Dr. Dre- The Chronic (1991)

[aashbourne]

Hey everyone,

Does anyone in the forum listen to rap at all? Lately I have been listening to old-school gangsta rap, like NWA and old Dr. Dre, and I am really diggin Dr. Dre's The Chronic from 1991. I like it because it has some really good beats in it, and the really high synth parts are pretty badass.

Anyone listen to this album, any comments?


Cheers

[lazarus]

Yes. I have it. It was a long time ago I listened to "The Chronic" but I have always been a fan of that album.

I also like NWA and some of Ice Cube´s early albums. This is his first solo after NWA:

[Gary Sisco]

bow wow wow
yippie yo yippie yay
snoop dogg in the motherfuckin' house


My favorite Ice Cube was "Check Yourself." Wicked rhythm.


I liked the hip hop and other club music of that time. Friends and I were spinning rekkids in the hip club of the time and there were good house parties, too.

you better check yourself
before you wreck yourself

[Borat Pri Hagafen]

Originally Posted by aashbourne

Hey everyone,

Does anyone in the forum listen to rap at all? Lately I have been listening to old-school gangsta rap, like NWA and old Dr. Dre, and I am really diggin Dr. Dre's The Chronic from 1991. I like it because it has some really good beats in it, and the really high synth parts are pretty badass.

Anyone listen to this album, any comments?


Cheers

The Snoop album from the following year (Doggystyle) is just as good if not better. The 2 Dre/Snoop songs on the 'Deep Cover' soundtrack are good as well.

My other favorites from the time period, not necessarily all that similar: Cypress Hill (self titled), Nas-Illmatic, Wu Tang: Enter the Wu Tang 36 Chambers, Genius/GZA-Liquid Swords,

[Gary Sisco]

Shabba Ranks' single on the "murderer" riddim. I can't remember its title. It was a good one that was ubiquitous.

I loved Cypress Hill's first two.

[Noj]

All of the first Wu solo albums have some of the greatest beats in the history of rap. GZA, Ghostface, Raekwon, and especially ODB's debut...beats have rarely been on the same level.

Cypress I can't stand to listen to because B-Real and Senn are lyrically so lame. I'd love to have the first two albums on instrumental, Muggs' beats were quality.

Nas is the most overrated rapper ever imo, but he definitely made some classics along the way. Illmatic is still the only album by him I own, but I've heard the others.

Ice Cube's first two albums and the Kill At Will EP are definitely favorites of mine, except when he goes militant or does diss tracks toward NWA. I don't dig when rap goes WWF with the silly beef tracks.

I really like Devin The Dude's music as far as more current gangsta shit. He's a funny cat.

[John L]

The Chronic was a great great record. So was Doggy Style. Those two records really turned my head around when they came out. It was like hearing James Brown in the 60s. The sound was so compelling that you knew that it was the sound of the future, that popular music would be under this spell for a long time.

Really, I can't think of anything that I have heard since that had a comparable effect on me from that point of view.

[Monte Smith]

The Chronic is the unsurpassable hip hop record of, well I thought it was 1992, but if you say 1991, whatever. I listened to it for about two years straight in heavy rotation. My friends who did not like rap were seriously annoyed. Great sound (that high pitch wail stolen from the funk forefathers) and while I can't listen to it much these days with two kids because of the language (wish there was an instrumental version like there is with Chronic 2001), it is also one of the most enthusiastically libelous attack records in the history of American recording. Poor penguin lookin EZ. I think you have to look to Big Band propaganda records of WWII to find anything so free-flowingly splenetic. Just another motherfuckin day for Dre.

[Jon Abbey]

I never thought it was especially consistent, but the two singles, Nuthin' But A G Thang and Fuck Wit Dre Day are fantastic and timeless, I still play both a lot. fans of the former should check out Leon Haywood's I Wanna Do Something Freaky To You, which NBAGT is very closely based on.

http://dreamchimney.com/tracks/19101

sadly Snoop and Dre haven't done anything anywhere nearly as good since their initial records, UGK picked up their baton and took it down South, though.

