How Dre Forgot About Dre: The Story of ‘2001’

I still can’t shake the goosebumps I get when I hear those keys. You know the ones: that murderous mob-movie piano, clinking as it’s methodically built out by a lone cello and mournful violins, then by electric bass and drums so crisp they sound pulled from the soul of the Korg Triton machine they were produced on. “Still D.R.E.,” the first single from Dr. Dre’s 2001, is an antihero’s theme, the music Denzel Washington’s bad cop Alonzo Harris flips on before his panoramic tour of L.A.’s underbelly in Training Day. Twenty years later, even though the myth of 2001 has worn off, the song is still transportive. It’s cinematic and immersive, which is exactly what Dre intended: Coming off of three years in the wilderness, Dre needed more than a new sound. He needed a new story.

“Since the last time you heard from me I lost some friends / Well, hell, me and Snoop, we dippin’ again / Kept my ear to the streets, signed Eminem,” he raps. It’s not a lie, but it’s certainly not the truth; Dre’s version of the period of time between leaving Death Row Records in 1996 and 2001’s triumph in 1999 excludes a series of excruciating personal and professional setbacks that tell a more complex story of who Andre Young really is. “Haters say Dre fell off / How? Nigga, my last album was The Chronic,” he scoffs on the same song. It wasn’t, actually, but the stakes were so high for Dre to rebound from his real second album—1996’s soulless Dr. Dre Presents... the Aftermath, which announced his intention to step away from gangsta rap—and the rocky start of his new label that he felt compelled to bend the truth. 2001, released 20 years ago on November 16, had to be more than an album. It had to reassert Dre’s place atop of rap’s hierarchy while also cementing, and smoothing over, his legacy. 2001, a big-budget, tightly controlled film, had to create a myth bigger than the man itself.

It worked. Growing up in L.A., where he remains omnipresent, I was captivated by Dre’s mystery—and the lore surrounding this comeback album in particular. The draws of 2001’s story are numerous: There was the cathartic reconciliation with Snoop, the discovery of Eminem, the introduction of an unprecedented space-age sound, the blend of West Coast legacies old and new, the massive commercial success that followed. At the time, I didn’t realize that it sounded too perfect to be true, that maybe 2001 was not just a mythical gangsta rap album, but also a Dre rehabilitation project.

I know now what’s real and what’s not. But 2001 nonetheless still has a hold on me, and I sometimes find myself believing the myths about Dre, and this album, that I obsessed over as a teenager. The fact remains that what he accomplished with 2001 was almost alchemy: Somehow, Dr. Dre, the man who had already shape-shifted into and out of the pioneering sounds and high-stakes dramas of N.W.A and Death Row, reinvented himself yet again, this time at 34 years old, and changed music in the process. He made people remember only what he wanted them to: a version of history that ignored his violent assaults of several women. Over the course of one album, Dre shaped his—and hip-hop’s—future. How the hell did he do it?

Dre’s that action hero who walks out of an explosion unscathed; he’s Houdini underwater, wriggling out of a straitjacket right when you think it’s too late. I don’t know if it’s guile, luck, or a combination of both, but when you’ve managed to survive as long as Dre has, it doesn’t really matter. He’s an escape artist and a damn good self-preserver. In 1991, at the peak of N.W.A’s popularity, Dre quit the group due to the poisonous financial disputes between its members and the group’s manager, Jerry Heller, who was backed by member Eazy-E, and found himself with nowhere to go. To make things worse, he was still signed to Heller and Eazy’s Ruthless Records. But then Dre’s friend the D.O.C. introduced him to Suge Knight, a 300-pound bodyguard turned businessman with a knack for getting people out of contracts. Dre and Suge quickly formed Death Row Records, and, as 1992 was bleeding into ’93, with black L.A. still reeling from the riots that erupted after Rodney King’s brutal beating at the hands of the LAPD, Dre released his debut album, The Chronic. Firing shots at Eazy-E and the police in equal measure, and introducing the world to G-funk with his protégé Snoop Doggy Dogg riding shotgun, Dre was back and looking for blood.

