Dr. Dre – 2001 [Aftermath/Interscope] – 16 November 1999
The disappointment that I feel after re-listening to Dr. Dre’s 2001 is the result of the disconnect between the album’s opening line and the nearly 70 minutes that follow. 2001 appeared a full seven years after Dre’s groundbreaking solo debut The Chronic, which fails to place it in Chinese Democracy territory, but which did qualify it as “highly anticipated” nonetheless. Seven years is an eternity in the world of pop culture, and the album was a prime opportunity for the man who helped create gangsta rap to reflect upon its growing pains.
Judging by that opening line, he was tempted to do so: “Things just ain’t the same for gangstas”, he raps in that first song, “The Watcher”. In it, he assumes the point of view of a man whose beard is both greyer and longer than his alleged peers, and the wisdom of his years has made him reconsider his previous ways: “How would you feel if niggas wanted you killed?” he asks. “You’d probably move to a new house on a new hill / And choose a new spot if niggas wanted you shot / I ain’t a thug, how much Tupac in you, you got?”
However, he also makes it clear that, if threatened, he’s never too far outta Compton. He’s doubly dangerous now that he has so much to protect: “Nigga, if you really want to take it there we can / Just remember that you’re fucking with a family man”.
“The Watcher” fascinates as it juxtaposes Dre’s edge with his vulnerability. Rarely do artist, rarer still, rap artists, let their guard down, and in featuring this song at the top, 2001 promised to reinvent the game yet again, a promise that lasted all the way to the next song, the elegantly titled “Fuck You”. “I just want fuck bad bitches / All them nights I never had bad bitches / Now I’m all up in that ass bitches,” he says. And away we go….
It’s worth pausing here to remind ourselves that, though 2001 is widely considered a sequel of sorts to The Chronic, Dre’s name did appear on an album in the interim, the ill-fated Dr. Dre Presents the Aftermath (1996). This compilation featured a stable of artists from his newly launched Aftermath Records. The mushroom cloud on the album’s cover is appropriate because it symbolizes a disaster. Of the 16 tracks, only “East Coast/West Coast Killaz”, by a rap supergroup that goes by the name of “Group Therapy”, and Dre’s own “Been There, Done That” have any kind of staying power. The rest is utterly forgettable.
Dre usually gets a pass on this record, but he had a hand in producing nearly half of the songs, which is more than he produced on Eminem’s The Slim Shady LP, a record for which he receives much of the credit. In retrospect, even the video for “Been There, Done That”, in which Dre, tuxed-out, actually tangos, seems like a miscalculation.
However, the point here is not to beat up on Dre for putting out a shitty album; rather, the point is that 2001‘s immediate predecessor was a failure rather than a success, which makes it more of a comeback album than a sequel, which in turn explains a song like “Fuck You” or any of the other lyrically-undercooked tunes that permeate the record. Though he claims to be torn between the “old me” and the new, Dre spends most of his time insisting that, like Ralph Malph, he’s still got it.
When his claims take the form of good ol’ fashioned boasting, they’re amusing enough. For example, from “Forgot About Dre”: “I told ’em all / All them little gangstas / Who you think helped mold ’em all? / Now you wanna run around and talk about guns / Like I ain’t got none / What you think I sold ’em all?” However, when he falls back on the tried (tired?) and true combo of sex and drugs to prove that he’s still the undisputed champion, the results are less convincing.
Would the champ really write, “Yeah, I just took some ecstasy / Ain’t no telling what the side effects could be / All those fine bitches equal sex to me / Plus I got this bad bitch layin’ next to me / No doubt, sit back on the couch / Pants down, rubber on, set to turn that ass out / Laid the bitch out, then I put it in her mouth / Pulled out, nutted on a towel and passed out”? Unfortunately, all this does is serve as a reminder that, for all of the brilliance of side one of Efil4zaggin, side two is absolute shit.
To be fair, in addition to “The Watcher”, there are other moving moments on the album. The last song, for example, “The Message”, which is about Dre’s deceased brother, never quite reaches the level of poetry that, say, Ice Cube does in “Dead Homiez”, but it is equally affecting because its subject is more specific. Equally so are the references to Eazy-E, dead for four years by the album’s release from HIV-related complications. From “What’s the Difference”, an otherwise jaunty club song: “Eazy I’m still wit you / Fuck the beef, nigga I miss you / And that’s just being real wit you”.
