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Music

Chronic summer heat

At least once every summer since 1993, I’ve heard, in some form or another, Dr. Dre’s G-funk masterwork The Chronic.

Whether it be emanating from the windows of a passing car, such as the other day drifting into my apartment window, or in its entirety repeatedly in the smoke-filled haze of my teens.

Either way it remains a summer classic and as L.A. Times blogger Jeff Weiss rightly pointed out, it’s “ferociously funky” and best ingested under scorching temperature, the kind we’re getting up here way northeast of Compton.

It was recorded in 1992 – the year of the L.A. riots – during a likewise tumultuous year in Andre Young’s life. He had Eazy-E’s lawsuit hanging over his head, accusations of assaulting a woman named Dee Barnes at a party, a recent fire to his home which some accused him of starting to collect insurance, and another battery charge for knocking the jaw off a guy named Damon Thomas. It’s astounding he was able to produce such an enduring good time party record amidst all this.

Maybe it’s because of all the dark clouds hanging over him at the time that he buried himself in the home studio, digging deep into the crates for the funkiest tunes to sample and in the process changing the game of rap and putting West Coast hip hop on map.

If you know the album well enough many of the 70s samples will be familiar, like Willie Hutch’s Brother’s Gonna Work It Out, used in the intro to Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat before Snoop lyrically lays in on his and Dre’s enemies, or the litany of Parliament samples used on Fuck Wit Dre and Let Me Ride. But did you know about Malcolm McLaren’s Buffalo Gals on High Powered? What about Led Zeppelin’s When the Levee Breaks on Lyrical Gangbang?

Los Angeles-based hip hop blogger Ivan Rott has meticulously compiled a sample set of all the tunes Dre jacked on the Chronic. Forty-one funked-out jams totalling nearly three hours of music, a great way to revisit Dre’s opus without some of the now cringe-inducing lyrics that make the album difficult to grow old with.

Highlights for me included Do Your Thing (Live at the Sahara Tahoe) by much-missed Isaac Hayes, Donny Hathaway’s poignant soul on Little Ghetto Boy and the Kay-Gees’s rump shaker Who’s the Man (With the Master Plan).

Rott did the same for Dre and Snoop’s follow up, Doggystyle, which he suggests makes an excellent companion piece to his Chronic sample set. Combined the two would constitute over six hours of funk. If you get yourself into some real chronic, however, those hours would likely just fly by. [rssbreak]

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