Sometimes I’m reminded of things (that were retroactively erased from my memory) by consequence of the dreaded Wikipedia Hole. Like a Youtube Hole, one link leads to another and so on until you realize hours have flown by and your initial query was for Boy Meets World. And so I landed at this Dr. Dre video, obviously.
When we think of Dr. Dre, it’s normally within in two specific contexts–The Chronic/Death Row era and the resurgence with Eminem, 50 Cent and his own 2001, but we often overlook what happened in between. Dr. Dre Presents The Aftermath was an oddity not unlike Blood On The Dancefloor in its ill-timed release and sound that unsuccessfully rode nostalgia and a stab at relevance. It’s never regarded as part of the official cannon (not to mention his work on The Firm album). It yielded two singles, though, the Group Therapy track that proposed to rather obnoxiously absorb or undo the East/West beef back then and “Been There Done That”, where Dre “grows up” and brands the gangsta pose passé with a carefully choreographed tango number. Here’s why it didn’t work.
Had a really dope breakfast conversation today about writing, music and… well, writing and music, at the Starbucks at Howard with a loud derelict chortling in the background at a book he was reading. It was extremely fucking loud, and we were afraid he was dying because it was a hacking cough that sounded like he was being strangled from the inside. This detail isn’t important to this post at all but I wanted to include it.
We’ve arrived at that time of the year where I review the latest offering from my beloved Mary J. Blige. It has become a bi-annual tradition, since her fourth quarter, every-other-year- release can be counted on like clockwork. With that in mind let’s review the way her last three albums have been setup by Blige via press.