[ recap ]

Last week we looked at the "right to be let alone": Abigail Roberson's face on flour, Meta's Muse Image, and the difference between being seen and being used.

[ thoughts ]

In January 2023, Anderson Cooper asked Rick Rubin whether he plays instruments. "Barely," Rubin said. "I have no technical ability. And I know nothing about music."

What artists pay him for, Rubin explained, is certainty about his own taste and the ability to say what he feels.

The clip became a meme, read either as Zen mysticism or as permission to skip the leg work and run on sheer vibes.

Both kinda miss the point.

Rubin started Def Jam in an NYU dorm room in 1984. Two years later, while producing Run-DMC's Raising Hell, he pushed the group to remake Aerosmith's "Walk This Way," bringing Steven Tyler and Joe Perry into the studio at a time when pop radio would barely touch rap and plenty of people still argued that it was not music at all.

The single reached number four in the US. His production of the Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill, released that November, helped turn rap built on rock riffs into the first rap album to top the Billboard chart.

Rubin has spent four decades doing the same job for more than 120 artists: Slayer, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Adele, Metallica, Johnny Cash, Jay-Z, Public Enemy.

The thing he has is judgement.

Last year, Rubin released The Way of Code, a rewriting of the Tao Te Ching for people building with AI, made in collaboration with Anthropic. In an interview about it, he called vibe coding “the punk rock of software”: if you have something to say, you can say it without the established skill set.

A person with a genuine point of view can play any instrument, including this one. A new instrument in the hands of forty years of listening is simply a new instrument.

The question is what it becomes in hands with no listening behind them.

[ creativity ]

Some of electronic music's most important sounds began with people misusing instruments they did not understand.

In Chicago in 1985, the trio Phuture bought a used Roland TB-303, a bass-accompaniment synthesiser Roland already discontinued after it failed to find a market.

DJ Pierre later described the method behind "Acid Trax," the record that gave acid house its defining sound: "just ignorance, basically. Not knowing how to work the damn 303."

The ignorance was technical only. Phuture were dancers and DJs formed inside a scene. They knew what room the track belonged in and which person’s judgement mattered, so they took a cassette to Ron Hardy at the Music Box.

In Pierre's telling, Hardy listened to all thirty minutes without a word, then asked when he could get a copy. That night he played it four times: the floor emptied on the first pass, and by the fourth the room lost its mind.

The hands on the knobs were guessing, but the ears deciding what to keep had years of the scene behind them. Phuture were guessing at the machine, but they were not guessing at the culture.

The Atari ST, a relatively cheap home computer with MIDI ports built into it, became a staple of home studios running sequencing software such as Cubase.

On the Commodore Amiga, tracker software coming from game and demoscene culture gave producers an inexpensive way to cut, pitch, rearrange, and repeat samples.

Machines sold for home computing and games became recording studios because their users knew what they wanted to hear, even while learning how to make the machines produce it.

Underneath jungle and thousands of records since sits six seconds of drumming from "Amen, Brother," a 1969 B-side by the Winstons, played by Gregory Coleman.

This year, the US Library of Congress selected the recording for preservation, calling the Amen break possibly the most sampled musical riff in history.

The Winstons received no royalties from its reuse. Coleman died in 2006 without being paid for the afterlife of the rhythm.

The culture we celebrate kept an unpaid musician at the bottom of the stack.

[ making ]

Now, onto Suno.

Suno was founded in 2022 and their HQ is in Cambridge (MA). Type a sentence and receive a finished song, vocals included.

Last month, it raised more than $400 million at a valuation of $5.4 billion.

Its CEO, Mikey Shulman, named the problem the product solves:

"It's not really enjoyable to make music now," he said in a 2025 interview, pointing to the time, practice, and years it takes to become good at instruments or production software.

He later said he expressed himself badly, but as a product description, it was spot on.

But that friction built Rubin's judgement, created acid house and techno, and much of the music of the 1990s.

It’s kinda like the product removes the learning but keeps the diploma.

In November 2025, a hacker using the name ellie.191 said they compromised a Suno employee through the Shai-Hulud software-supply-chain worm. Suno's source code and internal files taken during the breach.

The files itemised Suno's training pipeline: 113,879 hours from YouTube Music, 152,162 hours of tagged YouTube tracks, 62,117 hours from the stock library Pond5, 12,287 hours from Deezer, and a plan to download roughly a million hours of podcasts from 420,000 RSS feeds.

Machines can have near-perfect output now, but here's the thing: the 303's flaw survived because Roland could not reach into Chicago and fix it.

This instrument works differently. Its makers can alter the model whenever its strange outputs reveal too much of what went into it.

[ sign off ]

The new instruments are repetition engines, and their makers have every reason to strip the recognisable accidents out.

Rubin may still be right though.

A person with a genuine point of view may play this instrument like any other, but nothing in his story suggests the point of view itself can be prompted into existence.

You can't download taste or creativity.

Thanks for reading. See you next Sunday.