The five best Death Row albums of all time
Death Row Records, over time, sadly became known more for its disasters than its successes. Controversy was never far away from the infamous West Coast label, and its reputation for chaos and violence is entirely warranted. But the fact remains that, during its day, Death Row released some of hip-hop’s most important albums ever. It’s legendary for a reason.
Founded in 1991 by Suge Knight, Dr Dre, The DOC, Dick Griffey, and Harry-O, Death Row was central to West Coast hip-hop’s success throughout the ’90s. With artists like 2Pac, Snoop Dogg and Dr Dre himself all putting out classic albums on the label, Death Row backed a core group of artists that were capable of giving the East Coast a run for its money. It helped to shift hip-hop westward.
But by 1996 things had started to go wrong. Dre left Death Row that year, and, within a matter of months, the label’s main man, Tupac Shakur, was shot and killed. By the following February, Suge Knight was in jail for violating his parole and an exodus of some of the label’s remaining artists subsequently took place. Snoop Dogg, Nate Dogg, Kurupt, The Lady of Rage and Daz Dillinger had all abandoned ship by the end of the decade. The label was a shell of itself.
Bankruptcy was filed for in 2006, and Death Row was auctioned off. It passed through different owners over the following years, until, in 2022, a familiar figure bought it. Death Row now belongs to Snoop Dogg, who hopes to restore it to greatness. That seems fairly unlikely, but, even so, the label’s legacy was secured long ago. Even though it all unravelled in the end, some of Death Row’s releases are among the greatest hip-hop albums of all time.
The five best Death Row albums of all time
5. Tha Dogg Pound – Dogg Food
Daz Dillinger and Kurupt started as solo artists, but, after Dr Dre worked with both of them for one of his own albums, he realised that these two needed to work together. Tha Dogg Pound was formed, and, in 1995, their debut Dogg Food was released on Death Row. It flew straight to number one in the album charts in America, while the video for one of its singles, ‘New York, New York,’ caused a huge stir because it depicted Snoop Dogg, who featured on the track, kicking down New York skyscrapers, Godzilla-style. This was at the height of the East Coast–West Coast feud, so, naturally, people from the East didn’t take kindly to that.
As for the album itself, Dogg Food, despite its immediate commercial success, isn’t remembered in quite as fond a way as some Death Row’s other classics. But it arguably should be, as it helped to define what West Coast hip-hop was all about. Its skits, its instrumentals, its tone—it’s an archetypal West Coast record, featuring so many of its key figures in addition to Daz and Kurupt themselves. Snoop, Nate Dogg, and Dre all worked on the album. It’s West Coast through and through.
4. The Lady of Rage – Necessary Roughness
Another of the lesser-remembered Death Row artists is The Lady of Rage, whose one and only album, Necessary Roughness, was released on Death Row in 1997. She left the label and pulled back from the music industry itself not long after her album came out, instead focusing on becoming an actor. She did work with Snoop Dogg a few times throughout the 2000s, while continuing to make music with others here and there, but, generally speaking, her music career has been quiet since Necessary Roughness came out all those years ago.
Lady of Rage did an interview with a website called DubCNN in 2007, where she admitted that the production on Necessary Roughness wasn’t quite to her liking. There were other producers she would have liked to work on the album, but, still, she’s happy with her rapping on it. “But lyrically,” she said, “I feel that it was on point. I feel like if it could be redone today, it would still make noise. If I could get the producers to remix all those songs, it would really make a impact, because lyrically I feel that it was a work of art.”
3. Snoop Doggy Dogg – Doggystyle
In November 1993, Death Row released an album that, initially, received mixed reviews, but would go on to become one of hip-hop’s most important records. Doggystyle, the debut album from Snoop Doggy Dogg, helped to introduce mainstream audiences around the world to the high-pitched synthesisers and explicit lyrical content of G-funk. It also made a legend out of its main man, transforming Snoop into a superstar. The album went straight to number one on the Billboard 200, becoming the fastest-selling hip-hop album to be released up until that point. Doggystyle was a game-changing piece of work.
For Snoop, it was the beginning of the rest of his life. “Back then [Doggystyle] meant a lot because it was [about] being able to stand on my own two feet and put out a project for the first and to actually be heard and seen for who I am individually,” he reflected to MTV in 2013, after the album turned 20. “Now what it means, it’s an accomplishment. Looking back at it, it was very well put together, it was standards, it showed me the way to do it, the only way to do it.”
2. Dr Dre – The Chronic
Snoop’s Doggystyle wasn’t alone in popularising G-funk. Another Death Row album, released only months previously, started that process: Dr Dre’s The Chronic. These two albums were tightly linked, with a similar tone and style running through both. That’s hardly surprising, considering that so many of the same people were involved in making them. Obviously, Dre produced each album, and Snoop rapped prominently on both, but plenty of other performers and producers featured on the two projects. The Chronic and Doggystyle really were twin works, and their respective successes propelled G-funk and Death Row Records into the stratosphere.
The Chronic, released at the end of 1992, was responsible for launching the careers of so many West Coast rappers. Snoop, Daz Dillinger, Kurupt, Nate Dogg, and Warren G all featured on it, while the album also proved that Dre was a formidable solo artist without his NWA bandmates to back him up. The album literally changed the face of West Coast hip-hop, and, in 2019, the sheer weight of its cultural influence was recognised by the Library of Congress, which preserved it in the National Recording Registry.
1. 2Pac – All Eyez On Me
The reason Tupac Shakur signed to Death Row is fairly grim. In 1995 he was broke and facing serious charges of sexual abuse, for which he was being held in a correctional facility. Suge Knight and Jimmy Iovine of Interscope Records posted the $1.4 million bail in order to get him out, but they did so with a condition: Pac had to sign a three-album contract with Death Row. He agreed, and the first of these, All Eyez on Me, was released in February 1996. The album gestured towards some of the dramatic changes that were happening in Pac’s life around this period, and there was a definite darkness within it that only came to seem more profound in time. Seven months after it came out, Tupac was dead. Murdered in his prime.
All Eyez On Me marked a major departure for Tupac, who had moved away from the social consciousness of his previous albums and was now unashamedly showing off his newly lavish lifestyle of fame. Yet, at the same time, the album was cut through with a sort of paranoia that only fame can generate, as he hinted at in an interview with MTV in December ’95. “It’s called All Eyez on Me. That’s how I feel it is,” he said. “I got the police watching me, the Feds. I got the females that want to charge me with false charges and sue me and all that. I got the females that like me. I got the jealous homeboys and I got the homies that roll with me. Everybody’s looking to see what I’mma do now so All Eyez on Me.”