*Thirty years ago today (12-15-92), Dr. Dre dropped The Chronic, his first studio album and one that would catapult the rapper and record producer to superstardom, and usher in what many historians call “The Greatest Year in Music.”
To mark the milestone, EURweb in collaboration with Image Geyser and the BIPOCXChange is kicking off a yearlong multimedia examination, critique, and celebration of the artist, the album, and Hip Hop’s cultural impact and influence, with an emphasis on its importance to current economic, social and political issues. We’ll recount key moments, offer thought-provoking analysis, and uplift the perspectives of key players — photographers, videographers, stylists, publicists, journalists, and others — who carved Hip Hop out of the cultural wilderness of the 70s, 80s, and 90s America.
Finally, we’ll partner with BIPOC content creators, publishers and luminaries via the BIPOCXChange Chronic30 Metapage to invite personal reflections, host insightful discussions, and spark a long overdue national conversation that once and for all solidifies Hip Hop’s role in shaping language, music, fashion, art, dance, education, technology, television, film, literature, entertainment, politics and media — globally.
More than just a best-selling album, The Chronic represents a pivotal point on the Hip Hop history timeline, serving as both a prelude and an inspiration for important and influential artists like 2Pac, Nas, Wu Tang Clan, Queen Latifah, Onyx, and many others, who released music in 1993 and together birthed a cultural movement.
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August 11, 1973 Hip Hop began; 100+ years after the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation and a decade after the passage of the Civil Rights Act—bookends to a period of history in which formerly enslaved Africans in the U.S. suffered under the brutal oppression of Jim Crow. The musical art form was a reaction to the aftershocks of that brutality as well as the socio-economic conditions in Black and Brown neighborhoods, specifically in the New York City borough of the Bronx, where Black, Latinx, and Caribbean American youth held block parties that featured DJs like Kool Herc “mixing soul” and funk music.
“Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America,” Tricia Rose, a scholar of post-civil rights era Black U.S. culture, popular music, and social issues, calls that period a time of “social alienation, prophetic imagination and yearning.” Out of it emerged a powerful art form in which rappers created songs that spread news of their daily lives, dreams, and discontents outside of their immediate neighborhoods, creating their own form of resistance.
“At this point what is truly American Culture is Black Culture to a large degree. Flip on the television set…It’s had a profound influence on this entire nation and has to be affirmed.” – Barack Obama
The culture of Hip Hop as an expressive art form was born from the socioeconomic realities of Black life in America. Both a vocal and physical outlet for marginalized people of all colors, Hip Hop became a lifestyle and spawned the original pronouns, B-Boy and B-Girl. These nondescript monikers for a broader-yet-still-uninformed society only identified one as a subculture within already marginalized communities. However, for the B-Boy or B-Girl, being part of the Hip Hop community meant being a change agent!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Awzm7AVWHa4
But Hip Hop really came of age in the 1990s beginning with the release of “The Chronic,” an album that took the artform mainstream and solidified Dr. Dre as one of the culture’s most influential personas.
We begin our series with a look at the artist, the origins of his ground-breaking album, and how it both reflected the reality of the times and helped create a springboard for BIPOC liberation.
Now, sit back, roll up (if you like) and join EURweb as we slip-and-slide to the Westside.
No Deal. No Label. No Dre.
In 1992, Dre (born Andre Romelle Young) was far from the music mogul, face of an international brand (Beats By Dre) or future inductee into the Rock-N-Roll Hall of Fame we know today.
L.A. was still smoldering following a riotous spring and summer of unrest in America’s second largest city, sparked by fury over the April 1992 acquittal of four police officers — three of them white — whose savage beating of Rodney King, a Black man, was caught on video.
Dre was still beefing with childhood friends Eric “Eazy E” Wright and Ice Cube. He had left Ruthless Records, the label his artistry helped launch. And his personal finances were in shambles as a result of what he claimed was mismanagement by the company’s co-founder, Jerry Heller. At the time, Dre also was facing several criminal charges, including a misdemeanor battery count stemming from his self-admitted 1991 violent altercation with Hip Hop journalist Dee Barnes at a nightclub in Los Angeles. Only months before the release of The Chronic, he is out-of-work, damn near broke, and possibly about to do time.
Never far from their violent upbringing, Hip Hop artists can easily slip back into habitual behaviors often necessary to survive their surroundings. After having massive success in the 80s, Dre could have easily slipped into relative obscurity like so many troubled creatives.
On Dec. 15, 1992, the same day The Chronic was released, Dre appeared in a Van Nuys courtroom on a matter concerning an assault on producer Damon Thomas.
He was also facing up to 18 months in jail after pleading guilty to the battery of a police officer and two additional battery counts as the result of a hotel brawl in New Orleans. Barnes hit Dre with a $20-million lawsuit following her assault claim and by this time he had already pleaded no contest to the assault and received 240 hours of community service, fined $2,500 and given 24 months of probation.
However, it was the pending federal racketeering lawsuit against Ruthless Records’ president (Wright) and the real-life drama surrounding the situation that had Young’s life and career on a razor’s edge.
“1992 was not my year,” Dre told the L.A. Times.
More than a passing fad, bigger than the British Invasion, Hip Hop became a lifestyle and a culture. But few foresaw that in 1992. After Hip Hop exploded in the 80s, N.W.A. dropped like an atomic bomb. An outright assault on American institutions and values, the group co-founded by Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, DJ Yella, MC Ren and Eric “Eazy E” Wright, awakened the nation to the current rage felt by millions of Black men. Overnight, five brothers from Compton became cultural icons and spent much of the 80s living the Black American Dream.
The reality of where Dr. Dre found himself in 1992 is the exact same position as millions of Black men in America. His feuds were not unlike confrontations between young Black men playing out on the streets every day.
As Los Angeles Times journalist Chuck Phillips wrote on the day The Chronic was released: “There is little in Young’s rap sheet to distinguish him from hundreds of young Los Angeles street toughs.”
Against this backdrop and seemingly insurmountable personal odds, Dr. Dre gets busy nurturing and delivering The Chronic!
Stay tuned for MORE!
