FEATURE:
Celebrating an Iconic and Complex Debut Album
Dr. Dre’s The Chronic at Thirty
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THERE are a couple of things to note…
PHOTO CREDIT: Jeff Kravitz/Filmmagic/Getty Images
when it comes to Dr. Dre’s The Chronic. His groundbreaking debut studio album was released on 15th December, 1992. I wanted to mark thirty years of a Hip-Hop classic. It was not always regarded as the iconic and hugely influential album it is today. The Chronic was Dr. Dre's first solo album after he departed N.W.A and its label Ruthless Records. The departure was due to a financial dispute. The Chronic features insults towards Ruthless and its owner, the former N.W.A member Eazy-E. Also controversial because of its glamorisation of street life and its provocative and sometimes sexist and homophobic lyrics, the album has been given retrospective acclaim and focus. I can appreciate that some would dislike the album because of the way it glorifies hood life and objectifies women at various points. Some could argue that this was the sound of West Coast Rap in the early-1990s. Indeed, at the start of the 2000s, Eminem was producing far more controversial and explicit Rap. There is no doubting the influence of the Compton-born pioneer. Not only a celebrated Hip-Hop figure, Dr. Dre is a renowned and brilliant producer who has worked with the likes of Snoop Dogg, and Mariah Carey. A diverse and hugely respected and innovative producer, businessman and artist, there were a lot of eyes on Dr. Dre after he departed N.W.A. He confidently stepped out on his own and produced a magnificent debut that stands as one of the best of the ‘90s! Another controversy is that The Chronic is executive produced by Suge Knight. He was convicted for voluntary manslaughter in 2018 for a hit-and-run. Also, The Chronic is not available on streaming services like Apple Music and Spotify.
As Screen Rant states in this interview, one of Dr. Dre’s protégé’s, Snoop Dogg, is partly responsible for a Hip-Hop masterpiece being elusive across streaming platforms:
“While some people may have hoped this was just a temporary glitch, it appears to be a conscious decision from Death Row Records — the record label that owns The Chronic and Doggystyle. Snoop Dogg purchased Death Row Records in February 2022. Shortly after the acquisition, he announced that he'd be turning Death Row into "an NFT label." And those NFT plans are already well underway. On March 14, Snoop Dogg launched the Death Row Mix: Vol. 1 NFT on the Sound XYZ marketplace. Only 1,000 versions of the NFT were available, with Snoop Dogg describing Death Row Mix: Vol. 1 as, "some bits and pieces from my friends and family for you to enjoy. Even a couple minutes for you to throw your own verse in there."
What does all of this have to do with The Chronic, Doggystyle, and the other Death Row albums no longer available on streaming services? The general consensus is that Snoop Dogg is planning to re-release them exclusively as NFTs. While nothing's been confirmed about this just yet, Snoop Dogg's made his interest in the NFT space very clear — at one point saying, "Just like when we broke the industry when we were the first independent to be major, I want to be the first major in the metaverse."
As for the future of The Chronic and Doggystyle on streaming services, it may be a while before you can listen to them again. Billboard claims that The Chronic may not come back to Spotify, Apple Music, and other platforms until 2023 (with no mention of a return for Doggystyle). The NFT focus from Death Row could be a win for hardcore fans of its albums, but for everyone else, it could be a pretty annoying future”.
I am going to bring in just a couple of the retrospective reviews for The Chronic. Released into the world thirty years ago on 15th December, there are some great articles about this cornerstone of 1990s Hip-Hop. The Ringer celebrated The Chronic in 2020, as it was available for streaming for the first time ever – but has obviously since been removed.
“Born Andre Romelle Young in Compton, California, Dr. Dre found himself at a crossroads in 1992. Seven of the eight albums he’d produced for Ruthless Records between 1983 and 1991 had gone platinum, including his group N.W.A’s most recent opus, Efil4zaggin, which hit no. 1 on Billboard. But he wanted out, badly: His royalty payouts were too low, and he felt N.W.A founder Eazy-E and manager Jerry Heller were taking advantage of him. (Heller, who died in 2016, disputed these claims.) Desperately wanting to start a new label, he enlisted the help of Suge Knight, a former UNLV defensive end and the bodyguard of Dre’s confidant the D.O.C. Knight, who had famously hung rapper Vanilla Ice over a balcony to get him to sign over the rights to his hit song “Ice Ice Baby,” demanded Eazy-E release Dre, D.O.C., and several others from their Ruthless contracts. When he threatened to hurt Eazy’s mother and Heller if that didn’t happen, the diminutive rapper reluctantly signed the papers.
