Dr. Dre has announced that he has spent the last two years working on at least a dozen albums’ worth of new material. The eminent hip-hop hero explained his prolific creativity of late in a new video.
Dr. Dre released the new video on his Instagram page last Thursday. He sits behind a mixing desk in his studio while Busta Rhymes looks at him intently. After being asked about his recent output, Dre moves in his seat to look at Rhymes and says: “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’].”
He continued: “That’s fucking nutso – and then we came back, and … I did the Grand Theft Auto shit, 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 “Grand Theft Auto shit” that Dre mentioned refers to the six songs he created for the Grand Theft Auto Online expansion ‘The Contract’, which was released last December and featured Dre as a character.
For the tracks – which were later compiled into an EP that landed on streaming services in February – Dre collaborated with Eminem, Anderson .Paak, Rick Ross and Snoop Dogg, among others.
Last December, at around the same time Dre released ‘The Contract’ as an EP, he performed alongside Eminem, Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar, Mary J. Blige, 50 Cent and Anderson .Paak for the Super Bowl Halftime Show.
In the following weeks, Dre’s albums surged in the US albums charts, and the music video for his and Snoop’s 1999 single ‘Still D.R.E.’ reached one billion views on YouTube.
Elsewhere, in March, Snoop Dogg claimed that he had become the rightful owner of the master tapes for Dre’s 1992 seminal debut album, The Chronic, when he acquired Death Row Records. Subsequently, Dre set the record straight on the matter, asserting that he still owns 100 per cent of the rights to and masters of the album.
