The Chronic opens with the sound of a jail door slamming, and before the tumblers went click, Dr. Dre had a lock on the '90s. As a record, Dre's post-N.W.A. debut gave African-American resentment and ghetto nihilism a seductive, cinematic flow. As a cultural force, it rolled over all resistance, defining the entire country as Death Row Records turf and selling the West Coast gang mythos to the suburbs. "Dre fuckin' slowed down the '90s like The Matrix," Public Enemy's Chuck D says. "That record transformed everything--all that laid-back California shit." Dre says he makes "feel records," and the feel of The Chronic is riot-time Los Angeles, 1992, bitterness grazing across territorial lines, anger edging into stoned hilarity. The album's gaggle of rappers sounds reborn in rage, posing as "n!ggas with big dicks and AK-47s" like they're having the time of their lives. But all that anger flowed from a very personal need for revenge. "It was a period in my life when I had just left [N.W.A.'s label] Ruthless, and talk on the street was I wasn't going to be able to do it without those guys," Dre says. "So I felt I had something to prove." The Chronic rolls on drum-machine beats, like most rap albums, but Dre revolutionized the genre by deemphasizing samples, bringing in a Moog keyboard, live horn players, and crucially, multi-instrumentalist Colin Wolfe, who played the bass lines and eerie, high-pitched synths that provided the outrageously catchy hooks. Recreated P-Funk, Isaac Hayes, and Donny Hathaway melodies complete the essence of "G-Funk": cold-compress grooves applied to street-corner static, a budded-out haze that makes the anger seem serene and spacious. The cast was pulled from the 50 or so people who dropped by "the Lab" on a typical day to get high and get heard--MCs That N!gga Daz, Kurupt, RBX, the Lady of Rage. But the album's secret weapon is Snoop Doggy Dogg, a young Crip who'd recorded the underground hit "Deep Cover" with Dre the year before, and whose dry, graceful drawl dominates the record ("I guess I just wanted it a little more than everyone else," Snoop says). As he drops "a jimmy joke about your mama that you might not like," Snoop sounds lighthearted, almost giggly, like nothing can touch him.
Hip-hop's energy source had been going West for years, and The Chronic's four million copies sold, two Top 10 singles ("Nuthin' But a "G" Thang," "Dre Day"), and omnipresent videos, were the final victory. The album's barely ambivalent, skitlike vision of the ghetto as a bullet-riddled sex-and-drug party had white kids in front of the mirror enunciating "beeee-yatch," while conservative activist C. DeLores Tucker went on a Washington rampage against so-called "gangsta rap." It's even said that the album's success caused the price of the herb it was named after to skyrocket. The Notorious B.I.G.'s 1994 debut, Ready To Die, brought attention back East, but even he sampled Dr. Dre's "Lil' Ghetto Boy" and The Chronic's narrative structure. After Dre hit it was truly the G-Funk era: Snoop's Doggystyle debuted at No.1 in 1993, and Dre's stepbrother Warren G concocted the brilliant Regulate, then came the reserves-the Twinz, Tha Dogg Pound, etc. Violent drama became a hip-hop industry standard; even records by experimentalists like the Wu-Tang Clan and the Fugees needed a body count for credibility. The Chronic funded Suge Knight's Death Row, and it's doctrine of revenge articulated label policy on both coasts, leading to Knight's feud with Bad Boy's Sean "Puffy" Combs. For years after The Chronic, "never hesitate to put a n!gga on his back" was rap policy. Before things cooled down, Death Row's Tupac Shakur and Bad Boy's B.I.G. were murdered; Knight went to jail on a parole violation; Dre and Snoop eventually fled Death Row; and Snoop toured with 1995's Lollapalooza in a bullet-proof van. Today, Dre attributes some of the above--plus hip-hop's onslaught throughout the 90s--to the triumph of The Chronic. "If that record wasn't successful, at least 50 percent of that shit wouldn't have happened." - Spin Magazine (September, 1999). Dig in...
A full copy of Spin Magazine's feature on The Chronic in 9/99...
