Pop Music is a Satanic Mind-Virus!
Part Two: The Rubish Question

Jay-Z and Rick Rubin.

2,237 words

Part 1

Who is Rick Rubin?

If you asked in the early part of his career, he was a member of the provocative hardcore punk band, The Pricks. He would also stress that he was a nobody. Rubin’s purpose for being in the Pricks was, functionally, to piss off his rich Jewish father; his bandmates recalled that his musical talent was sorely lacking. As Rubin would like to tell the story, the Pricks lacked any and all relevance, despite the fact that they succeeded in getting thrown out of CBGB’s in New York. Downplaying his own importance is a common theme of Rubin’s autobiographical details up to the point that he came to lead Def Jam, and even then, he occasionally pretends he was a small fish.

Rubin’s resume is rather impressive. He is credited with both the popularization of rap music more generally in the United States, as well as for producing the famed Beastie Boys and countless other rap groups. Outside of rap, Rubin has worked with metal and pop-rock outfits that run the gamut from Slipknot to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. If you listen to any sort of pop music produced between the 90s and now, there is a huge chance that Rubin has laid his hands on the finished product.

Rubin’s legacy is regarded with simultaneous admiration or derision in music circles. You have the people who insist he is the coolest guy ever, and the people who believe that success went to his head, leading him to compress the ever-loving-God out of his albums in an effort to win the so-called “Loudness War.” The common thread in all of this, however, is Rubin’s status as some kind of Leviathan in the music world. Pop music simply is Rick Rubin. How did this come to be? I wish I could provide you with a juicy tale of pulled strings and smoke-filled rooms, but the answer is a little less dramatic. On the contrary, it’s just a little more annoying — and yet another useful glimpse at Jewish psychology as they behave in the West.

I would be remiss not to point out Rubin’s comfortable upbringing. There is not much information about his father, except descriptions of him as a “shoe wholesaler.” Rubin was able to attend New York University, and actually started his record company with seed money from his dad. There’s nothing to suggest that Rubin’s father was some kind of magnate, or that the family came from obscene amounts of money, but Rubin’s story is a far cry from a rags-to-riches tale. Considering his Pricks tenure, and his father donning a police uniform and driving to New York City in an attempt to shut down his shows, I believe the aptest description of Rubin would be “spoiled Jewish brat.”

Rubin’s connections within the music industry are of far greater importance. Rubin describes meeting one Russell Simmons in Manhattan, a kingpin of sorts in the New York hip hop scene. Of course, Rubin claimed that he was a nobody in the scene at the time, but Simmons had actually heard a record that he had produced, and Rubin was already associated with the Beastie Boys in their hardcore phase at the time. All of this could be attributed to good networking. That explains a lot of it, but misses an important subtext: at most, Rubin was simply a prolific self-promoter, piggybacking on musical developments wherever he lived and wherever he heard them. His fascination with black music was, in some ways, due to his obsession with simple novelty:

Long Beach High School is about 70 percent white and 30 percent black, and it used to close because of race riots. The white scene in my high school was into Led Zeppelin, Yes, Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones — all of those groups were com­pletely over. Whereas the black kids were waiting for the latest rap record. I re­member asking a black kid what his fa­vorite rap group was and he said the Crash Crew because their record came out last week. And the week before that it was the Funky Four, but now it’s the Crash Crew. It was so exciting that peo­ple could be so progressive musically that they’d want the newest thing, love it, and it would make them forget everything else.

Simmons and Rubin would found Def Jam Recordings together, each pitching in a few thousand dollars — Rubin’s stake came from his dad. Their first release was LL Cool J’s “I Need A Beat,” which had already been in the works — the track’s writing credit goes towards Rubin, LL himself, and a particular Adam Horovitz, member of the Beastie Boys and good friends with Rubin. Def Jam was something of an overnight success due to the sheer clout of everyone involved in the project; Rubin, Simmons, and the artists they signed collectively knew just about everyone in New York City, meaning that the path towards fame was laid before their very eyes. Def Jam would soon sign Public Enemy, put Aerosmith and Run-DMC on the same track (yes, that one), and bring the Beastie Boys to the forefront after convincing them to abandon their hardcore punk roots. In another example of Rubin’s connections seemingly materializing out of thin air, the “Walk This Way” collaboration was actually suggested by Sue Cummings, editor of Spin Magazine. Rap music had been brought to the white masses, an impressive feat for a genre previously demonized or ignored by the mainstream. I’m not quite old enough to remember these days, but a brief inquiry of my elders confirmed that just about all of them remember when “Walk This Way” made its way onto MTV. Today, Def Jam hosts the usual suspects of radio rap and painful pop fodder: Justin Bieber and Kanye West are the two examples most here are likely to be familiar with.

Alas, Rubin was not to last with Def Jam. In a power struggle, the label was taken over by the predictably named Lyor Cohen. Presently, it is managed by Paul Rosenberg.

