How Dr. Dre discovered Eminem

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/07/12/how-dr-dre-discovered-eminem.html

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Anyone know whatever happened to the History of Hip Hop comic strip that used to feature regularly on Boing Boing?

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Well, the author published at least two volumes of it, because I have them in my house. Check that - there are four volumes on Amazon. I guess it is still ongoing.

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I’ve heard the joke that they met by chance somewhere and Eminem shouted
"Ey, willst du mich produzieren du Opfer!?!"

Eminem was appearing on lots of guest spots in '97 and '98 before the Dre-produced stuff came out, High & Mighty’s album (where I first heard him), the Bad Meets Evil project with Royce, etc.

FYI, loop appears at about the two minute mark, great soul album in it’s entirety though:

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I asked about this back in 2016.

None of the PTB ever clarified the status of it.

And now I’m sad again because I miss it so much, so thanks a lot. :frowning_face:

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Mrs Ficus and I watched The Defiant Ones over the weekend. It was pretty fascinating. As an amateur hip hop historian, I didn’t learn a lot of new stuff about Dre but the background on Iovine was pretty eye opening.

Dre himself leads a pretty private personal life and Albert Hugues got some pretty unprecedented access to him which was also very interesting.

I was happy to see that the Dee Barnes incident was not glossed over or ignored.

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Thank you, I couldn’t remember the name of the series. Armed with this and the information from @cubby’s comment, I might be able to pick up the tale.

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He announced that he’d sold the animated rights to it in 2015, so hopefully there’s still something in the pipeline on that end.

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Thanks for the video clip, loved this song :slight_smile:

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The Slim Shady LP was the first time I heard something in advance because it leaked to the internet. Something like 6 months before the release, my buddy who went to school up north excitedly told me about him over the phone. The scene up there was already buzzing over the leak. I didn’t have a computer yet, but that Thanksgiving when he came home, he broke me off a tape. It was still a month or two until the release date.

It turns out that I already had seen him on home video of the Scribble Jam battles that my graf-head friends shot, but the video was so blurry, I didn’t realize it was the same guy until later. He lost that battle, though. I don’t think he even made it to the final round. He seemed really off his game, like tired but presumably he was also super fucked-up, knowing him.

After seeing this post and video, I now know this is wrong, but the way I heard it was that Dre first heard Em battling on LA’s Wake Up Show with Sway and Tech. Em did battle someone on that show (maybe it was Juice?) because I used to have a tape of that, too, but I guess he was just doing that on the side while he was out there. He officially lost that battle, but not to me; his freestyles were soooooo ill.

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No joke. The kind of insane and twisted shit he could come up with on the fly was just incredible. I remember the first time I heard him say, “I’ve got blond hair, I’m higher than Con Air, I’ll buttfuck Goldie Hawn bare, in a lawn chair” I damn near lost my shit.

Whether or not you like his music, it’s hard to deny he has incredible talent for words and rhyme and the fact he can come up with so much clever shit on the spot is incredibly difficult.

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Yeah, there was definitely a buzz, there were a lot of songs that he guested on that were recorded all around the same time, before he officially blew up. I think it was in '98 when I heard an advance of some album he had a guest verse on (probably that High & Mighty “Home Field Advantage” album, the distro I worked for had the advance months before it came out), and thinking “man, this dude can make almost anything sound like it rhymes.”

The DJ Spinna “3hree6ix5ive” track came out around the same time.

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I heard these, but not until after the Slim Shady LP. There was not much of a rap scene in Knoxville then. Or any, really. That tape I brought back made me the first person to play him for all the other heads there.

The 365 joint is curious, because I was rapping along to parts of it, so I know I know that vocal, but I mostly think of it as one of the instrumentals included in my DJ hero DJ Krush’s mixtape Code 4109

(cued to the 365 beat)

anyhow, what distro did you work? I probably received something from y’all either in college radio or at the store I managed

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