Latest Release
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- 7 MAY 2024
- 1 Song
- Gin & Juice (Another Shot From Dr. Dre) - Single · 2024
- Music To Be Murdered By - Side B (Deluxe Edition) · 2020
- Verzuz: Brandy x Monica (Live) · 2020
- No Diggity (feat. Dr. Dre & Queen Pen) [Sam Wilkes & Brian Green Sample Free Remix] - Single · 2019
- Oxnard · 2018
- Remix the Classics (Vol. 4) · 2016
- Don't Trip (feat. Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, will.i.am) - Single · 2015
- Compton · 2015
- Compton · 2015
Essential Albums
- 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-mythologising, 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 humour, the ingredients that made the LP one of the turn of the millennium’s greatest smoked-out hip-hop fever dreams.
Albums
Music Videos
Artist Playlists
- The iconic rapper-producer has pushed the limits visually for decades.
- An abundance of funk samples with deep basslines.
Singles & EPs
Appears On
Radio Shows
- Producer. Rapper. Visionary. Dr. Dre brings the West Coast to the world.
- Smoke from the riots clears, revealing the future of rap.
- This classic Snoop and Dr. Dre team-up was years in the making.
- 31 years ago, The Chronic turned Dre and Snoop into superstars.
- Why 2015 and Dr. Dre were so important to launching his career.
- Dotty celebrates Dr. Dre’s iconic debut album.
- Revisiting two iconic shows in Super Bowl Halftime history.
More To See
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 legitimise 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 towards 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
- 18 February 1965
- GENRE
- Hip-Hop/Rap