These names all seem to echo. There is something of a pattern here, one that is not exclusive to just Def Jam, though they are a prime suspect for their introduction of tribal bombastics to the airwaves. Rather, there is a peculiar psychology at work here; the Jewish names that make records do seem to all know each other, but that can be attributed to their general network-obsessiveness. Rubin, after all, made it big in New York City partially because he made a point of shaking hands with literally everyone. I would like to suggest that this fits a pattern of behavior among these individuals, and is not some kind of paranoid conspiracy theory. We have covered Rubin, who capitalized upon NYC blacks and their spittle-infused rhymes about urban crime and dinner. But what was it about Rubin’s records that propelled them to mainstream success? There is the obvious forced-meme aspect of it, in that the glut in supply of new, polished rap recordings would eventually find its own demand. More important, however, was Rubin’s recording philosophy when it came to making his hits:

Through his passion for the Beatles, he became fascinated by the seductive, addictive power of songs. From the first hip-hop records he produced for LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys, he insisted on classic song structure. “Before Def Jam, hip-hop records were typically really long, and they rarely had a hook,” he continued. “Those songs didn’t deliver in the way the Beatles did. By making our rap records sound more like pop songs, we changed the form. And we sold a lot of records.”

Hip-hop in its original forms was never intended for white ears. They were often harsh, cut-and-paste records that lacked any real resemblance to what most white Americans would consider a “song,” in the sense that they seemed to lead nowhere and were dependent upon pre-existing samples, many of which had either fallen out of fashion in pop culture by that point or were primarily listened to by blacks, such as Motown and soul samples. A humorous description of early rap music is “talking over drums.” Rubin’s secret was the added dose of pop sensibility; the verse-chorus structure and developments in white popular music, specifically. Rubin was not promoting hip-hop. He was promoting version 1.0 of whitewashed hip-hop, a sort of musical average that proves listenable to many ears, and is quite profitable in the process.

You don’t just need blacks to do this, either. David Geffen, a coethnic with Rubin, made his fortune in the late part of the 70s and the early part of the 80s by scooping up Southwestern American folk-rock acts, watering them down a touch, and then blasting their music into the mainstream with his own connections. Geffen’s label, Asylum, hosted acts like the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell, Warren Zevon, Tom Waits, and countless other hallmarks of the era’s country-infused soft rock revolution. Geffen’s hand in music was not nearly as destructive on an initial glance as Rubin’s was, but they both betray an underlying principle motivating the actions of record gurus in the country. Rubin, by the way, is an actual self-styled guru with a keen interest in magic and Eastern religion:

From the time I was 9 years old, I loved magic,” Rubin recalled as he walked around the cavernous loftlike space. “I was an only child, and I think that had a big impact on me. I always had grown-up friends even though I was a little kid. I would take the train from Lido Beach into Manhattan, and I’d hang out in magic shops. When I was 14, I had magician friends who were 60. I learned a lot from them — I still think about magic all the time. I always think about how things work, the mechanics of a situation — that’s the nature of being a magician.

Geffen and Rubin are not the only Jews who ride the waves of what otherwise would have been a niche, subcultural phenomenon to mainstream success by subjecting its music to the diktats of pop. The two have mostly retired from the spotlight, but others have taken their place. Michael Lynton, the current manager of Warner Music, is Jewish. Lucian Grainge, manager of Universal Music, is Jewish. It was under their tenure, and the Jews that preceded them, that trap music is having its moment in the mainstream. If I listed them all, you would grow either bored or enraged.

This is really the modus operandi of every single Jewish major-label manager in the United States, and likely the whole West. For them to be successful, a substrate of cultural development must take place in the country and region where they are active, and like an enzyme feeding upon it, they turn the oft-far-flung masses of the movement into a consolidated, cleaned-up product, ready to be sold to the general public. Hip-hop required whitewashing, adult contemporary required censorship (and management to try and keep them off the drugs), and modern pop tunes produced by whites require the brrrmm of 808s to appeal to loose women and blacks colonizing frat parties.

Pop music, as it were, is not necessarily “popular” music in the strict sense that it is already in the mainstream of the society in which it is introduced. Nothing about early hip-hop was popular, except inside of a relatively niche group of blacks and often-Jewish beatmakers in New York’s outer boroughs. These songs required cleaning up, into something hypnotic and addictive, to use Rubin’s own terms. There are psychological explanations as to why the pop structure, and more specifically, the pop music of the West in the last several decades, are so infectious. But what is it about these songs that make them so easily co-opted? Earworms have the ability to transmit themselves in memetic fashion across entire swaths of society in a short amount of time, permanently altering the cultural perception of the people exposed to them. I have a fear of going to well-attended public places these days, not out of fear of the Wu Flu or crowds in general, but because I’m scared some nonsense like “The Box” will be playing on loudspeakers.

There is the obvious concern of what it means for us, as a people, to be moving and shaking to Jew-produced Negrophile tunes, both in the analytical-cultural sense and in the spiritual, esoteric sense. I resent the notion that white energies and white mass-gathering consciousnesses are being sacrificed on the altar of hip-hop. But it was our own musical forms that were turned against us in order to make city center hip-hop clubs reality. Nobody is popping bottles to Public Enemy. Alas, Rubin had to look to the Beatles in order to convince white people to start swallowing this bitter pill.

If we want an explanation as to how this degeneracy took hold of our ears so quickly and so ruthlessly, we may need to spend some time looking in the mirror.

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