Skip to main content
Eddie Rockerz VibeZ - curated playlists, mixes and music commentary

Dig the crates

Every playlist on the blog, sorted by where it takes you.

Browse all 600+ VibeZ

DJ Mixes & Series

The house sets, the Producer Series and the running volumes.

Show all 16Show fewer

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."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more

De La Soul VibeZ (R.I.P Trugoy the Dove)

Trugoy the Dove died in February 2023, weeks before De La Soul's catalogue finally reached streaming after a fifteen-year legal deadlock. Thirty-one tracks, and a difficult kind of timing. Rest in peace, Dave David Jude Jolicoeur — Trugoy the Dove, later just Dave — formed De La Soul in Amityville, Long Island with Posdnuos and Maseo. Their 1989 debut 3 Feet High and Rising , produced with Prince Paul , remains one of the most inventive records in the history of the genre: dense with samples from Steely Dan to Johnny Cash to French language instruction tapes, funny, formally strange, and entirely uninterested in the postures rap was expected to strike. The consequence of that invention was a curse. The sample clearance landscape changed after Gilbert O'Sullivan sued Biz Markie in 1991, and De La Soul's early catalogue — built on hundreds of uncleared fragments — became legally impossible to license. For roughly fifteen years, their most important a...
Post a Comment
Read more