This idea of “being real” is probably more responsible for my disappointment than anything else. I like those moments. I like when he’s real about getting older and losing friends and family. The problem is that when he is real, if only fleetingly so, he only accentuates the fact that the rest is posturing. Not that there’s anything wrong with playing a role, but, well, like he says, been there, done that.
I suspect that Dre would say this is less about posturing and more about giving the people what they want. The bitches and ho’s. The pop-a-cap-in-they-ass. The smoke-a-pound-of-weed-every-day. And maybe it is. But ten years after the fact, this sure feels like pandering, too. – Kirby Fields
Sonic Youth – SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century [SYR] – 16 November 1999
In an interview with Adam Begley, Don DeLillo discusses the desire to control the meaning of language and sound, and harness meaning at the end of the 20th century, when information seemed to be both coming towards us and running away.
“You want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the world your way. You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas, but there’s a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger. The best moments involve a loss of control. It’s a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and phrases fairly often, completely surprising combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere.”
Within the sonic waves of Sonic Youth’s SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century is a similar search for meaning at the end of the century. Sonic Youth creates sound as language to demonstrate the spinning of a million bits of information throughout our world. For Sonic Youth, SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century is a final nod to those 20th-century avant-garde musicians who influenced them.
Sonic Youth chooses to argue that although language permeates our daily existence, the sound of those millions of voices serves as an ominous take on the previous century, highlighting the fear of the next. The band casts a noise-rich, minimalist double album towards the last century (as well as the next), capturing the essential yowl of civilization as it prepared to take the blind leap of faith into the void of Y2K and the eventual chaos of 9/11.
Interpretations of John Cage’s “Six” and James Tenney’s “Having Never Written a Note for Percussion” drive an album short on the punk and pop mainstays, but littered with a density of ambient, introspective compositions. Sonic Youth pressed an album filled with silent pops and oddly distorted riffs, such that one could believe they were secretly involved in creating the music for a Don DeLillo novel.
It could be argued that SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century is not just a direct call for the end of the 20th century, but for the end of the post-modern existence that finally crashed around the noise and pollution of 9/11. Not your elemental Sonic Youth album by a long shot. However, an album that deserves one hypnotic listen. – Michael Elder
Unida – Coping with the Urban Coyote [Man’s Ruin] – 16 November 1999
Kyuss didn’t last long enough to reap the benefits of the stoner rock movement they helped create, but their 1995 breakup only signaled an even brighter future for ex-members. Queens of the Stone Age was one byproduct, releasing a classic 1998 debut and some worthy (though lesser) follow-ups en route to commercial success.
If the first Queens of the Stone Age album brought a melodic sensibility to stoner rock, then Unida, featuring ex-Kyuss growler John Garcia, was the broadside that put the stoner movement on notice that it had better do more than fix the smashed Camaro’s dent. Debuting on a split EP with still-extant Dozer in 1999, Unida was power: the truck-motor, near-funk rhythms of bassist Dave Dinsmore and drummer Miguel Cancino overlaid with the metal-toned, punk-styled riffing of guitarist Arthur Seay.
Of course, there was also Garcia, who had gone from cutting through sheets of desert fuzz in Kyuss and the short-lived Slo Burn (one great 1996 EP, Amusing the Amazing) like a jousting conquistador to a strong-armed Southwestern sheriff holding a chained rottweiler in Unida. Here, Garcia’s snarl stirred the drink, and it burned as it went down your throat.
The initial EP delivered the message with an ironically titled punisher called “Flower Girl” and three others, but the ensuing debut album upped the stakes even higher. As great as the EP was, Coping with the Urban Coyote had even better material, ranging from fast raging riffs like “Thorn” and “Plastic” to (pardon the expression) slow burners such as “If Only Two” and “You Wish”, where Garcia lays back and sings a little more. Coping not only set a higher standard for stoner rock, but it was also heavier than the corporate metal being peddled in 1999.
It should have been the first chapter of a long run. However, thanks to signing to a major (American Records) and an unfortunate story too long to detail here (short version: majors are run by idiots), their killer 2001 follow-up, The Great Divide, never saw legitimate release, although pirate copies have leaked onto the Internet. Almost as tragically, Man’s Ruin went belly-up in 2002, leaving Coping with the Urban Coyote to lapse out of print and become a “collector’s item” on eBay.
