#128, "Forgot About Dre," Dr. Dre (feat. Eminem) (1999)

150 Favorite Songs: #128, "Forgot About Dre," Dr. Dre (feat. Eminem) (1999)

I love Dre's 2001, because—especially when it first came out—it was rare that a rapper would sound so paranoid and defensive. Especially Dre, whose whole persona has always basically been exactly as it is in this Dr. Pepper commercial, the good-times cool uncle who makes every party even party-er. Need weed, or a big TV, or somebody to flip the ribs on the grill? Worry not, Dre is here! You can trust him; he’s a doctor.

But on 2001, and some of the songs that came out around the same time (like “Hello,” an NWA mini-reunion on Ice Cube’s War and Peace Vol. 2), he's just so concerned with his legacy. "Who you think taught you to smoke trees /who you think brought you the OG's / Eazy-Es, Ice Cubes and DOCs / Snoop D-O-double-Gs / and a group that said motherfuck the police," Dre asks, and you can't deny that he did all of those things, nor the impact that they had. "Fuck Tha Police" still sounds vaguely radical, and that song is old enough to wake up with back pain now. But I think my favorite part of "Forgot About Dre"—besides that minimal keyboard line, the sort of thing that Dre does so perfectly, taking six single notes and turning them into something unforgettable—is the way that it thematically connects Dre's legacy from the first part of his career to what he already knew, even in 1999, would be the defining part of the second act: introducing Eminem to the world.

Eminem's verse here is pretty great, whiny in that way his voice was whiny early on, before he started rapping solely through his nose. "So what do you say to somebody you hate / or anyone who tries to throw trouble your way? / wanna resolve things in a bloodier way? / just study a tape of NWA," he raps, rhyming four consecutive lines with “NWA” in a five-second span, and essentially using his verse to glorify Dre's greatness.

In the final verse, Dre's last few lines sound kinda weird coming out of his mouth, because the rhythm is the sort of spry wordplay he rarely used in his career; Dre is mostly an AA/BB rhyme scheme sort of rapper, but when he drops “it’s like a jungle in this habitat / but all you savage cats / knew that I was strapped with gats / when you were cuddling with cabbage patch,” it makes sense when you realize that his verses were ghost-written by Eminem. And Eminem, of course, delivers lines like that in his sleep. But what I think is so interesting about "Forgot About Dre" in that context is that it's kind of a love song to Dre from Eminem. All of the defensiveness Dre shows in the first verse, championing his legacy—Eminem wrote that for him. When Dre says, "Fuck y'all / all y'all / if y'all don't like me / blow me," it's really Eminem standing up for his mentor. And that’s fascinating, especially since at this point in his career, Eminem's legacy was hardly certain—he had one hit single and one hot album, but he sure looked more like a novelty act than someone whose career would define twenty-first century pop music—so of course he knows, during this song, that he owes everything to Dre. It's interesting to hear that laid out back almost twenty-five years ago* with the distance we have now.

*Quick 2001 fun fact: Despite being called 2001, this album came out in November 1999. Dre had been promising to release a follow-up to The Chronic, which came out in 1992, for many years, and he referred to it as The Chronic 2000. He was in the thick of a feud with Suge Knight and Death Row Records at the time, though, and Suge released a compilation album called the same thing a few months earlier as a fuck-you to Dre. (The album also included an appearance by Milkbone, a white rapper who preceded Eminem by a couple years, whose track was a pretty goofy little Eminem diss.) Dre retitled his album The Chronic 2001—one better than Suge’s, take that!—and then it shipped with just the number 2001 on the cover.