“Somebody needs to occasionally slap Rick Rubin”

The Who‘s Pete Townshend thinks “somebody needs to occasionally slap” producer Rick Rubin over his polarising ideas about creativity.

Rubin, who has previously worked with the likes of Adele, The Strokes and Red Hot Chili Peppers, published a best-selling book detailing his ideas about creativity called The Creative Act: A Way Of Being last year. Notably, he suggested that art is only ‘pure’ if made for the artist themself and not for an audience.

In an appearance on Gary Kemp and Guy Pratt’s Rockonteurs podcast, a discussion about creativity led Townshend to criticise Rubin’s philosophy, or more specifically the idea of having any sort of doctrine around the process of making art.

“You see a lot of stuff on YouTube and Instagram, people nagging you about the way that you have to be creative,” Townshend began. “Somebody needs to occasionally slap Rick Rubin, because, one minute he’s telling us that we need to do whatever we like, and then, on the other hand, he’s telling us that we mustn’t do this, and we mustn’t do that.”

“The book of rules for me is… I’ve dabbled with all of those methods. I’ve carried complete big, recording studios on the road with me sometimes, and then sometimes I’ve used little cassette machines. I’ve recorded in all kinds of different ways. And if I fancy going into a studio with a huge orchestra, I’ve done that too. But what’s most interesting is the paper. The paper, the photograph, the writing.”

For Townshend, creativity is “not just about rock stars, pop stars, singers, musicians, artists, or whatever. It’s about everybody.”

He did praise Rubin in another way, however. “As Rick Rubin so rightly says, and many other pundits about creativity, it has to be fun,” Townshend continued. “It has to be enjoyable. It has to be something that you love to do, and it also has to be something that you like what you do. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that anybody else will like it.”

Rubin’s views on creativity were also criticised by Jacob Collier this year, who called him “hypocritical” for saying that art’s not as pure when made for an audience given a significant portion of Rubin’s catalogue would have been created with a large commercial audience in mind. Collier also suggested the audience for Rubin’s book was “non-creative people for whom creativity is novel”.

In other news, Townshend recently revealed that he found Roger Daltrey‘s pro-Brexit stance “very problematic”.

Townshend himself voted Remain in the 2016 EU referendum and told The Daily Telegraph he didn’t agree with his bandmate’s stance on Brexit: “[That was] very problematic for me. I think he was wrong. But we are a nation divided down the middle.”

Despite Daltrey’s views on Brexit, the guitarist added: “He’s not a fascist Right-winger, he’s a very decent man. But it felt to me that with respect to the arts, and particularly to music, the free flow of life from all of the history of Europe…was going to be denied to our young people.”

Meanwhile, The Who recently confirmed they would “definitely” return in 2025, according to Townshend.