Unida made a compilation appearance in 2004 and was seen on a Los Angeles marquee as late as 2008, but the band has been in a holding pattern since the corporate snafu. However, like Kyuss, it’s spawned further excellence: part of the band formed House of Broken Promises, which has a single and an EP to date, while Garcia has made four solid albums with Hermano. Even so, one can only hope that ex-members’ future plans have room for more Unida. – Doug Sheppard
Beck – Midnite Vultures [Interscope] – 23 November 1999
Beck’s weird folk pastiche progressed in both scope and focus from 1993’s Golden Feelings through 1998’s introspective Mutations. However, those who suspected they could plot his career’s course were utterly thrown by Midnite Vultures, an album-long boast that covered a bizarre blend of unexpected musical styles, which would have formed a discordant disaster if not so flawlessly executed. Everything on the record works, from the banjo-tinged up-tempo funk of “Sexx Laws” to the proto-electroclash of “Get Real Paid” to the slow hip-hop bounce of “Hollywood Freaks”.
Midnite Vultures finds Beck at the height of his imagination, filtering his Dadaist lyrics through a playboy who wants to “be your chauffeur on a midnight drive”. The tongue-in-cheek absurdity would wear thin if not for the fantastic performance and production chops of everyone assembled for the recording. It took a lot of players to execute Beck’s all-or-nothing vision, and the album transcends novelty because it also functions as a successful, if smirking, exercise in blue-eyed soul.
The swanky, sweaty mood hits an apex with “Debra”, the audacity of which still astounds. Lyrically (“Lady, step inside my Hyundai”) and vocally (a commanding falsetto), it is as precious a gem as Beck has ever produced. The song’s protagonist is totally committed to seducing characters Jenny and her sister Debra, and his confidence convinces us that no pickup line is too absurd if it’s delivered smoothly enough.
Even the traditionally staid Recording Academy recognized the quality of Beck’s work at the time, nominating it for Album of the Year alongside Radiohead’s Kid A, in a particularly adventurous year for that category at the Grammy Awards. Unfortunately, Beck’s recent releases lack both the songwriting inspiration and wiseacre humor that give Midnite Vultures lasting power. While it would almost certainly be a mistake for him to try to recreate the album’s specific atmosphere, listeners would likely welcome a return to the unbridled joy of expression he conjured so effectively then. – Thomas Britt
Q-Tip – Amplified [Arista] – 23 November 1999
In 1999, hip-hop was at a significant stage in its life cycle. There were definitely big-time moguls of the art form. Although the Roots and Mos Def led a quality underground, the majority of hip-hop at the end of the 20th century suggested that the art form was slowly degenerating into needless posturing and over-hyped artistry.
By the end of 1999, the quality of hip-hop had distilled itself to an orgy of poor lyricism. It failed to promote those intending to tell us about their brilliance, instead of actually showing it in a full release. Dr. Dre’s 2001 was the ruler of 1999, and his production for Eminem’s Slim Shady LP outlined the most popular radio hip-hop. Although there’s quality there, an out-of-control hype machine sustained each.
Q-Tip is as good a symbol to understand the strangeness of 1999 hip-hop as any. Q-Tip’s former band, A Tribe Called Quest, was an essential act with each release. Fresh lyricism and Q-Tip’s saxophone call reminded me how vital hip-hop could be in re-creating the world of early 1960s jazz like Davis, Coltrane, and Coleman; an art filled with freshness and experimentation. When A Tribe Called Quest disbanded, many hip-hop fans mourned the loss of one of the most influential bands in the early development of hip-hop. The immense pressure to create a seminal solo album greeted Q-Tip’s first album sans Tribe, and thus we get Amplified.
If any album underscored the concern for where hip-hop was headed, Amplified stood as reason number one. A brilliant poet and rapper, Q-Tip was known for developing rhymes and beats that demonstrated insight into modern life while creating engaging loops. Amplified became the same syrup of most popular rap in 1999: booty, simple beats, and more booty. Reused tropes of the past four years of hip-hop demonstrated a decline for a once-proud and creative music source. Plus: Korn. Yep. Korn and the ever-present rapper of the 1990s, Busta Rhymes. Amplified became a sad and poor first effort from one of hip-hop’s most extraordinary talents.
The question was asked: How can one man have so much to say before, and so little to say now? Did Q-Tip just sell out? Was Q-Tip not as brilliant as we were led to believe? The answer was a cautious “maybe”. However, the story has a happy ending. The release of 2008’s Renaissance brought Q-Tip away from ordinary hip-hop motifs to recreate and reinvent the hip-hop album again. – Michael Elder
Aimee Mann – Magnolia [Reprise] – 7 December 1999
After a decade of record-label neglect and scant output, Aimee Mann, the onetime blonde-braided lead singer of ‘Til Tuesday, was ready to blossom as the new millennium dawned in 1999. The MP3 era would suit Mann well, too, as she was one of the first musicians to successfully use the Internet to independently release her music her way, labels and record stores be damned.
