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 beard, his tendency to make airy pronouncements in the style of Zarathustra descended from the mountain, Rubin has aged into a kind of tech-friendly Zen creativity guru.
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On his social media accounts and on his podcast Tetragrammaton, he has been increasingly vocal on the topic of AI as a valuable creative tool; last year, he went all in and published an ebook called The Way of Code: the Timeless Art of Vibe Coding, which he created in “collaboration” with Claude, Anthropic’s LLM chatbot. Conceived as a “remix” of the Tao Te Ching, one of Zen Buddhism’s central texts, the book is full of faux-profundities on the creative life and artificial intelligence. (“Do by not doing, and there is nothing that cannot be done.”) It is both an airy invocation of vibe coding and an example of its ethos in practice, “created” as it was through a series of AI prompts.
Last week, a clip went viral on social media in which Rubin discussed the relationship between punk rock and AI. “In the past, for music,” he said, “you had to go to the conservatory and study for years and years, and then some day you could play in the symphony. And then when punk rock came along you could maybe learn three chords in a day … If you had something to say, you could say it. You didn’t need the expertise or skill set other than your idea and your ability to convey it. And vibe coding is the same thing.”
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On a superficial level it makes sense. AI offers, in all kinds of ways, a liberation from the imperatives of technical mastery. And to be fair to Rubin, he’s not exactly saying that this technology should be used as a big red “creativity” button that you just press to create art or music from scratch. He’s saying that, in creative work, it’s the idea that is primary, and that AI allows you to express that idea without needing the basic skills that would previously have been required to do so.
But this is not, in my experience at least, how creativity works: you don’t just have an idea and then express it using words, or paint, or a musical instrument. The finding of the expression is itself the creative act. But to give Rubin credit here, it probably has some relation to his own somewhat unique career. He was never an accomplished musician (though he did play guitar in the art-punk band Hose in the early 1980s), and he has himself admitted to having no real ability as a studio technician.
When a somewhat baffled interviewer asked him, in 2023, what he was being paid for his response was to close his eyes, as though in deep meditation, and to slowly intone: “The confidence I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel.” You can see how using AI to bring an idea to fruition, or to summon a cultural product out of thin air, might be in keeping with this notion of creativity as the dispensing of vibes.
But the AI vibe coding as punk rock gambit is frankly bleak. The fact that it was made during a conversation on the A16Z Show, the in-house podcast of the Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm, is indicative of where Rubin is at these days. The podcast’s co-hosts Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, both of them billionaires heavily invested in AI, were clearly pleased with the analogy.
There’s obviously little to be gained from arguing at this stage of the game what punk rock is or was, certainly not in the opinion pages of The Irish Times. But hearing Rubin talking to the boys from Andreessen-Horowitz about how vibe coding is punk, I could suddenly hear in my head the song Punk is Dead by the great and uncompromising first-wave English punk band Crass, the singer Steve Ignorant repeating the titular proclamation again and again in his insistent nasal monotone.
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AI has its uses certainly, but the billionaire investor class that owns this technology, who are doing everything they can to ensure its cultural omnipresence, are committed to it because it promises to vastly increase their already vast wealth and power.
Punk’s early energy was in its revolt against a deadening cultural and a sclerotic power structure. In time, it succumbed to sclerosis itself, becoming just another genre of classic rock, little more than a set of rules for the construction of aesthetically conservative music. But if it was about anything in its time, it was about making art outside of corporate systems, and it was about sneering at self-satisfied old hippies clinging vaingloriously to relevance. And punk might be dead, but those things aren’t going anywhere.