[Scott Dolan]

Wow, I couldn't disagree more with most that's been said here.

But, in all fairness, I really love the old school stuff a lot more. I draw the line at PE.

All that "gangsta" shit is just fucking silly.

[aashbourne]

Feelings about NWA's Straight Outta Compton?

I really like this album too, Eazy-E has some pretty funny rhymes... I see a big ass and I say word, took a look at the face and the bitch was to the curb... I love that one!

I also like the use of the drums and other percussion that they have in their songs, some of the drum beats are a little repetitive though.

[MRS]

100 Miles and Runnin' and to a greater extent Niggaz4Life are tremendous albums that have been slept on. There are some dry spots on the latter but I still treasure both. Fifty years from now someone will realize how important this group was, much less Ren.

[Borat Pri Hagafen]

I haven't heard it in a couple years, but my recollection is that I thought 'Niggaz4Life' had fantastic production, but the lyrics were just so dumb. It's like listening to a DJ Quik record. Which i guess has its place, but not for me so much. I like 'Straight Outta Compton' and the original 'Boyz n the Hood'.

I also like the first Pharcyde album, the first Outkast album (the others have never done anything for me with a couple songs being exceptions), and if you like the production on 'The Chronic', there's a bunch of other Death Row you should check out.

If you haven't heard 'Doggystyle' yet, get that immediately. I don't like any of Snoop's other albums (I'm sensing a pattern here), but it's to me like a more maturely produced version of 'The Chronic', like they took everything they learned from that and took it to the next level. Which isn't to say it's even necessarily better, but the production is I think much more advanced.

[Sergio Zamora]

A related album that I really dug was the D.O.C's "No One Can Do it Better". In retrospect, one can the direction Dr Dre's production aesthetic was heading from that album way before the track from 'Deep Cover' soundtrack.

[Enforcer]

Great record. I'm listening to Fuck Wit Dre Day right now, one of the all-time greats. Punishin' punk motherfuckers real quick like.

[aashbourne]

In Fuck Wit Dre Day, Snoop Dogg says

"All these sucka ass niggaz can eat a fat dick. Yeah, Eazy-E Eazy-E Eazy-E can eat a big fat dick. Tim Dog can eat a big fat dick. Luke, can eat a fat dick, yeah..."

But in NWA Dre was rollin with Eazy-E, so was there a big rivalry between Dre/Snoop Dogg and the people like Eazy-E? And do you know why it happened?

[Borat Pri Hagafen]

I used to know a bitch named Eric Wright
We used to roll around and fuck the hoes at night
Tight than a muthafucka with the gangsta beats
And we was ballin' on the muthafuckin' Compton streets
Peep, the shit got deep and it was on
Number 1 song after number 1 song
Long as my muthafuckin' pockets was fat
I didn't give a fuck where the bitch was at
But she was hangin' with a white bitch better yet a Jew
Suckin' on his dick just to get a buck or 2
And the few ends she got didn't mean nothin'
Now she's suing cuz the shit she be doin' ain't shit
Bitch can't hang with the streets, she found herself short
So now she's takin' me to court
It's real conversation for your ass
So recognize and pass to Daz



Eazy and Jerry Heller formed Ruthless together. Basically, Cube and later Dre felt like Heller was stealing money from them, and that not only wasn't Eazy doing anything to stop it, but he was (in their minds) showing more loyalty to Heller than to his boys from NWA.

The funniest part to me is that of all of the insult lyrics on 'The Chronic', the one thing they weren't allowed to say was 'better yet a Jew', so they had to change it to 'doing the shit she do'.

[Sergio Zamora]

Originally Posted by Borat Pri Hagafen

The funniest part to me is that of all of the insult lyrics on 'The Chronic', the one thing they weren't allowed to say was 'better yet a Jew', so they had to change it to 'doing the shit she do'.

And yet Ice Cube got away with it (in 'Death Certificate' was it?)

