past.The references you've been collecting your whole life without realizing you were collecting anything.The movie you've rewatched so many times you say the lines before the actors do.The album that hits you in a way you can't really explain.The color you keep accidentally buying clothes in.The weirdly specific detail you always point out that nobody else seems to care about.That's your point of view, and it's the only part nobody can copy, which brings me to Anthony Bourdain.I already made a whole video about him, so I won't go through his story again.But there's a side of him I never really got into, and it fits this perfectly.When Bourdain got into TV, food and travel shows already existed, tons of them, and most of them followed the same formula.
A smiling host walks into a market, tries the local dish, makes a face like it's the best thing they've ever eaten, and says something about how authentic it is.You've seen it a thousand times.Bourdain couldn't stand that stuff, and he made fun of it constantly.So instead of following the formula, he did something kind of strange.He filled his show with everything else he was obsessed with, most of which had nothing to do with food.Bourdain loved old movies,
especially foreign films, and he loved punk rock.All of that ended up in the show.When he went to Rome on No Reservations, they shot the whole episode in black and white, like an old Italian film.When Parts Unknown went to Hong Kong, he brought in Christopher Doyle,
the cinematographer behind a lot of Wong Kar-wai's movies, because Bourdain was a massive fan.Even the Parts Unknown theme was written by Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age, and the show ended up winning a bunch of Emmys, including for its cinematography, for a show about a guy eating dinner in othercountries.So, technically, it was a travel show.In practice, it felt like a punk who loved foreign films had gotten a TV budget, and nobody was brave enough to stop him.
Nobody told him to do any of that.There was no meeting where someone said, "What if the food show looked like an art film?"He just put the things he loved into the work, and that's why nobody could imitate it.Plenty of people tried.They copied the travel and the late-night street food.It never felt like Bourdain, because what made it Bourdain was all the stuff he brought from outside of food, which takes us back to Rick Rubin.
Explains Rubin's career through his ability to strip songs down and trust his taste across rap, rock, country, and hip-hop. Concludes that originality comes from confidence in your point of view, not from avoiding influence.
Rubin started out as a college kid at NYU making hip-hop records out of his dorm room.That's where Def Jam started.The very first album Def Jam ever released was one he produced, and in the credits, instead of produced by Rick Rubin, it said reduced by Rick Rubin, because his whole thing was stripping a song down until only thegood part was left.A couple years later, he had an idea that sounded kind of insane at the time.Run-DMC, one of the biggest rap groups in the world, should remake "Walk This Way" with Aerosmith, a rock band most people thought was washed.Rubin loved rap, and he loved rock, and he didn't see why they had to live in separate worlds.That song became a massive hit, and it helped put rap on rock radio and MTV in a way that hadn't really happened before.
Then, in the '90s, he went the complete opposite direction and started working with Johnny Cash.Cash was in his 60s by then, and the music industry had pretty much moved on from him.Rubin sat him down in his living room with an acoustic guitar and had him sing.No big production, just Johnny Cash and a guitar.
Those records brought Cash back and years later his cover of Hurt became one of the most emotional songs of his entire career.Decades later, he did a version of the same thing with Kanye.On Yeezus,
Rubin came in near the end and helped strip a lot of the album back, cutting songs down until they sounded raw and almost unfinished.Basically, the reduced by approach, 30 years later.And if you've ever seen him work, it's almost funny.He's usually barefoot, lying on a couch with his eyes closed, just listening.Sometimes he'll stop the song and say one sentence,
and that's the session.So, here's a guy who barely plays instruments and can't work a mixing board, and somehow he keeps showing up behind some of the most important records of every decade he's been around for.
And when Anderson Cooper asked him what he's actually being paid for, Rubin said this.
The confidence that I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel.
His taste.That's the whole job.Rubin notices things.He hears a song and knows which part is the good part.He looks at an old country singer everyone forgot about and hears what would happen if you took everything away except the voice.And taste is pretty much just your point of view with some confidence behind it.It's all the stuff you've been noticing your whole life, finally trusted enough to act on.Most people have taste, they just don't trust it.They notice something and immediately check if anyone else is doing it.If nobody is, they assume it's weird and drop it.If somebody is, they assume it's been done and drop it anyway.Either way, it never makes it into the work.And has this been done before is a pretty useless question.Of course it has.Cobain was literally copying the Pixies.Or Dane made a travel show, which is about the least original format on television.
A better question is whether anyone would know it was you.Back in 1991, before the song even had a name, a friend of Cobain's, Kathleen Hanna, spray-painted a line on his wall as a joke.Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit.Teen Spirit was a deodorant his girlfriend at the time wore.Cobain had no idea.He thought it sounded kind of revolutionary, so he made it the title.The most famous rock song of the '90s is named after a deodorant he didn't even know existed.