Over the past four decades, Dr Dre has slowly but surely become one of the wealthiest and most influential people in music. Born in raised in LA, the producer and emcee (real name Andre Young) first entered hip-hop as part of the World Class Wreckin’ Cru. However, his work with N.W.A. cemented him as a formidable producer, but there is one track from their debut album, Straight Outta Compton, that he has since admitted he hates.
N.W.A.’s first body of work was a cultural phenomenon that brought to light the struggle of African-Americans living on the country’s West Coast. For years, the focus had been on New York and the East Coast, with few paying attention to California. However, Straight Outta Compton permanently changed that. Ice-T laid the groundwork in 1983 with tracks such as ‘The Coldest Rap,’ but Dre and his collective ultimately legitimised LA hip-hop.
With tracks such as ‘The Dopeman’ and ‘Fuck tha Police,’ the Compton group took over the airwaves with their abrasive, crude music, and when they released their debut album, they unleashed a vicious beast. However, the project’s lead single is a track Young takes issue with.
The collective’s title track and debut single is a true classic and a masterful creation. ‘Straight Outta Compton’ is the quintessential gangsta rap song and marks the start of California’s ’90s cultural takeover. However, even though he produced it, Dr Dre can’t get behind the track. According to the book Original Gangstas, in 1993, Dre revealed he didn’t put his all into the project, saying: “I threw that thing together in six weeks so we could have something to sell out of the trunk. Back then, I thought the choruses were supposed to just be me scratching.” What’s even more shocking is that, as well as ‘Straight Outta Compton’ Dre wasn’t too keen on ‘Fuck Tha Police either.’
In a comprehensive book regarding rap written by Jonathan Abrams entitled, The Come Up an Oral History of the Rise of Hip Hop, Ice Cube recalled how Dr Dre initially opposed his idea for the track. Speaking to Abrams, the rapper (real name O’Shea Jackson) stated: “I threw the lyrics away at first. Dre said that he didn’t wanna do the song. I had rapped it to him a year before we actually did it, and he was going through an issue where he had to go to jail every weekend, Friday night, get out Monday morning.
Jackson continued: “He didn’t wanna do the record cause he was like, ‘Dude, I don’t want these sheriffs fuckin me up when they find out that I produced this record when I go in for the weekend.’ He had just served like three months or something, so he was like, ‘Nah.’” Even though Dre may not have been fully invested in the collective’s debut album, he not only still makes money from it but was so inspired by the 2015 biopic of the same name that he made a third album, Compton. You can hear the track in the video below.