A musical block party indebted sonically to George Clinton’s P-funk and thematically to Dre’s experience living in a dangerous, early-’90s Compton, it’s a spotless masterpiece. It put the West Coast on equal footing with the storied East and established what would become Dre’s signature, one he had begun developing near the end of N.W.A: the eerie, mosquito-in-your ear synth that danced over every track and instantly became synonymous with L.A. rap. The Chronic elevated Dre from N.W.A member to hip-hop celebrity producer nearly overnight. It spent eight months in the Billboard top 10, and Dre piled on 11 months later with a sequel of sorts, Snoop Doggy Dogg’s infectious debut album, Doggystyle, which set the record for the fastest-selling hip-hop album in history. On the backs of these two records—plus the Above the Rim soundtrack and Tha Dogg Pound’s snarling debut, Dogg Food—Death Row became an institution. In 1996, after bailing him out of jail, Suge and Death Row released 2Pac’s seminal two-disc album All Eyez on Me, which sold over half a million units in its first week and featured contributions from Dre, Snoop, and the rest of the label.

Ceding his 50 percent stake in a wildly profitable Death Row, Dre narrowly escaped the East Coast–West Coast beef that ultimately consumed Suge and Co. to form Aftermath in March 1996, leaving Snoop behind and bringing with him not a single longtime collaborator. And as a result, the West Coast split between those still on the Row and those who left, with Snoop’s cutting off contact with Dre and eventually moving to Master P’s New Orleans–based No Limit Records. The final blow to the Death Row era came seven months after Dre left the label, when 2Pac, who had fallen out with Dre, was shot and killed. He left behind a final album, The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, which lobbed numerous disses toward Dre.

Throughout the N.W.A and Death Row periods, Dre the public personality remained unfinished. He rarely wrote his own raps, and, as a result, the more colorful aspects of his persona were shaped by his circumstances and collaborators. Friendless, searching for a new sound, and attempting to establish a label as big as the one he had left, Dre released his second album, Dr. Dre Presents... the Aftermath, on November 26, 1996. Bloated, boring, and uneven, it’s at times unlistenable. It didn’t help that the initial Aftermath roster, featuring West Coast legends King Tee and RBX, boasted some of the most anonymous rappers and singers this side of Reno with names like “Jheryl Lockhart” and, literally, “Miscellaneous”; the album also gave Dre just one solo song, the limp “Been There Done That.” It didn’t stand a chance. Trashed by critics and fans alike, Dr. Dre Presents... the Aftermath threatened Dre’s entire career. Dre came up short again in 1997 with The Album, the debut project of the supergroup the Firm, which was composed of Nas, AZ, Foxy Brown, and Nature. The album hit no. 1, but was dismissed as too pop-centric and lacking chemistry. “That point of my life, musically, it was just off balance,” Dre said in 2018. “I was off track then and trying to find it. It was a period of doubt.” If Dre’s magic touch wasn’t permanently gone, he knew it was missing. It was time to start from scratch, but it wouldn’t happen overnight.

Then came a miracle. Later in 1997, Jimmy Iovine, who ran Aftermath parent label Interscope, played Dre the demo of a white rapper from Detroit named Eminem. His maniacal, horrifying, multisyllabic rhymes would later fit uncannily well over Dre’s production. Within minutes, Dre knew he had something special—it was that simple. Dre was saved yet again.

After months of highly productive studio sessions with an unpolished but focused 26-year-old Marshall Mathers, Aftermath released Eminem’s debut, The Slim Shady LP, on February 23, 1999. The album shocked listeners across the world and went four times platinum. It made Eminem a superstar, gave Aftermath its first hit, and, more subtly, marked the start of Dre’s new sound. Gone were the sticky, warbly bass lines, big drums, and hypnotic stank of G-funk. What emerged instead was West Coast rap stripped down to its basic components, stretched and slowed and narrowed with ominous, sparse precision. SSLP’s “Role Model” is 2001’s most obvious precursor, and it’s the only track on the album that Dre coproduced with a young upstart from Virginia named Mel-Man, who would be instrumental in 2001. Around the same time, Dre and Snoop reconciled. No Limit Top Dogg, Snoop’s fourth album and second for No Limit, released on May 11, 1999, featured his first collaborations with Dre in nearly five years. The Dre-produced “Buck ’Em,” with its alien synths and Kill Bill–style guitars, is proto-2001, and the Xzibit-featuring, Dre-laced posse-cut “Bitch Please” got the gang back together again. Armed with a new superstar, a new coproducer, and a crew of old collaborators, Dr. Dre was finally ready for his next episode.

