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Producer Series: Dr. Dre

Forty-two tracks from the most consequential producer in the history of rap, and one of the very few whose reputation rests almost entirely on how records sound rather than what they say.

Compton, and the sound of everything after

Andre Young has had three distinct careers. With N.W.A he built the sonic template for gangsta rap — dense, siren-heavy, Bomb Squad-adjacent chaos. At Death Row he invented G-funk: slow tempos, Parliament and Zapp interpolations, live bass, that high whining synth line, and enough space for a rapper to sound relaxed. And from the late 1990s onward he became a discoverer, signing and developing Eminem, 50 Cent, The Game and Kendrick Lamar.

The obsessive part is the mixing. Dre is famous for spending months on drum sounds and for re-recording samples with live players rather than lifting them, and the result is that his records still sound enormous on systems that did not exist when they were made.

What to listen for

"Nuthin' but a G'Thang" is the G-funk foundation and the record that made Snoop Dogg a star. Play it next to N.W.A's "Fuck Tha Police" to hear how completely he changed direction in four years.

"In Da Club" and "Hate It Or Love It" are the 2000s star-making machines — both built to be inescapable, and both were.

"The Watcher" and "The Watcher 2" with Jay-Z and Rakim are the introspective ones, and "Imagine" with Snoop and D'Angelo is a genuinely strange and lovely record.

"Addictive" by Truth Hurts is worth its own note: built on a Lata Mangeshkar Bollywood sample, it became a huge hit and then the subject of a major uncleared-sample lawsuit. It also brought Hindi film music to American radio, which nobody planned.

"The Recipe" is the Kendrick handover moment, and "ETA" with Snoop, Busta Rhymes and Anderson .Paak is the late-period one.

The Eve tracks — "Satisfaction," "That's What It Is," "Rich Girl" — show how far his production travelled outside the West Coast.

Go deeper

The Chronic (1992) and 2001 (1999) are the two essential albums. Compton (2015) is the late one and better than its reception suggested.

The credit question is worth knowing about. Dre's method has always involved a room of collaborators — Scott Storch, Mel-Man, Mike Elizondo, Dawaun Parker and others played and programmed a great deal of what carries his name, and several have said so publicly. That is how a producer of his kind works, and it does not diminish the results, but the sole-author framing is inaccurate.

For the funk underneath it: Parliament-Funkadelic, Zapp and Leon Haywood, whose "I Wanna Do Something Freaky to You" is the bed for "Nuthin' but a G'Thang."

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