Coming straight out with Detox
by Riad Kadri
The Reflector
Dr. Dre
Many will fondly remember when Dr. Dre was dropping the hottest albums with the freshest beats, but that was almost twelve years ago. Since then, a new production, Detox, has been in the making and has earned somewhat of a mythical status amongst fans and the music community. If we examine some of the events, which have taken place throughout the past nine years, we can see that, this time, Detox just might drop.
After Dre’s 1999 release of 2001, rumours of a new album being put into production began buzzing through radio stations, MTV and the hip-hop world. Finally in 2002, Dre told MTV’s Corey Moss in an interview that Detox would be no place for the same old same old.
“I’m not talking about low riders and blunts and all that anymore, I mean, that’s played. As a matter of fact, I’m tired of hearing other people talk about it, to tell you the truth,” he said.
And this is true; people can only listen to songs about the same thing for so long. It seems as if songs about getting stoned were just a fad, now obviously the latest craze is, well… going to clubs and brushing your teeth with a bottle of Jack. This time Dre’s album is a story told through the eyes of a hit man, and all the artists featured in it are characters throughout the hit man’s life. The album had been set to be released in the summer of 2003, but when the time came he couldn’t deliver.
Moving forward to August 2004, MTV News reported that Dr. Dre was focusing more on his signed artists’ albums and spending countless hours in the studio. In an exclusive interview for MTV News, The Game told Shaheem Reid that Dre had put Detox aside to work on not only his album — but also the records of Busta Rhymes, 50 Cent, Eminem and Eve. After those albums were almost finished, November rolled around and the doctor got his second wind Dre announced that the album would be set to release sometime in the fall of 2005 — once again nothing happened.
Not a whole lot of information was being released about the album after 2005; until finally in 2007, rumours of the infamous Detox being released sometime the next year began to circulate. Rumour had it that the album was ready for release, though at the same time others were reporting that Dre was once again setting his masterpiece aside to focus on Eminem’s Relapse.
Snoop Dogg told reporters: “That record is real, it’s coming. You know me, I was starting to doubt it myself and then I went up in there and he played so much music for me it knocked my head off.”
By that time, over 80 songs had been recorded, but it looked as if the “D-O-Double G” was wrong when production of the album was stalled yet again.
Returning to present day, we have recently seen two hit singles from the album released on iTunes, “Kush” and “I Need a Doctor,” and his performance with Eminem at the Grammy Awards. Finally the album is rumored to be released in April with a “4/20” release date buzzing around after a video clip was linked to a Twitter response. The response was to producer Just Blaze’s shout out to another artist’s album being released. In the video Dre tells the camera, “4/20, baby,” and “4/20, I’m coming.” These pronouncments proved to be just more hype because the doctor recently announced in an unrelated interview on ESPN that the release date of the mythical album is April 1.
Looking back on the past nine years we can see that Dr. Dre doesn’t really hold a fantastic track-record for releasing his supposed final masterpiece, the release of the two singles do seem pretty promising. In the famous words of Flavor Flav, “Don’t believe the hype.” It’s best we not get our hopes up too high for a definitive release date of the most anticipated hip-hop album of the last decade.