The first sound you hear on 2001 is the THX Deep Note crescendoing and rumbling like an earthquake. It’s a fitting, on-the-nose introduction to one of the most cinematic rap albums of all time: Throughout 2001, Dre creates a highly curated noir L.A. soundscape, complete with skits, whirring helicopters, bar chatter, and whizzing bullets. The THX note is also, in a way, an asterisk—this is a movie, not real life. “It’s all entertainment first,” he said to the The New York Times, in response to his change of heart after denouncing gangsta rap on “Been There Done That.” “Any person that listens to these records and wants to imitate them is an idiot.” The message is clear: 2001 is Dr. Dre, not Andre Young.

But for all the posturing about the line between reality and entertainment, lyrically 2001 feels remarkably real. It’s a testament to Dre’s many ghostwriters, but there’s an urgency in Dre’s rapping that makes it clear this isn’t for fun. The chip on his shoulder, the raw desire to reclaim his throne, was not just for show. If The Chronic was a daytime cookout, 2001 is L.A. at night, blending house parties and drive-bys, reminiscing and thirsting for blood. The album draws a dark portrait of Los Angeles, where at any moment you might get robbed, shot, or killed, whether by the police or a stick-up kid looking for a thrill—a free-for-all war zone where sex is perpetually available and women are pimped, discarded, and fucked with little regard to their humanity.

“The Watcher,” 2001’s first song, is a snarling, paranoid introduction to the new Dre: a seen-it-all, weather-beaten warrior who’s been doubted too long. “Things just ain’t the same for gangstas,” Dre begins, sounding weary. It’s a persona he adopts throughout the album—a veteran who has outlasted them all. “Nigga we started this gangsta shit / And this the motherfuckin’ thanks I get?” he asks later, bewildered. The production on “The Watcher,” like the rest of 2001, is the culmination of years of experimenting: It’s fermented, stark G-funk filtered through the noir of L.A. Confidential, complete with crisp violin plucks, delicate piano, low horns, skulking bass, and pulsing drums. The trademark high synth is still there, but instead of dominating songs, like The Chronic’s “Let Me Ride,” it lingers in the background, an eerie callback to simpler times. Dre had hinted at his new sound on those earlier Eminem and Snoop tracks that same year, but no one was prepared for what 2001 held in store. Even now, 20 years later, it somehow sounds futuristic.

Throughout 2001’s 22 tracks, Dre and Mel-Man reinvented what hip-hop could sound like. Instead of old funk records, this time around Dre incorporated French songs from the 1960s, several TV and film scores, and a bevy of R&B licks without compromising 2001’s nocturnal core. The album is a statement in simplicity, orchestration, and scientifically precise execution. “Xxplosive,” one of 2001’s best beats, flips the first few bars of the classic Soul Mann & the Brothers instrumental “Bumpy’s Lament” from the Shaft soundtrack and pairs it with triangle-twinkles and drums so solid that Kanye stole them to help find his own sound early in his career. “The Next Episode” prominently takes David Axelrod and Dave McCallum’s “The Edge” and pairs it with trembling, reverberating drum hits and a massive, endorphin-generating build-up. “Big Ego’s” and “Still D.R.E.” incorporate producer Scott Storch’s bone-chilling keys and Mel-Man’s gurgling bass, while “Fuck You” and “Light Speed” ooze synths so restrained they feel on the verge of petering out. Anchored around stop-and-go drums, “Some L.A. Niggaz” is spookily empty until the chorus, when a lone, mournful Dre synth line flutters above the beat with the grace, and foreboding, of a vulture slowly circling a fresh kill.

On the lyrical side, 2001 shows off a stable of legends, upstarts, and randoms. They united under Dre’s hawk-eyed watch to make 2001 a layered, constantly surprising feature film. The sound had changed, but The Chronic remained—a few of its architects, along with the generation they influenced, picked up on 2001 right where they left off, with Kurupt, Snoop, Xzibit, Knoc-Turn’al, and Nate Dogg each appearing multiple times and anchoring the album. And then there’s Eminem. In 1999 there was no one like him. His sprawling verses on “What’s the Difference” and, famously, “Forgot About Dre,” are just mesmerizing, equal parts performance art, battle rap, storytelling, and raw charisma. Fitting with the 2001 narrative of Dre’s improbable return, Eminem ferociously defends his mentor’s legacy, threatening to shoot doubters if they “talk like The Chronic was lost product” on “What’s the Difference.”