Dre was free of his contractual obligations, but legal problems still loomed. The most high profile of those was the civil suit brought by Dee Barnes, host of the Fox hip-hop show Pump It Up, who said that Dre brutally assaulted her in 1991 because of the way a segment on the show involving N.W.A and departed group member Ice Cube had been edited. After confronting her at an industry party, Dre “began slamming her head and the right side of her body repeatedly against a wall near the stairway,” kicked her in the ribs and stepped on her hands, and followed her into a bathroom to continue the assault after she tried to escape, Barnes said at the time. Dre, who pleaded no contest to misdemeanor battery charges stemming from the incident in August 1991, would eventually settle the suit out of court.
Against this backdrop, Knight, the D.O.C., record producer Dick Griffey, and a 27-year-old Dre founded Death Row Records with the help of seed money from Michael Harris, a businessman who was serving a sentence for drug charges and attempted murder. Soon, Dre and a horde of collaborators began working on what would become the label’s first release, which would double as Dre’s first solo album and a showcase for Death Row. The sessions for the project, which took place at the newly christened Death Row Studios in Hollywood and Dre’s Calabasas home, quickly became smoke-filled affairs—quite the change for someone who rapped four years earlier that he “don’t smoke weed or sess / ’Cause it’s known to give a brother brain damage.” Through that haze, a title emerged: The Chronic.
With the new studio, new freedom, and new botanical muse, Dre began crafting a sound that would redefine rap, both for his coast and the genre at large. It started with the spirit of George Clinton: “At the same time [Dre and I] were like, ‘We need to do some P-Funk–sounding shit,’” Dre’s Chronic cowriter, multi-instrumentalist Colin Wolfe, told Wax Poetics in 2014. “We wanted to make a real Parliament-Funkadelic album.” The influence is apparent on “Let Me Ride,” which samples “Swing Down, Sweet Chariot” on its hook, and especially on “The Roach,” a Mothership homage bordering on parody updated for 1992 Los Angeles. But Parliament had been sampled plenty of times before—the flower children in De La Soul scored their biggest hit with a flip of “(Not Just) Knee Deep” three years earlier, and Dre himself had mined George Clinton records for N.W.A’s albums.
What changed in The Chronic sessions was Dre’s approach. Hip-hop music at the time was largely beholden to production techniques created by its East Coast practitioners: jazzy samples from dusty records that sounded analog even as they were pumped through digital mixers. While Dre later said The Chronic was inspired in part by A Tribe Called Quest’s 1991 classic The Low End Theory, he would largely forgo direct sampling on his solo debut, instead asking musicians to replay melodies and bass lines. This came at a time when live instrumentation in hip-hop was seen as a gimmick at best and a faux pas at worst. But the undeniably thumping grooves gave the naysayers little ammo; “Nuthin but a ‘G’ Thang” doesn’t get its full-bodied sound by Dre simply running a Leon Hayward record through an S900.
Crucially, Dre added one signature element to many of the tracks: a high-pitched Moog synth line, à la the Ohio Players’ “Funky Worm.” Dre had previously attempted something similar on songs like N.W.A’s “Alwayz Into Somethin’,” and while Cold 187um—the producer from Ruthless Records group Above the Law—has repeatedly said he invented the sound, it took on addictive properties on The Chronic. Beats like the one on “Deeez Nuuuts” were meticulous blends of melody, bass, and pounding drums; they could blow out subwoofers while also worming themselves into a listener’s ears. Others sounded as suspenseful as any horror movie score, but the underlying groove drew the audience in. It’s not that the music on The Chronic was pop—it was undeniable.
