The two rappers Jay-Z praised for “having it all”
A Brooklyn boy through and through, Jay-Z has always been firmly rooted within the tradition of East Coast hip-hop. But that doesn’t mean he refuses to recognise rap greatness from other parts of America. In particular, he’s singled out Californian Snoop Dogg and Detroit-native Eminem for praise.
Appearing on David Letterman’s Netflix chat show My Next Guest Needs No Introduction in 2018, Jay spoke about his two contemporaries and tried to explain why he thought they were so good. It wasn’t their lyrics that most jumped out at him, but their voices. That’s the secret behind their respective greatness.
“You can have a great voice and you can just almost say anything,” Jay told Letterman. “I think Snoop Dogg has a great voice. Like, he can say, ‘One, two, three, and to the four,’ and it’s like, ‘Oh my god.’ It just sounds good, right? It just sounds really good.”
Eminem, similarly, has a voice worthy of his stature as one of the greats, but his is different in nature to Snoop’s. If Snoop’s particular talent is to make everything sound smooth, then Eminem’s voice is used much more sharply. “Or you can be someone like Eminem,” Jay said, “and just have amazing cadence.”
He then demonstrated what he meant by that, rapping gibberish with the same sorts of rises and falls that Slim Shady delivers his best work with. “It’s percussion inside the music,” he noted of Em’s approach.
It certainly doesn’t hurt Eminem and Snoop that they each have such good, distinct voices. But that’s only one part of what makes them so brilliant, as Jay was happy to acknowledge. “So, there’s multiple ways to be really good,” he said. “Some people just have it all.”
Jay-Z’s admiration for these particular men—which is to say, the two leading protégés of Dr Dre—probably shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, given his own close connection to Dre. It was Jay, after all, who is credited as the main lyrical force behind one of Dre’s biggest hits, ‘Still DRE,’ which featured Snoop.
That song featured on Dre’s follow-up to his debut solo album The Chronic, which was released a whole seven years beforehand. ‘Still DRE’ served as the lead single for 2001, and it proved that, despite the big gap between his first and second albums, Dre still had it as a solo artist. That notwithstanding, he needed help to prove that point.
Jay-Z was recruited as ghostwriter for the track, and, initially, things didn’t really go very well. “At first, he wrote about diamonds and Bentleys,” Dre reflected to Blaze magazine in 1999. “So I told Jay to write some other shit. Jigga sat for 20 minutes and came back with some hard-ass, around-the-way LA shit.”
From Jay’s perspective, it was only possible for him to write the song to the desired standard because of his admiration for both Dre and Snoop. “You gotta have like somewhat of a reverence for them.. the music they were making,” he said on The Shop: Interrupted in 2021. “The Chronic and all of that… In order for me to really nail the essence of Dre and Snoop, it had to be like a studied reverence of what they were doing.”
This proved to be a reverence that Jay would carry with him long after he finished writing ‘Still Dre.’ It’s stuck with him all these years later, to the extent that he considers Snoop and Eminem, Dre’s two greatest successes, to be among the very best.