Dre melded the veterans’ hardened, old-school West Coast swagger with Eminem’s feral raps and Mel-Man’s stripped-down beats, but he wouldn’t have done it without the help of a rapper named Hittman. A virtual nobody before he met Dre, Hittman raps on 10 of 2001’s songs and has writing credits on two more, including “The Next Episode.” In a way he’s the narrator of Dre’s tour of L.A. at night, illuminating conflicts, histories, and characters, and popping up enough that when he does, you feel centered. In high school, I was so consumed by 2001’s story that, on its 15th anniversary, I sought out and interviewed him; he had disappeared almost completely in the years following. “I played the role of gravity,” he told me. “So, no matter what the other emcees chose to speak on in their verses, I always brought it back to the subject matter at hand with mine.” He dominates two of the best pure rapping songs on the album, the mournful highlight “Big Ego’s,” and the shit-talking “Bitch Niggaz,” and even gets his own solo track on “Ackrite.” As for the randoms, there’s Dallas’s Six-2, a nasal-voiced then-23-year old who came referred by Dre’s old friend the D.O.C. and who steals the show on “Xxplosive.” There’s also Ms. Roq, the only woman featured on the album, whose ferocious, iconic verse on “Let’s Get High” remains one of the best moments on the album.

2001 sold over half a million copies in its first week and ultimately was certified six-times platinum. It won a Grammy for “Forgot About Dre,” which, before 2001’s release, Dre and Eminem performed triumphantly on the Saturday Night Live stage. Six months later, Dre, Snoop, Eminem, Ice Cube, most of 2001’s guest artists, and pretty much anyone from L.A. that could fit on the bus embarked on the famed Up in Smoke Tour, a 44-show victory lap that, at one point in the set, featured an actual lowrider hopping on stage.

The album set up the rest of Dre’s career, cementing Aftermath as a dynasty on the scale of Death Row; there’s likely no Kendrick Lamar on Aftermath without 2001. The album led to an astonishing run of success in the years immediately following: more Eminem, the discovery of 50 Cent, and, in the wake of 2001, several huge, Dre-produced singles that built on the album’s instrumental foundation. The 2001 sound was suddenly inescapable, and things were finally as they were supposed to be: Dre was back. Again.

The parts of Dre that would be left behind in the period leading up to 2001 weren’t simply in the interest of making better music. To overhaul yourself, to craft a brand-new narrative the way Dre did between 1996 and 1999, requires a certain degree of cognitive dissonance. Dre was trying to move past Dr. Dre Presents... the Aftermath and the drama with Death Row. He was also trying to let go of the familial trauma that consumed his early life, and to put behind his violence, most of which was directed toward women.

On January 27, 1991, while still in N.W.A, Dre brutally attacked journalist Dee Barnes, the host of the popular Fox entertainment program Pump It Up, at the Po Na Na Souk club in Hollywood. One of the show’s producers had spliced an interview with former N.W.A member Ice Cube, in which he disses the group, into a clip of Barnes interviewing the remaining members of the group: Dre, Eazy-E, MC Ren, and DJ Yella. According to Eazy, the guys felt set up. So when Dre saw Barnes, whom he had known for years, he attacked her. In Barnes’s telling, “He picked me up by my hair and my ear and smashed my face and body into the wall. … Next thing I know, I’m down on the ground and he’s kicking me in the ribs and stamping on my fingers. I ran into the women’s bathroom to hide, but he burst through the door and started bashing me in the back of the head.” No one helped; several people watched on. N.W.A, proud of their violent misogyny, predictably backed Dre. “She deserved it. Bitch deserved it,” Ren told Rolling Stone. Dre told the magazine that, “it ain’t no big thing—I just threw her through a door.” Barnes sued and settled out of court in 1993. She still has migraines from the beating and has struggled to find work in entertainment since.

