718 Dr. Dre – The Chronic
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One response to “718 Dr. Dre – The Chronic”
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I think what was so incredible about this album was the world-building. Like the little girl from “Pan’s Labyrinth”, Dre and the other originators of the gangsta rap genre grew up in unpleasant circumstances and chose to escape those circumstances by building a fantasy world where all the men were tough gangstas and all the women were sexual objects. It wasn’t an original world, but borrowed from Blaxploitation films and funk music, just like Tolkien borrowed from various mythological traditions when he created middle earth.
In the 90’s, white suburbanites pretended to be gangstas the way kids from the 50’s pretended to be cowboys or film noir detectives. And those tropes were not that different. The characters lived in worlds of violence and frequent gunplay, they survived based on their toughness and street smarts, and their worlds were populated by over-sexualized stock female characters. Fantasies like these appeal to adolescent boys, for better or for worse, probably for worse.
I don’t think that the inventors of the gangsta rap fantasy world can be criticized any more than the inventors of other fantasies that captured the imagination of young men looking for a pretend world to inhabit. Plus this iteration of that teen-boy-friendly world-building had style and flair and sounded incredible.
Dr. Dre is nothing if not an expert in identifying and incorporating talent. Ice Cube was a better lyricist, Eazy and then Snoop had more charisma, and his later protege (or young white avatar, according to Atlanta) Eminem was a vastly better rapper, but Dre recognized talent and gave talented artists greater exposure. He also used samples from great music and did so in a way that made them sound fresh to young ears. There is no denying that this album sounds amazing, even if most of the credit for that belongs to George Clinton, Isaac Hayes, James Brown and Donny Hathaway.
I can’t defend the lyrical content of this album but I think it is reductive not to appreciate its strengths.
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