The one person Dr Dre credits for making his music “hardcore” again: “It’s a movie”
By the end of 1999, Dr Dre was not just at the top of his game – a relatively easy statement to make, granted, considering the rapper had not released music for seven years – but also redefining the game itself for the new millennium with the release of the critically acclaimed, Grammy Award-winning 2001 album.
Despite its accolades and praise, one matter both fans and critics – unsurprisingly, more the latter – picked up on was the intensity of the album’s lyrics. Even by late 1990s gansta-rap standards, the album’s themes of violence and explicit sexual content were a lot. Regarding the latter, it seemed like all the married Dre was doing was partying hard with women he clearly had no respect for.
It’s therefore natural to wonder what Dre’s wife, Nicole Plotzker, made of it. Having been married since 1996, and parents to son Truice since 1997, the album suggested a life far, far away from the Americana white picket fence so associated with newlyweds.
And yet, according to Dre in a 1999 interview with The New York Times, Nicole didn’t mind. Far from it: Dre details that while he was initially reluctant to open that box of lyricism, she actively enabled Dre to return to hardcore lyrics again.
”For a while, right when I got married, I was kind of turned off from using the type of language I was using and the type of records that I was doing,” Dre said. ”It was, like, OK, I’m married now, so maybe I need to tone it down. And my records stopped coming out as good as they should. So she got with me: ‘What’s up? I want to hear the hardcore stuff.’ She was a big reason for me getting back on track.”
On 2001, Dre said: ”Everything you hear is planned. It’s a movie, with different varieties of situations. So you’ve got build ups, touching moments, aggressive moments. You’ve even got a ‘Pause for Porno.’ It’s got everything that a movie needs.”
His albums, Dre clarifies, are for entertainment purposes only: they are not lifestyle recommendations, and should not be treated as such. “I’m not trying to send out any messages or anything with this record,” he said. ”I just basically do hard-core hip-hop and try to add a touch of dark comedy here and there. A lot of times the media just takes this and tries to make it into something else when it’s all entertainment first. Any person that listens to these records and wants to imitate them is an idiot, unless they just want to imitate the fact that it’s a good record. You shouldn’t take it too seriously. It’s not like you’re going to go see a play or a movie or something and want to come out to be Rambo.”
2001 features a roster of collaborators that in retrospect feel like a snapshot of the time, with the likes of Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Nate Dogg, Kurupt, and Mary J. Blige lending their voices. Some lyrics were allegedly even ghost-written by Eminem and Jay-Z. It concluded the year – and therefore the millennium – as the number one R&B album of 1999. Which is pretty hardcore stuff in its own right.