Between 1992 and 1994, Dre was arrested three separate times for assault, battery of a police officer, and a DUI that involved a high-speed chase through Los Angeles, which sent him to jail for five months. The Barnes incident, though the most famous, wasn’t Dre’s only attack against a woman, nor was it the first. Tairrie B, a female rapper signed to Eazy’s Ruthless Records, says Dre punched her in the eye and mouth at a post-Grammys party in L.A. in 1990. Singer Michel’le, a Death Row labelmate, dated Dre between 1987 and 1996 and had a child with him. She detailed her abuse in a 2015 interview: “I had five black eyes, I have a cracked rib, I have scars that are just amazing. It was normal. Everybody that knew, it was the norm.”

In his 2017 HBO documentary The Defiant Ones, Dre owns up to his assault of Barnes, who’s the only victim interviewed, but nothing else. To explain himself, he discusses seeing his mother abused by his stepfather; the deep depression and alcoholism he fell into in the early ’90s after the death of his brother, Tyree; and the dangerous combination of ego and fame that consumed him and N.W.A as they blew up. “I have this dark cloud that follows me. And it’s gonna be attached to me forever,” Dre says. “It’s a major blemish on who I am as a man. And every time it comes up, it just makes me feel fucked up.” Yet Dre’s acknowledgment of his dark cloud, 26 years after assaulting Barnes, feels like too little and far too late. He says nothing of Barnes’s migraines or career blacklisting. And he says nothing of how that same dark cloud, as it became part of his legend, helped save his career.

In an interview with The Guardian shortly after 2001’s release, Dre credits his wife, Nicole, with his return to form, claiming that she told him to ditch the over-it ethos of the Dr. Dre Presents... single “Been There, Done That” and go back to gangsta rap. Dre admitted that returning to the misogyny and violence of his earlier work—which runs throughout 2001—made him uncomfortable. “But then, I have to look at it like entertainment, and I have a set fan base, and there’s certain things they want to hear. They wanna hear Dre be Dre,” he told journalist Ekow Eshun. Dre’s craftiness was that we could have it both ways: Now professing to be a family man, he was resurrecting the violent misogyny of his past self solely as fiction, and, as a result, he could assert it shamelessly. The dark cloud wasn’t something to repent, or overcome, but rather a personality to access. Dre used the violence of his past to color his present, to create an unassailable mythology, even as he declared the album’s violent content fictitious in interviews. “Came up in the game wearin’ khakis not Kangols, stranglin’ hoes / When asked about it in most interviews I just laugh,” he boasts on 2001’s “Light Speed,” eight years after assaulting Barnes. These are tongue-in-cheek threats to those who know, smug I got away with its from a man who never had to reckon with it to begin with.

The story of Dre’s three years in the wilderness, between Dr. Dre Presents… and 2001, asks a question: When does fiction in the name of art become revisionist history in service of the artist? In 2001’s case, the album reframed Dre as a stable, all-business super producer, a legendary figure beyond reproach. It allowed for his history of abuse to fade into the past, hidden behind cop-outs claiming the violence and misogyny on the album was all for show. “Having tried unsuccessfully to divorce himself from what Dr. Dre was,” Eshun writes in The Guardian, “it seems he has chosen instead to broaden the possibilities of who Dr. Dre can be.” 2001 is the sonic equivalent of those endless possibilities. The new Dr. Dre can tell stories about pimping women out and claim to be a family man. He can stage a home invasion and, a few tracks later, mourn his brother’s murder. He can also claim “my last album was The Chronic” and elide his previous failure. 2001 is the blockbuster that returned Dre to prominence. And in the process of rehabilitating Dre’s career, it quietly revised the story of who he is.

I was 12 or 13 when I first got my hands on 2001. I don’t remember if I was shocked at the vulgarity, or confused by Dre’s cryptic references to fallen West Coast legends and old beefs. All I remember is being captivated by its sound. When I finally started to drive a few years later, the first song I put on at max volume, with the windows rolled down, was “Big Ego’s.” I nodded my head and smirked like I imagine Dre did, and my stomach dropped when the bass tumbled in. A queer Jewish teenager from Santa Monica, I was nonetheless captivated by Dre’s big-budget storytelling, transported into the shoes of 2001’s shit-talking protagonist. I knew 2001’s lyrics were shocking, misogynistic, violent, and offensive. I also knew I loved the album, and that its unsavoriness, and the disgust it provoked in countless other listeners, was one of the reasons why.

