I am almost finished with Rick Rubin’s book The Creative Act: A Way of Being, his ode to Art’s infinitude by way of the practical, minimalist moment. I have enjoyed Rubin as a podcast host (Broken Record), and his legendary status as music producer to the titans lent this title an aura of intrigue. The tome itself is decidedly less intriguing—what might have an anecdote-drenched foray exploring the particularities of how various artists made their greatest works takes the shape of Rubin repositioning his status as music producer to that of creativity guru, a stab at a type of iconic wholeness that amputates itself from the real. Between the shredded calm of the blank sentences that spool into passages that barely describe what they are describing and hardly name what they are naming squirms a violence that resists identification. The name that eats naming. Here exists the same phenomenon that we encounter with most texts that offer themselves as wormholes into “the creative state”: content masquerades as insight, Art is sought in the how rather than in the Art itself. Which is fine and all, if you enjoy bathing in the dispassionate fluids of this kind of porn. Rubin can afford my apathy. I am tired of the guru. I am tired of these inarticulate constipations, when what I want is an Art that shits itself all over the page, the ear, the body, that makes a death-chaos of the material world, that is faithfully unfathomable.
Like André 3000’s recently released album New Blue Sun, his first solo album and the first new music he has attached his name to in almost twenty years. Rubin’s methods, even if they don’t make for great reading, undoubtedly work well in practice, and André 3000 seems to be the embodiment of Rubin’s philosophy of the ineffable, the artist remade by Art—How do you even begin the conversation about the new-age spiritual-jazz flute-based album of improvisational instrumentals just dropped by the man many consider the greatest rapper who has ever picked up a mic? A purest rupture—of sound, of self—for artist, for audience—one can almost hear André 3000 begging to be destroyed and remade in the wandering self-formation of these tracks, swallowed, digested, assimilated, and shat from Art’s sphincter. His decades-long inwardly intergalactic journey has led him to the sphere of knowing all receptively starveling artists land in via attentive diligence, the molten-blue understanding that Art speaks in winds, not words. For a man who has taken pains to position himself as a writer, this deformation is a fantastical, hypernatural departure. Patience, Rick Rubin would say. Essence, Rick Rubin would say. The ellipsis divorced from the sentence. The mystery that scripts itself into mystery . . . Even if New Blue Sun isn’t your cup of tea, and it won’t be for many, as an evacuatory utterance its long sigh stamps upon the self the sort of exclamation only Death can offer—this is André 3000’s dirge to himself, and in its tones he sounds viciously, vibrantly alive.