The sound also had a name—G-funk—and suddenly, the man who desperately needed 1992 to break his way professionally had an aesthetic that would become the platonic ideal of West Coast rap for the rest of the decade”.
It’s likely the album flops, or at least fails to reach such lofty heights, without Snoop to ground it. Dre has always been better served as a director than a leading man, and while his rhymes aren’t quite as stilted as some contemporary reviews made them out to be, he’s missing a certain charisma. (“Let Me Ride,” one of the few songs on the album that Dre lyrically anchors, was The Chronic’s lowest-charting single.) It also didn’t help matters that he didn’t write many of his own lyrics—when he shouted-out D.O.C. by saying “no one could do it better” on “‘G’ Thang,” he was actually reciting lines his buddy penned for him.
The contrast between Dre and his deputy is clearest on “Lil’ Ghetto Boy,” a Donny Hathaway–sampling song that opens with clips from Birth of a Nation 4-29-92, a low-budget documentary that captured the Los Angeles Riots that occurred seven months before The Chronic’s release. As Dre clumsily recounts a fictional botched robbery, Snoop offers a plaintive meditation on the cyclical nature of violence and consequence, culminating in the lines: “And we expose ways for the youth to survive / Some think it’s wrong but we tend to think it’s right.” Amid all the garish violence, Snoop’s verses are the closest The Chronic has to a message.
But elsewhere, Snoop puts a smooth voice to some of the uglier moments on the record: the homophobic “Dre Day” disses aimed at Eazy-E, “Fuck Compton” rapper Tim Dog, and 2 Live Crew’s Uncle Luke, for some reason; the comically regressive posse cut “Bitches Ain’t Shit,” where Snoop debates killing his cheating girlfriend. The Chronic is sometimes cited as the first major album to make gangsta rap fun, and while it’s impossible not to get swept up in its more fantastic elements, it’d be tougher to swallow with Dre as its only leading voice, especially given his history with Barnes and other women who said that he assaulted them. And unlike our present day, when discussions over an artist’s actions play out in real time on social media, The Chronic was created in a world before mass internet access. If you weren’t reading Rolling Stone or paying attention to Kurt Loder’s MTV News updates, you likely didn’t know about Dre’s history of violence.
The controversy over the lyrical content, however, ultimately became a selling point. The early ’90s were something of a heyday for moral panics over rap music, a time when a soon-to-be president could score political points by repudiating Sister Souljah, when a metal band fronted by Ice-T was the most dangerous group in America, and when Rev. Calvin Butts steamrolled albums he deemed to be of questionable moral standing. C. DeLores Tucker, a former civil rights activist, took aim directly at the genre’s treatment of women: “I am here to put the nation on notice that violence perpetuated against women in the music industry in the form of gangsta rap and misogynist lyrics will not be tolerated any longer,” she said in 1993. “Principle must come before profit”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Dr. Dre in New York in 1992/PHOTO CREDIT: Al Pereira/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Vinyl copies of The Chronic are expensive, but I would urge people to get it on CD if they can. Also celebrating this wonderful album making its way to streaming services in 2020, NME produced a deep dive. There are parts of the feature that are especially interesting and illuminating:
“America had become aware of the tensions brewing in LA following the shocking case of Rodney King, a black construction worker who was badly beaten up by several LAPD officers in 1991. After the court acquitted the participating officers in 1992, finding them not guilty of police brutality, riots, fires and looting broke out all over the City Of Angels.
‘The Chronic’ was recorded while all of this was going on in Dre’s own backyard. Providing an audio depiction of the injustices taking place, it referenced several of the incidents on ‘Lil Ghetto Boy’ and ‘The Day The N****z Took Over’, noting the change in their environment, where it seemed like both gangbangers [US slang for gang members] and the police were quicker than ever to pull their triggers.
‘The Chronic’ might not have invented gangsta rap, but it was certainly the first to transform it into the dominant soundtrack of America’s party scene. Together with Snoop, Dre captured the state of mind of a gangsta, even though he wasn’t a gangsta himself per se. He romanticised the gangbanging lifestyle on tracks like ‘Nuthin’ But A G Thang’ and ‘Let Me Ride’, presenting it in the context of an eclectic and uncompromising body of work that established the west coast as a commanding mainstream musical force.
