How The Hell Do I Curate

I got bored waiting for an agent and asked a stupid question. If Rick Rubin were working today, with nothing but agents, how would he do it? And what would he do while they ran?

Not because I want to be Rick Rubin. Because he has already been doing this job for forty years.

He can’t play an instrument. He doesn’t work the desk. He doesn’t read music. He has said on television that he knows nothing about music. What he does is sit on a couch, usually barefoot, often with his eyes shut, and tell you whether it’s good.

That’s the whole job. Def Jam, Johnny Cash, the Chili Peppers, Adele. Four decades of being the only person in the room who isn’t making anything.

I read that back and felt something land, because I can’t code.

The code works. Things get built, they run, people could use them. But I couldn’t write any of it and I couldn’t fix it either. So I did the honest inventory of what I can actually judge, and it comes to this: is it fast, does it feel good, does it do the thing I asked for. That’s the list. It is shorter than I would like.

Except it turns out that list might be the job.

Because I’ve fallen into his other habit without knowing it was his. I ask for ten versions of everything now. Ten homepages, ten headlines, ten ways to lay out the same screen. It costs me nothing to ask and a few minutes to receive, and it works far better than carefully describing what I wanted in advance ever did. Rubin does this with songs. Bands come out of sessions with him having written far more than an album needs, and he takes the best of the pile rather than sharpening one idea to death.

Which means making has quietly stopped being my job, and picking has quietly become it.

So how the hell do I curate?

I asked that out loud actually wanting a method, some way to train the thing. And I keep arriving at the answer I don’t like. There isn’t one. Rubin’s method is do I like it. That’s not me simplifying his method. That is the method.

I want that to be a dodge. It isn’t, because the man has run on it for forty years and nothing else in his process explains the results.

But here’s the part that changed how I’ve worked this week. If picking can’t be trained, it can still be wrecked. Rubin’s entire operating style, looked at from the right angle, isn’t a technique for developing taste. It’s an elaborate system for not contaminating it.

He doesn’t watch the work being made, because seeing how it was done ruins your ability to hear it plainly. He doesn’t get interrupted when a take is finished. He decides when to listen, in the state he wants to be in, and hears the whole thing start to finish. He doesn’t carry a second project, because you cannot have a clean reaction to one thing while holding three others.

And what he does while waiting is nothing. Walks. Sun. Swimming. Music with no relation to the project. Conversations about anything else. Not as a wellness routine. The reaction is the only asset and it’s fragile.

The one that got me is efficiency. I’ve treated gaps as waste for as long as I can remember. Forty second wait, open a second thread. Something’s rendering, go check something else. Every hole plugged.

Deliberately trying not to be efficient is the strangest instruction I’ve been handed in a while, and it does something. The antenna comes back up. I start noticing what I’m looking at instead of processing it.

Then there’s subtraction, which is the Johnny Cash story. Take away the Nashville production, the strings, the arrangements, all of it, and leave an old man alone with a guitar. The removals made those records.

I’ve been building at a rate where the only question I ever ask is what else could it do. When making is nearly free that question is worthless, because everything can be added. The only expensive thing left is the no.

Here’s the bit I’m still sitting with.

Every job I’ve had until now responded to effort. Not always fairly, but reliably. If it wasn’t working I did more of it and eventually it moved.

This one doesn’t work like that. Pushing makes it worse. It improves when it’s protected, and protection mostly looks like a man doing nothing in the middle of a weekday.

There’s also no scoreboard. I have no idea whether my taste is any good. There’s no test I can sit. I find out years later, from whether the things I picked turned out to be the right things, and even then I won’t know if it was taste or luck.

My instinct is to fix it structurally. Find someone to run the machine so I only do the picking. Rubin has exactly that, by the way. He has always had engineers. He has never once been alone in a room with the equipment.

But that’s an arrangement, not an answer. I still don’t know how to curate. What I’ve started doing instead is protecting the thing that does it, which mostly means not spending my reaction on anything else first.