Dr. Dre has chosen to speak up about the type of music N.W.A. made in the late ’80s and ’90s, explaining that he wasn’t responsible for labeling it as gangsta rap.
The legendary producer recently sat down with Kevin Hart for his Hart to Heart series on Peacock, where he shared what type of music he felt the iconic West Coast group made as opposed to what everyone else associates the group with.
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“By the way, I never liked it being called that, ‘gangsta rap,'” Dr. Dre admitted. “That’s never what we went in to do. We were just making hardcore Hip Hop. That’s all it is. I don’t know why it got that title, or who gave it that title. I don’t know who the fuck that was but, it wasn’t us.”
After Kevin Hart asked if N.W.A. was concerned with correcting the actual term for the type of music they created, Dr. Dre simply said: “We let it go.”
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“We just embraced it and let it go, but that’s not what we decided to do,” he continued. “That’s not what we called. We [were] just doing Hip Hop. Hardcore Hip Hop.”
Check out Dre’s interview with Kevin Hart below:
Despite Dr. Dre’s comments, many people in the comments section were quick to recite old lyrics of his where he himself called his music, “gangsta rap.”
“Just another muthafuckin’ day for Dre, so I’ll begin like this/ No medallions, dreadlocks or Black fists/ It’s just that gangsta glare with gangsta raps/ That gangsta shit makes a gangs of snaps, uh,” the Aftermath Entertainment head honcho raps on 1992’s “Let Me Ride.”
“I started this gangsta shit/ And this the muthafuckin’ thanks I get?,” Dr. Dre spits on the chorus of Ice Cube’s hard-hitting 2000 track, “Hello,” featuring himself and MC Ren.
Elsewhere in the Hart to Heart interview, Dre said The Chronic wasn’t even his idea and that he had to be “talked into” making the record.
“The difference, there was money and business got involved, and it separated the friendship,” he said. “I had to separate myself from [Eazy-E] because he decided to take a different route. [Ice] Cube had already left, so I’m out here on my own. I have absolutely no idea what the fuck I’m gonna do. I just know I have this talent.”
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Dre went on to say that his close friend and collaborator, The D.O.C., told him that he needed to just get in the studio and start creating, convincing him to start crafting his debut album as a solo artist.
“A close friend of mine, we’ll call him D.O.C., talked me into doing the Chronic album,” he continued. “It wasn’t my decision, I was talked into doing that. I just went in there and went for it because I felt, at that time, it was a life or death situation.”
