Dr. Dre

100 Best Albums

Essential Albums

  • 2001
    2001
    2001

    On nearly every song on his 1999 album, 2001, Dr. Dre finds new ways to make an argument for his own importance in hip-hop. There are ways he has changed since his early days—and very important ways he hasn’t. For those who doubt him, he and his collaborators have no shortage of choice words. A multi-Platinum smash, the record served as a reintroduction to the N.W.A and Death Row legend after several years without a major musical statement. Its most ubiquitous tracks are larger-than-life exercises in self-mythologizing, grounded by the hardest beats Dre and his team could cook up and verses from guests both young and hungry and seasoned and formidable. In his opening verse on the album’s lead single, “Still D.R.E.,” Dre raps that his genre-defining 1993 debut, The Chronic, was his most recent record, overlooking 1996’s oft-dismissed Dr. Dre Presents... The Aftermath. The song perfectly represents the ethos of 2001: Dre reframing his narrative by any means necessary. In this case, it’s with the help of his most celebrated collaborator (Snoop Dogg), rapping verses written by the most bulletproof hip-hop talent of the moment (JAY-Z). Dre attempted to populate every track on 2001 with heavy hitters in this way, combining artists from different regions and sensibilities to make tracks that felt both timeless and modern enough to capture the zeitgeist. One of Dre’s most crucial weapons on 2001 was Eminem, the older rapper’s recent Aftermath Entertainment signee. Em steals the show on three of the album’s tracks, including the hit “Forgot About Dre,” on which he pledges his allegiance to his mentor on the strangely infectious, virtuosic hook. The production evidences Dre’s updated, Y2K approach to his formative G-funk style of the early '90s, integrating more space and a more uncanny, of-the-moment synth template. Few 2001 tracks, though, perfectly embody the album’s winning combination of pop prowess, playfulness, and seamy atmosphere as well as the posse cut “The Next Episode,” with its epic orchestral sample and enduring treat of a non sequitur a cappella tag (“Smoke weed every day”). The song is emblematic of 2001’s brand of bombast—all kingmaking, violence, sex, and dark humor, the ingredients that made the LP one of the turn of the millennium’s greatest smoked-out hip-hop fever dreams.

  • The Chronic
    The Chronic
    The Chronic

    100 Best Albums It isn’t long into Dr. Dre’s Death Row Records debut that a then-promising MC named Snoop Doggy Dogg draws a hard line in the sand. “Oh, yeah, PS, fuck Mr. Roarke and Tattoo, AKA Jerry and Eazy,” Snoop says towards the end of “The Chronic (Intro).” “Sincerely yours, these motherfuckin' nuts.” In standing with Dre, newly freed from what the producer and MC saw as an exploitative Ruthless Records deal—one for which he blamed former N.W.A. groupmate Eazy-E and business partner Jerry Heller—Snoop wanted to be crystal clear about where his alliance lay. “I don't love Eazy, I don't love Jerry, I don't love Ruthless Records,” he continued. “Frankly, I don't love nothin' they got to do with.” And this before anyone on the album spits a single bar. Dr. Dre’s The Chronic is a record powered in equal parts by weed, vitriol, and G-funk, a West Coast hip-hop subgenre that Dre founded by way of optimizing some of the funkiest and most innovative sounds of his adolescence and young adulthood. The album contains samples from Parliament, George Clinton, James Brown, Led Zeppelin, Gil Scott-Heron, Bill Withers, and Malcolm McLaren, to name but a few of the universally recognized innovators and geniuses from whom Dre borrowed inspiration. And atop their rejiggered masterpieces? A bevy of then still-bubbling yet incomparably talented MCs who, in that moment, shared an insatiable hunger to make a name for themselves in rap. Among them were as-yet-unproven versions of Nate Dogg, Kurupt, Daz Dillinger, Warren G, The Lady of Rage, and, of course, a young Snoop Dogg, who authored so many of the album’s verses—his and other people’s—that he’d wonder, in conversation with fellow onetime Death Row signee Crooked I some decades removed from the album’s creation, “How the fuck was I on damn near every song?” The answer can be found in just about any verse he can be heard spitting on the album. The Dogg simply had what it took. The Chronic, in fact, would set the tone for Death Row Records as an incubator—and more notoriously, the inevitable saboteur—of some of the most memorable talents in Los Angeles street rap history. And street rap is exactly and exclusively what you find herein. The album, named for a high-grade marijuana of its time, contains a multitude of disses for both Eazy-E and Heller—and also Luke Campbell, Tim Dog, and Ice Cube—disseminated within fiercely competitive posse cuts (“Deeez Nuuuts,” “Lyrical Gangbang,” “Stranded on Death Row”), vivid depictions of the lives of young hustlers (“Let Me Ride,” “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang,” “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat”), and a handful of ruminations on the perils of street life and also solidarity in the Black community (“Lil’ Ghetto Boy,” “A N***a Witta Gun,” “The Day the N****z Took Over”). All of which is not to mention an undeniably healthy dose of misogyny (“Bitches Ain’t Shit,” etc.). But The Chronic was then, and is still, everything the legendary Death Row Records would become known for—god-tier street rap as orchestrated by the label’s onetime golden goose, the incomparable Dr. Dre.

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About Dr. Dre

When Dr. Dre got his first Grammy in 1994 (Best Rap Solo Performance, “Let Me Ride”), the idea of mainstream audiences taking rap seriously was still pretty new. Not that rap wasn’t popular: A few years earlier, N.W.A.—of which Dre was a key part—had been the first hardcore rap group to have a No. 1 album on the Billboard charts (1991’s Efil4zaggin). But when it came to the kind of institutional respect that something like a Grammy confers, rap was still considered an insurrectionary fad: exciting, controversial, and above all the kind of thing that mainstream America seemed to hope would go away. Not only did Dre (born Andre Young in Compton in 1965) help legitimize hip-hop in the cultural imagination, he changed the vocabulary of the music itself. Where early rap was built on breaks—records excerpted and looped by a DJ in real time—Dre’s production on N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton (alongside other mid- and late-’80s work by Eric B., Rick Rubin, The Bomb Squad, and others) brought about the era of the sampler, leading to tracks that were denser, harder, and more reference-heavy. By 1992’s The Chronic (and Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle), he’d moved on to replicating the funk he loved with live instrumentation, drawing a line from ’70s Black American music to a present where its messages of resilience and good times in the face of everything were especially resonant to a country shaken by race riots and sustained indifference toward its Black, urban populations. Listening to The Chronic could make you feel angrier, but it could make you feel tougher, too. By the time he was 30, Dre was already an elder statesman. Not only did he keep the music coming at his own pace (1999’s 2001, 2015’s Compton), he helped build careers for some of the most significant rappers of their generations, including 50 Cent, Eminem, and Kendrick Lamar. And with the launch of his Beats by Dr. Dre headphones in the late 2000s—and the subsequent sale of the Beats brand to Apple—Dre put himself in the rarified territory of JAY-Z and Kanye West: not just a hip-hop artist, but a businessperson, hustling, working, and taking his cut.

HOMETOWN
Compton, CA, United States
BORN
February 18, 1965
GENRE
Hip-Hop/Rap

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