It is no secret that Jay-Z wrote a leading single for Dre’s “2001” — “Still Dre”. Now Hov says that he even recorded a reference tape imitating both of their voices.
The hip-hop mogul casually talked about this event while recording the Season 4 premiere of LeBron James’s HBO show “The Shop”.
The main point that Jay-Z was making that when he was writing for somebody, he had to get into their shoes to understand what makes the artist tick. And to sound like them vocally was, perhaps, not even that difficult after he could make lyrics that they would be able to rap as their own. Yet Hov did both:
Well, on that reference track, I’m doing Dre and Snoop’s vocals. The reference track, it sounds like them. The Foxy [Brown] reference? I’m glad no one can find them. You’ve gotta have somewhat of reverence for them. Obviously, the music they were making — The Chronic and all that. In order for me to really nail the essence of Dre and Snoop, it had to be like a studied reverence of what they were doing to even put myself in their shoes.
Snoop Dogg has never had a problem admitting the role Jay-Z played in creating “Still Dre”. In 2012 he spoke about it in length on GGN NewsA:
We was trying to write “Still D.R.E”, we all took a shot at it, but we all couldn’t come up with nothing as dope as Jay-Z. So we had to take a back seat and say, “Okay, his shit is doper than everybody else’s shit that had done wrote something, so he’s the winner, we gonna do what he says”, and at the same time he wrote it in the same vein as if we wrote it because he understood what he was writing for. He took and embodied the whole situation as far as writing for Dr. Dre, so we couldn’t do nothing but take a back seat and acknowledge that, and say, “You know what? You’s a bad motherfucker”. We didn’t dispute that, even with Eminem. You know, when the white boy was writing, he was coming with that shit. Niggas were like, “Man, we can’t fuck with that!”.
Watch the video below:
