Celebrating the 20 year anniversary of hip hop classic “2001” Dr. Dre sat down with Jimmy Iovine of radio Beats 1 and discussed the release and the history behind it in detail. Talking in length about the important role Eminem played in finding the sound for Dr.Dre and how Eminem’s appearance on “Forgot about Dre” was not planned at all.
Dr.Dre started from discussing his attitude towards music in general and how he was much more interested in producing music rather than holding the mic himself. And how it was not easy for him to find the right foot at that time:
I just felt like I needed to bump into a right artist, or a right musician and I didn’t have it at the time. Eminem was the missing link. Hearing that demo with Eminem and how I feel and then meeting him and how we saw eye to eye as far as the work goes and what we wanted to do in the studio… He was hungry, I was hungry. And you know, that was spontaneous combustion. We just clicked and that just brought everything and everybody together that was happening at that time. And we found out that what we were doing – it really worked. And that’s what we needed. And then we started working on the second solo album “2001”.
Answering the question about “Forgot about Dre”, one of the highlights of the album, Dre said that the song was not meant to sound this way:
That was Eminem’s idea. He wrote that song for me and Snoop originally. He laid the reference vocals for Snoop and I liked the way he sounded. So we just kept it that way. I laid my vocals and that was it.
Watch Dr.Dre reminiscing about his classic below:
