People went bananas over this book, but I’m not one of them. Rubin has produced records for Johnny Cash, the Beastie Boys, Slayer, and Adele, and he does not play an instrument or work a board. What he does is set conditions, and this is the closest thing to a description of that. Seventy-eight short chapters, a page or two each, on paying attention, on the difference between the source and the filter, on making a lot of bad things to find the good one, on shipping before you’re ready. There’s no music-business memoir in it and no gossip, which disappointed a lot of buyers. Read it in the same way you’d read a book of aphorisms — a page in the morning, not a sitting. Don’t be surprised if most of it comes across as obvious.
The Creative Act