Nothin' comes out when they move their lips - just a bunch of gibberish

Continuing my trip back through the 2001 album charts.

11/02/01 : 2001 - Dr Dre


I'm certainly not a Dre fan, but I do like "Forgot About Dre" so I'm not going to hate it all - I'm expecting 68 minutes to be too much though. 

Ah - I might not have forgotten about Dre, but I had forgotten about "Still Dre" and I liked that one as well, and a couple of others in an "am I still relevant?" vein. What I didn't like, and they're very much in the majority, are the "slightly" misogynistic tracks - god, do they get tiresome. So much so that I was actually amazed that he allowed a couple of women a chance to answer back along the lines of "you do realise you're all dicks, right?" which was a breath of fresh air. The whole album gets a bit too much, but I have to admit he has a good line in guest artists (Eminem and Snoop Dogg stand out for me) and the production is crisp. 

We're at #9 in the charts this week on his 60th week of a frankly incredible 83 week run, with it having peaked at #4 in its 21st week. This was its second run out of fourteen, with it first charting in November '00 before taking Xmas off (it's not the most festive of albums) - it's spent 112 weeks in the chart in total and was last seen in '22. The top five this week were Dido, Anastacia (about to start three weeks at #2, kept off the top by Dido for all of them), Limp Bizkit, a Texas best-of and Toploader, with the highest new entry being Spooks (#29) - they were a US hip-hop group with this being the only time they bothered the album chart. 

Wikipedia has quite a bit of text (248 milliPeppers) and it tells us this is his second solo album and it has eighteen guest artists including Snoop Dogg, Kurupt, Xzibit, Eminem, Mary J Blige and Nate Dogg (I'm obviously an expert on them all). It has awful lot of text about how it was going to be called The Chronic II - it probably won't surprise you to hear that, in the end, it wasn't. In other unsurprising news, "the lyrics on the album received criticism and created some controversy" - they're digging deep here, aren't they? Critically, the lyrics seemed to be the only area people objected to with the production and the beats coming in for particular praise. Commercially, it did best on the other side of the Atlantic getting to #3 in Canada and #2 in the US, selling nearly eight million copies in the US - I was surprised to read it sold over 1.5 million copies here though. 

discogs.com tells us this is a £2.50 album but if you want the '25 limited, special edition with clear and green split vinyl (whatever that looks like) it's going to set you back £200. I was also somewhat surprised to see there's an instrumental version available - who on earth is buying that? There is plenty to admire here but overall, it's not an album I can wholeheartedly recommend. 

04/02/01 - Could have been far worse
18/02/01 - Not for me

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