Brain Rot: Hip Hop Family Tree, Rick Rubin, and the first gold record

• [pupdog]

  Loving all of this – and the bottles of TJ Swann – awesome!

• [Jeremy Mesiano-Crookston]

  I certainly hope there’s some sort of verifiable way to show that Rick Rubin actually was a spoiled dick? Because it seems to take a lot of liberties in portraying him poorly, and makes the author seem catty.

  • [Donald Petersen]

    I hear he was in a band called The Pricks, so…

• [Daniel Latta]

  Jeremy — well, he hasn’t exactly been kind to Russell Simmons, either. 

• [Scooter Jackson]

  He hasn’t really been “kind” to ANYONE  for that matter, and that makes it so much better. It also doesn’t take away any respect I have for any of the artists portrayed. Life ain’t just peaches and cream.
  Keep em comin Ed! These are better than any weekly tv show.

  • [Jeremy Mesiano-Crookston]

    It’s not about showing people warts and all, which is always fine, it’s about portraying people in ways that I’m not sure are true. Especially portraying Rubin as a petulant rich kid with an ugly unibrow and a vaguely unsettling Jewish caricature for a father. Someone who didn’t know shit about hip hop but had to be handed tapes by some no-named white dude. That’s pretty far from the Rubin I read about. It’s pretty heavy-handed. Simmons is just portrayed as a high-liver with a lisp.

    • [origilla]

       You’re alarmed by some silly shit. I bet you’re a blast to hang out with.

      • [Jeremy Mesiano-Crookston]

        What I am and am not in real life isn’t really important, except to trivial people.

    • [devophill]

      > petulant rich kid with an ugly unibrow… who didn’t know shit about hip hop but had to be handed tapes by some no-named white dude

      Ed’s been pretty consistently en pointe with the details in this strip, I don’t think he’d start making shit up out of whole cloth at this point. If he drew ol’ Beardy McSunglasses like that, there was a reason for it.

• [noah django]

  another of those five singles Treacherous Three cut for Enjoy, liberated from a ten-cent bin at Ear Wax, ATL.

• [Ed Piskor]

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHBu5_qLIas

  • [Ed Piskor]

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk_DBrjtH0s

    • [Ed Piskor]

       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZDUEilS5M4

      • [Steve White]

         Ed – I love it when a new one of these shows up on BoingBoing! 

• [MattAtDoyle]

  Bwa haha from uni-brow rich punk to garden gnome. Rickie Rubin…

• [bobkat]

  Despite one’s opinion of how various people are portrayed, I think one must admit that this comic, when complete, is going to be a significant historic document.  This era in music history is largely unknown and under-reported, and I think depicting it in an exaggerated and humorous fashion, with obsession on real historic minutia, is not only appropriate, but awesome.  Ed, thanks for taking this project on!  I love it.  I also really enjoy listening to the tracks mentioned in the comic.

  It’s probably impossible, but if this would ultimately get released in book form with a mix tape of all the songs, it would be mind-blowing!  

• [Grand]

  I don’t know who Ed Piskor is, but I can tell you there is a certain level of truth to what he writes.