It's so strange for me to be discussing 'The Chronic' et al as old school hip hop.

[Rob C]

The Chronic was the beginning of the end of my major hip-hop phase. I never owned that record, but I didn't much like anything I heard from it (never liked Snoop at all). I was into the noisier, harder "east coast" sound of PE, et al. I did love Straight Outta Compton and esp. the first, Bomb Squad-produced, Ice Cube record. But when the smoother "west coast" sound took over, I lost interest.

I remember the title track of 100 Miles being pretty great, but I thought the rest of that record sucked. And I seem to recall the lyrics getting really ugly. I sold it long ago, so I don't remember the specifics.

[Scott Dolan]

Originally Posted by Rob C

The Chronic was the beginning of the end of my major hip-hop phase. I never owned that record, but I didn't much like anything I heard from it (never liked Snoop at all). I was into the noisier, harder "east coast" sound of PE, et al. I did love Straight Outta Compton and esp. the first, Bomb Squad-produced, Ice Cube record. But when the smoother "west coast" sound took over, I lost interest.

I remember the title track of 100 Miles being pretty great, but I thought the rest of that record sucked. And I seem to recall the lyrics getting really ugly. I sold it long ago, so I don't remember the specifics.

I pretty much agree with all of this.

[Rob C]

Originally Posted by Scott Dolan

I pretty much agree with all of this.

Probably cause we're both representin central MO, holmes.

[Noj]

My biggest problem with gangster rap is often the lyrics are too stupid to be tolerated. For Dre's follow up, Chronic 2001 or whatever it was I got the instrumental version.

I really liked Cube's approach on most of the songs off those early albums, more of a storyteller or a ghetto commentator than actually a gangster. Songs like "Who's The Mack" or "Once Upon A Time In The Projects" or "Dead Homiez" or "Bird In The Hand," that was how it was supposed to be done.

[Scott Dolan]

Originally Posted by Rob C

Probably cause we're both representin central MO, holmes.

Yeah, BOY!!!!!!

[Scott Dolan]

Originally Posted by noj

My biggest problem with gangster rap is often the lyrics are too stupid to be tolerated.

I couldn't agree more. Just look at the ones Alex posted as a prime example. Musically some of them have some interesting ideas, but the lyrics completely ruin it.

[Gary Sisco]

I take that kind of shit about as seriously as I take Hollywood movies.

Hip hop's been around for more than thirty years. The world is still turning, last time I noticed.

Truth is, I don't find its lyrics, for the most part, any dumber than the endless repetition of love and love lost songs that make up almost all of pop music's offering. Some people might like one more than the other but neither is exactly so-phisticated, so far as the lyric content alone goes.

[Jon Abbey]

Originally Posted by Scott Dolan

I couldn't agree more. Just look at the ones Alex posted as a prime example. Musically some of them have some interesting ideas, but the lyrics completely ruin it.

those aren't exactly lyrics, they're just him talking as that track winds down. that's one of the great diss songs of all time, "with my nuts on your tonsils, as you're onstage rapping at your wack-ass concert".

[aashbourne]

In 'Fuck wit Dre Day' when Snoop Dogg and Dre are trading lines, does anyone else find the dissonant synth line in the background annoying? I just started hearing it recently, and I feel it takes away from the song.

[Scott Dolan]

Originally Posted by Jon Abbey

those aren't exactly lyrics, they're just him talking as that track winds down. that's one of the great diss songs of all time, "with my nuts on your tonsils, as you're onstage rapping at your wack-ass concert".

Ah, well that makes it all different then.

Sorry, if I want to hear that kind of obnoxious horseshit I'll go back to junior highschool.

Really, I have no problem with talking shit, but "gangsta" rap takes it to incredibly absurd levels.

[MRS]

What is "gangsta" rap?

[Scott Dolan]

It's a bunch of scrawny punks who go on and on about how they are going to make your girlfriend/wife their bitch while they show off all their fancy cars/houses/jewelry and tell you how much better they are than you.