This can be when decline sets in, the artist is aged out of relevancy, and their comfortable surroundings cease to reflect the world that inspired their ascent. It’s one of rap’s most influential figures, 34 years old, saying goodbye to his youth and accepting elder statesman status. With his most effective cohort Snoop Dogg in the passenger’s seat to provide the hook, Dre raps about his days with the World Class Wreckin’ Cru, through to signing Eminem, his most obvious recent success. “Still D.R.E.” is also the assertion of a legacy in the strongest possible terms. Press play 24 years later and you feel the palm trees looming over your head, the stickiest California weed enters your bloodstream, and the car you may or may not be driving automatically starts to bounce up and down from its front suspension. It was the ultimate in neck-snappin’ technology, visionary yet West Coast to its core, and presented with a suitably stylish Hype Williams-directed music video loaded with bouncing lowriders and hard-partying crowds shot in the filmmaker’s distinctive rich color palette. The raw, buzzing grooves of G-funk had been stripped out, replaced by pristine strings, slick drums, and that blinging piano loop. The song immediately felt like the future. In late 1999, he released “ Still D.R.E.,” the lead single from his second solo album, 2001. Needing a hit, Dre put the label on his back. Eminem’s The Slim Shady LP was a commercial success, but whether or not Aftermath’s new star could establish himself as something beyond a flash-in-the-pan gimmick was far from certain. Dre Presents: The Aftermath and supergroup project The Firm’s The Album drop with a thud - two of the few obvious failures of the Comptonite’s career. In the three years since leaving Death Row, he had seen his label-launching compilation Dr. But in reality, was it all so simple?Īs the 20th century began to fade, Dre’s ongoing relevance was not secure. With dramatic pause, he utters the word “Aftermath.” It wasn’t subtle: the Good Doctor was exiting the bleakness of Death Row towards the light of Aftermath Entertainment and a better future. The very final line of Straight Outta Compton sees Suge ask Dre what the name of his new label will be. Dre served as a producer on the serviceable Hollywood depiction of the NWA story and scenes like the face-off with Suge call to mind a Chappelle Show joke on how making a movie about your own life brings too great a temptation to embellish. That’s how the finale of the movie Straight Outta Compton tells it anyway. As Dre has come to see things, “You can’t put a price on a piece of mind.” He wants to escape the empire his beats helped build. Walls are painted Grim Reaper black both the carpet and Suge’s suit match his gang affiliations: blood red.ĭre gives it straight. The setting of the duel could scarcely be more intimidating. Dre, stepping to the notoriously menacing Death Row Records CEO Suge Knight to liquidate their professional relationship. The young rapper-producer charges into corporate headquarters like a revolutionary soldier storming a state armory.
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