Songoftheday 11/13/18 - Mista Busta where the fuck you at? Can't scrap a lick so I know ya got your gat...
from the album The Chronic (1992)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #8 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 14
Today's song of the day comes from rapper and producer Dr. Dre, who had struck out on his own after his stint in one of the most influential hip-hop acts of all time, N.W.A., in the early 1990s. In the spring of 1993, Dre landed at the runner-up spot on the American pop chart with "Nuthin' But A 'G' Thang". For his next single, Dre retitled his Chronic track "Fuck wit Dre Day (And Everybody's Celebratin')" to just "Dre Day" to make it more palatable to mainstream radio to play the very edited version that basically was a diss track to all his enemies at the time. Luke Campbell, Tim Dog, and former N.W.A. bandmates Eazy-E and Ice Cube get roasted in the verses, all over a mix of five different George Clinton samples from Parliament, Funkadelic, and his own "Atomic Dog". Snoop Dogg is back again on the track and in the video, a comic look at the very real problem of the exploitation of hip-hop talent by the "management" culture. Beware, this is 1992, so misogynistic, racist, and homophobic taunts linger, so way NSFW...
"Dre Day" became Dr. Dre's second top-10 pop hit in July of 1993. The track also climbed to #6 on Billboard's R&B chart, while the remixes of the record helped it up to #29 on their Dance Club Play list. Internationally, the single was a minor hit in New Zealand (#49) and the UK (#59).
As a postscript, it's a worrying time on the music industry's ability to work around a "streaming economy" when this album still isn't available on Amazon, though it does appear on iTunes.
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And here's Dre and Snoop performing the song as well as "Nuthin' But A G Thang" live on Rosie Perez's hip-hop special Society Ride...
Up tomorrow: Pure white Canadian rapper is injured.
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