Revisiting Late 90’s Hip-Hop

The enormous success of Eminem’s 1999 Slim Shady LP and its attendant slew of singles, all of which Dr.Dre produced, had the knock-on effect of making Dre’s 2001 (ironically released in 1999) familiar to many new white teenage rap fans. Both records were particularly popular with certain groups of kids at school around the time I purchased my first album (Nevermind by Nirvana, see previous post), yet I didn’t own either of them. The fact that 2001 came with the coveted ‘parental advisory’ sticker, seeing as it was packed with plenty of expletives and references to both drugs and sex, made it a popular choice with many approaching their mid-teens. The sizeable glowing ganja leaf emblazoned across the album sleeve and the CD label, might also have had something to do with the appeal of this record to late 90's and early noughties teens.

Compton, Los Angeles, is a long way both geographically and culturally from the rural town of Garstang in north-west England (where I attended secondary school until finishing my GCSE's), and nobody really fully understood or related to the record’s tales of a triumphant gangster come hip-hop producer. In retrospect, the trouble with 2001 is that it seems a bit forced. When it was released, Dre was a particularly wealthy 34 year-old who was happily married with several kids – a far cry from the aggressive bad-boy gangster image he was working so hard to project. Successfully cultivating a controversial media image, however far removed from reality, probably made this record one of the most memorable for those growing up in the late 90’s and early noughties.