Dr Dre Chronic 2001 Album Tracklist
Ena Baccari
Though he's one of the most influential figures in hip-hop history, Dre's solo releases have been few and far between. 2001 was preceded only by 1992's The Chronic, which propelled Dre to new heights just as N.W.A was in decline (and also introducing the world to Snoop Dogg). He is known for his work behind the scenes, producing signature beats that helped popularize artists like 2Pac , Eminem and Lamar.
If the hype is to be believed, it seems that Compton: The Soundtrack could be Dr. Dre's last solo record. "All my friends came in, and we all came together to build this thing," he said. "It's going to be my grand finale."
Rumors of a non-Detox album have been circulating since May, but the new tracklist blindsided many fans over the weekend. Low-quality leaks on YouTube have appeared, as is often the case with new hip-hop albums, but it's worth waiting until Friday to hear the new songs, which will also feature a collaboration with N.W.A alumnus Ice Cube. "Cube came in, [and] he went bananas on the record," said Dre.
Jack Martinez is a writer from Great Falls, Montana. He attended Stanford University, where he studied the Classics and received training in archaeology. He currently covers national politics for Newsweek.
Around three years ago, a teen pop artist from Ohio named brakence started to experience a relentless, nagging headache that lasted for months. This chronic pain, and brakence's broader understandings of his mind, body and environment, inspired his second album, the meticulous hypochondriac, released in December 2022 on Columbia Records.
Raised in the suburbs of Columbus, brakence enjoyed a comfortable middle class upbringing that allowed him to explore his creative tendencies from an early age. He developed his voice in choir and his knowledge of music theory in jazz piano lessons. He attended an alternative middle school that abolished grades and sent him on "discovery days" to a family friend's basement studio to record. Around that time, he sunk deeper into the internet and grew obsessed with maximal, early 2010s dubstep.
The trick of this album is to channel these heady metaphysics through the familiar forms of pop music. Drawing from a prickly palette of IDM, emo and rap textures, brakence reaches for the "realer-than-real" feelings that stem from taking psychedelics. When songs abruptly shift tempos and veer off in surprising directions, like the mini Jersey club explosion at the end of "caffeine," they feel less like stray experimental gestures than intentional pieces of the album's grander architecture. Through a production technique called formant shifting, brakence makes his crisp, classically trained baritone vocals expand, shrink, sprout and wither as an outgrowth of the synth plucks and bass smacks.
Sometimes, brakence is but a machine "digging out dopamine," or a "handmade prop" on stage. But other times he's in control, basking in the limelight, striving for an obsessive level of perfection as an artist. It's almost as though brakence is trying on different worldviews like clothes, seeing how they fit as he develops his own theory of the world. On sonic and conceptual levels, hypochondriac is a testing ground, brakence attempting to generate a fully-rendered map of himself and his environment, perhaps to ground himself amid the storms of reality.
Ahead of his Denver show in November 2022, brakence spoke to NPR about his love of dubstep and IDM, his burgeoning interest in Eastern philosophy, the arduous process of recording hypochondriac and becoming better in tune with his body's needs.
brakence: When people ask me what kind of music I make, I just say pop. I understand why a lot of people don't like being called hyperpop, but personally, I don't really have a problem with it. But that's just me, you know, 'cause I can see how other people would be like, people decided to put this label on me and I don't really want to have a label kind of thing.
I think that my music has a certain ethos to it that is a pop ethos. And that's why I would say that I like using the word "pop" for my music. There are a lot of values that pop has that I actually f*** with. And there are a lot that I don't that aren't part of my music.
Whenever I show your music to people who've never heard it, some of them get it [immediately], but then there are others who find it a bit more experimental and challenging. And I think it's interesting how you bring this really heady, producer-brain to pop. Is that a challenge for you, trying to convey these big musical ideas through the framework of pop? Or does it just come naturally?
I would say it definitely is a challenge. In my very early music, when I was just messing around, I didn't care about pop structure. Sometimes it would manifest itself without me thinking about it. But it definitely is a challenge now, because I want to be very intentional about it.
