They say good things come to those who wait.
Well, hip-hop has been very patient for the past 12 years, while producer extraordinaire Dr. Dre has worked on Detox, the extremely anticipated follow-up to his monumental, six-million-selling 1999 album, 2001, and his first solo classic, 1992’s The Chronic.
First announced in 2002, and teasingly rumored to have been finished and scheduled many times over the years, Detox has turned into the rap equivalent of Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy: delayed so much that it’s taken on a mythical quality. Many have doubted it will ever actually become real.
All along, though, Dre has stayed busy. The legendary member of N.W.A and founder of Death Row Records has spent the past decade cultivating the talent he has long surrounded himself with (think Snoop Dogg, Eminem, 50 Cent, Game) and crafting the occasional freelance beat for some of music’s other biggest stars (think Mary J. Blige, Gwen Stefani, Jay-Z). In 2008, he partnered with Interscope boss Jimmy Iovine to create Beats by Dre, a line of high-end, high-fidelity headphones that has since become a major success.
But it’s time for The Good Doctor—who is now 45 years old—to return. Not just to the studio, but to the vocal booth and the mic, maybe for the last time ever. For the past two and a half months, Dre has been holed up at a studio in Ferndale, Michigan, outside of Detroit, recording the final parts of Detox. On a recent November night, XXL paid him a visit there, and he sat down for an exclusive interview about his artistic process, getting old in hip-hop, the state of the game today and what it’s like to have so many people always asking, “When is it coming?”
Visit XXLMag.com to read the full story! Cop the Dec/Jan issue of XXL to read the rest of the Dr. Dre cover story!
