Dr. Dre Produced 247 Songs Throughout The Pandemic
According to a new video from the current hip-hop great Dr. Dre, he has spent the previous two years working on atleast a dozen albums’ worth of material.
Dre can be seen in the clip, which was posted to Instagram on 30th June, working behind a mixing desk in a studio, as Busta Rhymes observes him inquisitively. Dre shifts his gaze to Busta after being questioned about his output and responds: “N****, I got… Yeah, 247 songs during the pandemic, and then we paused and did a whole album with Marsha Ambrosius [her upcoming fourth album ‘Cascablonco’].
“That’s f*****g nutso – and then we came back, and … I did the Grand Theft Auto s**t, and now we’re working on my n**** Snoop. And y’know, we’re two days in right now and we’ve got, what, like six bangers?”
The six songs Dre created for the Grand Theft Auto Online expansion, ‘The Contract’, which was released last December and featured Dre as a character, are what Dre was referring to when he called it “Grand Theft Auto s**t.” Dre worked with artists like Eminem, Anderson.Paak, Rick Ross and Snoop Dogg on the songs, which were subsequently compiled into an EP and made its way to streaming sites in February.
For this year’s Super Bowl Halftime Show, Dre performed with Eminem, Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar, Mary J. Blige, 50 Cent and Anderson. Paak during the same month that ‘The Contract’ was made available as an EP. In the weeks that followed, Dr. Dre’s albums shot to the top of the US album charts and the music video for his 1999 single ‘Still D.R.E.’ with Snoop reached one billion views on YouTube.
Snoop stated in March that when he bought Death Row Records, he also became the owner of the master tapes for Dre’s 1992 debut album, ‘The Chronic.’ However, Dre retaliated, asserting that he is the only owner of the rights and masters of the iconic album.
Fat Money, the co-writer of Ye’s most recent album, ‘Donda 2,’ was seen in the studio with Dre the following month. It happened when rumours about the release of Dr. Dre’s long-delayed album ‘Detox,’ which was first announced in 2002 but hasn’t materialised after 20 years, started to circulate. ‘Compton,’ Dre’s most recent full-length album, was released in 2015.
There were rumours last year that a new album by Dre would be released last December when Grandmaster Flash stated a few months prior that Dr. Dre’s upcoming album would alter the game.
The recording of the album, on which Flavor Flav has also stated he will appear as a guest, supposedly came to a close in November 2020. Diamond D estimates that the album will have a runtime of about two hours. Of course, no formal announcement has been made yet.
—Silviya.Y
