Rick Rubin

The move

1983. Rick Rubin starts Def Jam Recordings out of his NYU dorm room. A kid from Long Island who didn't make beats and didn't rap. He produced. Signed LL Cool J, then Public Enemy, then the Beastie Boys, and ran the label that defined hip-hop's big commercial years.

1986. Rubin produces Run-DMC's Walk This Way with Aerosmith. Rap and rock weren't meant to share the radio, never mind a single. It broke MTV's colour line and brought Aerosmith's career back from the dead.

1993. Johnny Cash is 61, dropped by Mercury, written off. Rubin sits him in his living room with a microphone and an acoustic guitar. The American Recordings series runs for six albums and changes how music history remembers him.

2010. Pop is all Pro Tools. Layers, compression, sugared-up vocals. Rubin produces Rolling in the Deep the way he did Cash. Stripped down, mostly live, barely mixed. Adele's 21 sells 31 million copies.

Why it was risky

Rubin had no technical training. Couldn't read music. Didn't engineer. The industry thought a producer was someone who knew the gear. He thought a producer was someone who knew when to leave a recording alone. He bet a 40-year career on an unpopular idea. Most of production is taking stuff away.

The numbers

Def Jam to American Recordings. Slayer to Adele. LL Cool J to System of a Down. No common genre anywhere in there. Just one rule. Keep what's true and lose the rest.

The lesson

The records weren't the risk. Trusting his own ear over everyone in the room was. Rubin's whole catalogue says the producer's job is to spot the take that's the one, and protect it from getting polished into something safer. R.I.S.K. is for creatives brave enough to leave space instead of filling it.