I will say, I think you stretch pop a little bit, like songs where you stretch the tempo, for instance. I've never heard that type of thing in a "pop song" in my life. Do you think that's all pop? Are you trying to change what pop can be?
I don't know. That stuff is very new stuff. With hypochondriac, I do this thing where I'll have a pop song, and then at the end, I basically add this thing in where I just do whatever I want at the end of the pop song. [Laughs]
I definitely f*** with themes, and so I think that I want to give you themes. But then I want to take those themes and not just make a song a theme, but have themes that go places, kind of very theatrically.
So your first music uploaded to SoundCloud sounds a little like you're a producer messing around. What were you trying to do with that stuff, what were you channeling? You were singing a little bit, but it felt more subdued compared to where you're at now.
I was definitely coming at it from this kind of carefree creativity. I started to get more like, I want to be more focused with it. I listened to a lot of IDM as well, like Autechre, Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin, all that. And there's this one artist from Montreal, gonima, who I did a remix for recently. He makes this really high definition IDM, and it sounds nothing like any other IDM. I had never listened to anything like it before and I was like, oh my god, I literally just want all my beats to sound like this.
Ever since I discovered that you can sound higher def than [in] real life, I've been very adamant about almost always doing that, and I'm very drawn to the way it sounds. It's psychedelic, but in this way that's completely different from something like psychedelic rock. Because when you think of psychedelic rock, the lo-fi-ness of it is almost why it's psychedelic, because everything is sort of overlapping and kind of muddy in this very intentional way. It's all about elements mixing together. But there's this other thing you can do with psychedelic production, where you can make it sound realer than real. It just sounds very alien and very beautiful.
I'm interested in how your music feels so intense, so in your face. And the thing that sticks out to me most in your lyrics more than anything is how you talk about your health and chronic pain. Can you talk more about your relationship to chronic pain, like why you decided to start writing about it in your music?
Probably three years ago, I started getting this pain and I didn't know what it was. I was like, this is just a headache, and I started really freaking out about it. I would go to the doctor, and they didn't know what was going on either so they prescribed me things that I didn't need. Eventually, I realized that it's TMJ pain, like, my jaw. I don't know if it's because my teeth got f***** up because I stopped wearing my retainer when I was in early high school, or maybe it's just because of anxiety, I'm clenching? Probably both.
It kind of took over my life, especially during the pandemic. It was this thing where I felt like I couldn't really operate as a regular human being for awhile because I had so much of this chronic pain. And through other people's help, I've developed a lot of tools to be able to make it not nearly as bad as it was, and it's definitely very much a psychological thing.
I think that in some ways my music has that ethos, but in other ways there's still this very much Western thing. I think that the Western thing is probably stronger, because my whole sort of upbringing was that. And it's being challenged by these ideas and it's reacting to them badly. [Laughs] This album isn't a very happy album. I think a lot of it's about that style of thinking getting challenged by this other style of thinking and getting really not happy about it. This stuff that you subscribe to and you'd subscribed to for so long is a lie. It would make sense to me that jazz musicians really f*** with Eastern philosophy because jazz is all about this very spontaneous creativity that's coming from this place in the moment.
Pretty soon after [punk2] came out, I was like, ok, I'm on to the next one. Then I tried doing it and was like, I don't know where I'm going with this, got really burnt out, and then tried again and got really burnt out ... it was a lot of that. I would keep little bits from [the areas] of time where I was really trying.
So that. This happened so many times with this record, where I would come up with the end of the song first and then I'd be like, "Oh, this sounds like the end of a song. This does not sound like the beginning of a song." Then I would be like, "Okay, so now I have to come up with the beginning of the song." And that I put at the end of so many different things, and then I finally was like, "Okay, I need to put it at the end of this. And now it works." This album is kind of like this Frankenstein monster. It's very weird, and it's cohesive, but in this kind of gross way where everything is like, [makes squelchy noise].
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