“It was the first time in the history of rap music that New York artists and producers had to ride in the proverbial passenger seat,” explains UK rap legend Rodney P. “N.W.A. had started the trend but it was ‘The Chronic’ that opened the floodgates, giving regional artists the belief that they could succeed in making music that was hip-hop. The Dirty South, Atlanta, Houston, St. Louis, they all owe a little something to ‘The Chronic’ and to Dr. Dre for removing the limitations on what hip-hop could and should sound like.”
But it wasn’t just about artists from other regions being inspired to describe and celebrate their own lives, scenes, experiences and cities. Listeners from other regions and other countries were given an insight into what it was like to live in South Central Los Angeles in that turbulent time.
“I can imagine how educational ‘The Chronic’ was for people living in other cities or in other countries around the world,” Thomas notes. “Whether you lived in Africa, London, France, or even another city like Detroit, ‘The Chronic’ was like an educational road map on what South Central LA and the west coast was all about. Dr. Dre was able to paint a picture for all of those who weren’t from South Central.”
On thinking about the impact of ‘The Chronic’, the thing that is probably the most overlooked is the shockwave it sent through the industry for years to come. It was the bedrock of one of the most dominant record labels in the history of music. At the height of its powers, Death Row Records was pulling in $100 million a year – and proving that hardcore rap could power a hit machine in pop music. In time it would inspire label powerhouses such as Cash Money Records, Top Dawg Entertainment and more.
IN THIS PHOTO: Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
In a more linear sense, ‘The Chronic’ provided a springboard for many to flourish. While Snoop Dogg is an obvious one to point out, Daz and Kurupt had a pretty successful run as Tha Dogg Pound, as did Nate Dogg before his death in 2011, featuring on songs by 50 Cent, Fabolous and Ludacris, with many considering him one of the greatest hook singers of our time.
Then there’s Warren G. Aside from him having a mammoth hit in his own ‘Regulate’, an iconic tale of LA street life, he played a huge role in keeping the lights on at legendary hip-hop label Def Jam Records after sales of his debut album ‘Regulate…G Funk Era’ injected some much needed revenue into the then financially struggling industry giant.
“A lot of people owe their career to this album,” Sway points out. “There would be no Kendrick Lamar if it wasn’t for ‘The Chronic’. There would be no Game, no YG, no Nipsey Hussle.”
Dre shaped LA’s present and future with ‘The Chronic’. But more than that, he made the naysayers who thought hip-hop lacked substance sit up and take notice, alerting them to a simple fact: this was no passing fad”.
A seminal album that impacted and infused the Hip-Hop and Rap genres soon after its release, its influence is still being felt thirty years later! In their review, this is what AllMusic said about the staggering and reappraised classic, The Chronic:
“With its stylish, sonically detailed production, Dr. Dre's 1992 solo debut, The Chronic, transformed the entire sound of West Coast rap. Here Dre established his patented G-funk sound: fat, blunted Parliament-Funkadelic beats, soulful backing vocals, and live instruments in the rolling basslines and whiny synths. What's impressive is that Dre crafts tighter singles than his inspiration, George Clinton -- he's just as effortlessly funky, and he has a better feel for a hook, a knack that improbably landed gangsta rap on the pop charts. But none of The Chronic's legions of imitators were as rich in personality, and that's due in large part to Dre's monumental discovery, Snoop Doggy Dogg. Snoop livens up every track he touches, sometimes just by joining in the chorus -- and if The Chronic has a flaw, it's that his relative absence from the second half slows the momentum. There was nothing in rap quite like Snoop's singsong, lazy drawl (as it's invariably described), and since Dre's true forte is the producer's chair, Snoop is the signature voice. He sounds utterly unaffected by anything, no matter how extreme, which sets the tone for the album's misogyny, homophobia, and violence. The Rodney King riots are unequivocally celebrated, but the war wasn't just on the streets; Dre enlists his numerous guests in feuds with rivals and ex-bandmates. Yet The Chronic is first and foremost a party album, rooted not only in '70s funk and soul, but also that era's blue party comedy, particularly Dolemite. Its comic song intros and skits became prerequisites for rap albums seeking to duplicate its cinematic flow; plus, Snoop and Dre's terrific chemistry ensures that even their foulest insults are cleverly turned. That framework makes The Chronic both unreal and all too real, a cartoon and a snapshot. No matter how controversial, it remains one of the greatest and most influential hip-hop albums of all time”.
