Music Icon Rick Rubin On His Love of Pro Wrestling, Says It’s the ‘Most Accurate Representation Of Life’

Rick Rubin is an icon and legend in the music business, and he also happens to be a massive fan of professional wrestling and discussed it with Marc Maron. Rubin, who cofounded Def Jam and was extremely influential in bringing hip-hop to the mainstream, appeared on Maron’s WTF Podcast and discussed his love of the wrestling business. Rubin famously was the financial backer for Smoky Mountain Wrestling for most of its 1991 through 1995 run and talked about how he still watches a lot of it. You can check out some highlights below, per Fightful:

On still being a big fan today: “I absolutely love it. I watch more than eight hours every week. There’s a tremendous amount of pro wrestling on TV. It’s a really beautiful, fine art form. It’s storytelling taken to the next level. It’s beautiful. It’s American Opera.”

On what he loves about wrestling: “It’s definitely DIY crazy. The stories they tell are reckless in a way that you don’t get to see in the mainstream. There’d be violence towards people in a completely inappropriate way on a regular basis, but it makes sense because you’re setting up bad guys and good guys, so the bad guy has to do something really despicable to be a bad guy, so they do some things that are really despicable. It’s like this hyperreal/not real. It’s like that line, and the fact that they work reality into it — if a guy gets hurt, that becomes part of the storyline but then sometimes, they say a guy gets hurt and he didn’t get hurt, it’s only in the storyline. Sometimes one of the characters gets divorced and then, he might be getting a divorce but maybe it’s just a story, and you never know! It’s like this parallel reality always going on and it never ends. It goes on forever. It’s amazing.”

On wrestling being a deep art form: “I would say it’s closer [than a reflection of life]. It is more honest. If the most honest form of information in our society. Pro wrestling is the most accurate representation of life, dude.”