Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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Far Out SEPTEMBER 9, 2025 - by Tim Coffman

BRIAN ENO: THE ARTIST RICK RUBIN SAID "BROKE DOWN" ROCK AND ROLL

Rick Rubin never liked to have restrictions on where he could go as a producer.

Everyone should be able to have a broad taste in music, and Rubin felt that it was a lot easier to gravitate towards the people he liked to hear, whether that be Slayer, Tom Petty, or The Chicks. But before he even got the idea of helping found one of the biggest labels in the world, Rubin was already looking up to the people that were used to breaking the rules of what rock and roll could be.

If we're talking about those that broke the mould, though, you can't do much better than punk rock. For Rubin, that was his road into the world of rock in the first place. He never claimed to play an instrument well by any stretch, but when looking at bands like Ramones, no one needed to have the most intense technique to be a star. All they needed was the right song and a lot of heart, and Rubin understood that better than anyone.

Because looking at his track record, most of Rubin's best moments are dictated by what music is speaking to him at a particular moment. Sometimes it works for an entire song or maybe two lines of a demo speak to him, but regardless of what he suggests to an artist, it's usually the right call, given the fact that he convinced Petty to turn a tiny fragment into the entire basis of Mary Jane's Last Dance.

But before settling into his groove as a rock producer, he was already catching flak from purists for wanting to disassemble rock and roll with hip-hop. After all, Beastie Boys didn't necessarily play all of their own interests, and the idea of a sampler was already being considered a form of "cheating" by more snooty rock artists who considered it the height of musical laziness. It could have been lazily thrown in at times, but what Rubin was doing with it was far more musical.

He wanted to make the kind of music that deconstructed the idea of what music could be, and whether or not the naysayers wanted to admit it, that came from rock and roll first. David Bowie had already been trying to shatter people's expectations with his post-rock experiments during his Berlin period, but what really made Rubin turn his head was listening to what Brian Eno was doing behind the scenes.

Eno had already proven himself as a musical visionary in Roxy Music, but his ambient albums opened up Rubin's mind to what a musician could do, saying, "He seems to be the one who really broke down the walls of anything sounding like a band. I think up until the time of Eno, the idea of the band being the centerpiece of the recording was the thing that you built on or veered from. I think his idea was music is music, and it's not about the band. It's about the sounds. Whatever sounds put together in an interesting way is what it is."

That might be better felt than heard when listening to Music For Airports, but a lot of it can be felt in the kind of production work he had been doing later. U2 had already been a rough-and-tumble rock and roll band, but when listening to Eno's work with them on The Joshua Tree, it was about them trying to build songs from those basic elements, usually only using pieces of guitar to create textures rather than having to rely on the traditional guitar solo.

It might not have been what the rest of the world wanted to hear at the time, but not every bold new innovation is accepted right away. They only become classic when people follow you, and some of the biggest names in music owe their entire production career to Eno's way of deconstructing music.