

Dre’s rap skills were never as impressive as his production, but he played to his strengths by giving game-changing proteges the majority of time on the mike, first introducing the world to Snoop Dogg’s laid-back charisma and then to Eminem’s staggering technical abilities. His production informed the dominant trends for several decades of rap, updating the noisy clamor of Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad-produced tracks by bringing in funky rhythms for his breakthrough work with his group N.W.A., single-handedly inventing G-Funk in the ‘90s by reworking George Clinton’s spaced-out party funk into something aggressive yet still commercially viable, and then abandoning the style when it became too ubiquitous by the early 2000s. Dre’s impact on rap, hip-hop, and pop music in general is nothing short of revolutionary.