When the N.W.A biopic Straight Outta Compton came out in 2015 and left out any mention of the group’s misogyny or Dre’s abuse, I, like many people born after N.W.A and The Chronic, learned the extent of Dre’s history with women in the ensuing controversy. Even Dre, for the first time, had to (somewhat) own up to it. If the apology he issued seemed half-assed, it’s because it was; I don’t know whether Dre genuinely felt regret, but I imagine the lack of effort in actually repenting is partially due to Dre’s own confusion at having to apologize in the first place. If something is a persona, if a history is the result of an external, unremovable dark cloud, then what’s there to apologize for? It’s almost as if Dre, since 2001, has bought into his own myth so entirely that reckoning with what’s within him is now impossible; Straight Outta Compton arrived 16 years after 2001, but it recast and justified Dre’s story in exactly the same way.

The cracks in that story, though, are obvious when you listen closely to 2001. Despite the ghostwriting interventions of Jay-Z (who wrote “Still D.R.E.”), Hittman, Snoop, Eminem, and the D.O.C., Dre never really sounds comfortable in his own voice, and often sounds downright like an alien. Many of his verses feel forced, and he raps on only 13 of 2001’s 17 songs. “Another classic CD for y’all to vibe with / Whether you’re coolin’ on the corner with your fly bitch / Laid back in the shack, play this track,” he huffs on the third verse of “Still D.R.E.” with the flow of a high school guidance counselor. It’s not even clear what Dre delivering his own rhymes would sound like.

There’s one song, though, on which we get a hint. 2001’s closer, “The Message,” is the one track that is utterly, undeniably convincing from Dre’s point of view. It’s the only song not produced by Dre or Mel, instead coming courtesy of the legendary East Coast producer Lord Finesse. Featuring a hook from Mary J. Blige, it’s a heartbreaking reflection on the loss of Dre’s younger brother, Tyree, who died in a street fight while Dre was still in N.W.A. The song’s lyrics were written by rapper Royce da 5’9”, but, like any movie with perfect special effects, Dre’s delivery and message is so convincing that, even knowing he didn’t write the words himself, the song never fails to give me chills. “I’m anxious to believing real G’s don’t cry / If that’s the truth, then I’m realizing I ain’t no gangsta,” he raps. For a fleeting moment, the artifice falls apart, the weight of history slides off, and Dr. Dre becomes Andre Young.

As I’ve gotten older, 2001 has remained in my personal rap album pantheon. The beats continue to thrill me, and most of the rapping hasn’t aged. 2001 still somehow sounds like the future. But my obsession with the album’s lore has steadily faded. I interviewed Hittman when I was 20 because his disappearance post-2001 only added more to the myth of the album—and the myth of Dre himself. But when I met Hittman, I found him living happily off royalties with his family in Pasadena, California. And when I learned the reasons for his disappearance—personal tragedy, a disinterested Dre, bad business deals—the bubble popped. Hittman didn’t mysteriously disappear; he got burnt out and chose to move on. The reality was far from the myth, and much more human.

How do we choose the stories we tell about ourselves? Dre chose to bury the shame, anger, and insecurity of his deepest self within tall tales of authority, menace, and, later, questionable contrition. He got one of the greatest rap albums of all time, and a remarkable life, out of that truth bending. But there is always a cost. I asked Hittman, back in 2014, on 2001’s 15th anniversary, whether he had any regrets. He quickly told me no. “And while I may have squandered any remnants of a career, I never compromised my character in exchange for one,” he said, sitting outside at a frozen yogurt shop, watching his two young daughters play. “So I can live with that.”

I wonder if Dre can, or if he can say the same. I think of a scene in The Defiant Ones when Dre is sitting alone in his mansion, the Pacifc Ocean crashing outside, as Dee Barnes’s testimony narrates the details of his abuse. His face remains placid as his history is unspooled in front of him in what feels like a final attempt to find the person at its center. He’s the greatest producer of all time, the craftsman behind two of the best albums in history, a mogul worth $800 million and beloved by his city, and an absolute enigma. The waves thunder; the furniture casts shadows. He stares and blinks. Barnes goes on. If Dr. Dre’s having trouble living with himself, he’s learned how to hide it.

Jackson Howard is an assistant editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His writing has appeared in Pitchfork, them., The Fader, W., and elsewhere.