I will finish off with Pitchfork’s review of The Chronic. At least part of it. They gave the album a perfect 10 when they sat down to review it in 2019. It is an ageless album that, whilst possibly not for those easily offended, is such a powerful, personal, and transformative listening experience:
“The confrontational machine gun funk of “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat” and the sinister squeal of the creeping “High Powered” were emblematic of a territorial mentality. Both Dre and Snoop rapped as if on standby, calm yet poised to strike at a moment’s notice. Many of the album’s best sequences are just them standing their ground. In Daryl Gates’ Los Angeles, this was radical. “Old buster ass nigga talking bullshit/Don’t know that I’m the wrong nigga to fuck with,” Dre barks on “A Nigga Witta Gun.”
At Solar, Dre produced on a cutting edge SSL mixing console that producer Rhythm D likened to the Starship Enterprise, which felt particularly fitting since they were making beats by reworking about a dozen Parliament-Funkadelic songs in their sessions. A connection with the Mothership had yielded a magnificent and funky new subgenre. They were building songs from the ground up, according to Wolfe, “drums, bass, keys, guitar, in that order,” with drums and bass being fundamental to their hydraulic, shock-absorbent bounce. Instead of sampling records, as he had for N.W.A, Dre had his live musicians channeling the deep alien grooves of Bernie Worrell and George Clinton.
Dre helped to reshape the sound of the West using whining Moog synthesizers. The initial wave of West Coast gangsta rap was (naturally) still indebted sonically to hip-hop’s birthplace, New York City. N.W.A songs sampled Big Apple rappers Whodini and Beastie Boys. AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted was produced by Public Enemy’s team the Bomb Squad, and Cube was “obsessed with” Run-DMC. Many of the West Coast rappers that had come before Dre brought an undeniable California flavor to rap, but there wasn’t yet a distinctive sound separating them from their East Coast predecessors. The Chronic was instrumental in changing all that. The album’s reinterpretation of ’70s P-Funk, dubbed G-Funk, was altogether different. Dr. Dre’s songs moved more leisurely, a tonic for the hustle and bustle of East Coast rap.
It’s an oversimplification to say Dre beats sound good, but the man did sell a line of high-performance headphones to Apple for $3 billion on the strength of his music’s supreme fullness and fidelity. He is a production genius. “I used to spend all my time trying to make my beats be mixed as good as Dr. Dre,” Kanye West recently admitted. Q-Tip called Dre the bar for producing A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory. Dre, in turn, was pushed to match that classic’s resonant bass, and The Chronic set a new mark.
In addition to launching Dr. Dre into rarified air, the album launched about a half dozen successful solo careers. It is the nexus of an entire chunk of rap history. Death Row peaked with the February ’96 Vibe cover, more an endnote on an era than anything else; Dre left the company a month later, and by that fall Tupac was dead. In the end, the label Dre built with Suge was just as combustible as the one he left to start it. But The Chronic lives on as a timeless show of strength when the stakes couldn’t have been higher, and as the herald of a tectonic shift in rap. Without it, or Dre, there is no Game, no YG, no Kendrick Lamar or To Pimp a Butterfly, no Nipsey Hussle. Dre gave shape to L.A.’s present and future. His dispatch from inside a city in transition not only furthered its sense of place in the world beyond but helped affect the place it was becoming”.
It is unsurprisingly Dr. Dre is such in demand as a producer given albums like The Chronic. The voice for so many emerging rappers, The Chronic will get new inspection ahead of its thirtieth anniversary on 15th December. Songs about police corruption and racism are, sadly, still relevant in 2022. So many of the songs and messages still pack such a punch and hold so much truth and urgency to this day. It is hard to believe that one of the greatest Hip-Hop albums turns thirty…
TEN days before Christmas Day.