Mann’s full flowering began with the 1999 release of the soundtrack to Magnolia, which provided listeners and critics alike with a reminder of what they had been missing since Mann split from her Boston-based bandmates in 1989. Many of Mann’s nine songs on the soundtrack (which also features two by Supertramp, one by 1990s one-hit wonder Gabrielle, and a snippet of producer Jon Brion’s soundtrack) actually predate the writing of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar-nominated script for the film. According to the wunderkind director and longtime friend of Mann’s, the songs were a significant influence on his sprawling, Altman-like Los Angeles story, which culminates, famously, in a hail of raining frogs.
The vibe on many of Mann’s tracks is definitely a California one, starting with her spot-on cover of Los Angeles legend Harry Nilsson’s haunting classic, “One”, a smash hit for Three Dog Night in 1969. Like the film, Mann’s take is a perfect slice of gloomy/sunny SoCal pop (a la Grizzly Bear) with overt nods to (who else?) Brian Wilson and Phil Spector.
The ornate production and power pop of the Beatles are also touchstones here. Still, it’s Mann’s caustic/clever lyrics (“You look like the perfect fit / For a girl in need of a tourniquet”), coupled with her angelic-yet-vulnerable voice, that really steal the show, especially when couched in producer Brion’s lush arrangements, at times complete with horns and strings. However, while Mann’s softer, folkier side provides some of the album’s most arresting moments — “Build That Wall” and “Save Me”, in particular — the power ballads “Deathly” and “Driving Sideways” prove Mann still knows how to rock.
Magnolia is that rare soundtrack album that actually influenced a movie before it was even written. It’s also that rare soundtrack that doubles as a comeback record, and a clear signal that Aimee Mann’s voice was still carrying many years after she first burst onto the scene. – Mike Garrett
The Notorious B.I.G. – Born Again [Bad Boy] – 7 December 1999
Diddy’s pilfering of his star pupil’s catalog began with the posthumous release of the Notorious B.I.G.’s Born Again. Despite wanting to shake your head at the exploitation factor, this album remains an essential purchase for a couple of reasons. One, it mainly consists of early Biggie rhymes that had been unearthed. Never mind the fact that then-current rappers have been added to the songs, “Dead Wrong” (featuring a then brand-spankin’ new Eminem) and the good-natured “Can I Get Witcha” (featuring protégé Lil Cease) are worthy additions to every B.I.G. catalog.
Two, several underground B.I.G. classics that had never seen the light of day on an album release are here, most notably the Sadat X duet “Come on Motherfucker” (which teams one of hip-hop history’s best rhymers with one of its most underrated) and the classic B-side “Who Shot Ya?” (which is even more chilling in light of B.I.G.’s tragic murder).
Even though a chunk of the LP features unnecessary revisions of previously released material with new musical backing and an all-star collection of guest emcees (Method Man, Nas, and Snoop Dogg are among the luminaries making appearances), Born Again is by far the best of Biggie’s post-mortem catalog, and probably the only posthumous hip-hop album worth owning. – Mike Heyliger
Jay-Z – Vol. 3… Life and Times of S. Carter [Roc-a-Fella] – 28 December 1999
Jay-Z is hip-hop’s unlikely hero. Coming at a dire time in the history of the genre, following the dual deaths of its reigning heroes, he broke into the musical landscape like a man on a mission. After barely making a dent with his first two albums, the single “Hard Knock Life” burst onto the scene, one foot in the street and one in the charts, the best of both worlds. That album pretty much cemented Jay’s status as a force to be reckoned with, as well as ensuring a hefty amount of pressure to follow up with something even more genre-defining.
Vol. 3… Life and Times of S. Carter, billed initially as his return to street music after some of the blatantly commercial tracks that littered his previous album, ended up being known as, somewhat, completely the opposite. “Big Pimpin'” is the track that everybody remembers, a bold summer jam that can still be heard at block parties, but it’s the obscure, downright experimental tracks that stand out when listening to it now. Minimalist tracks such as “Do It Again (Put Your Hands Up)” and “It’s Hot (Some Like It Hot)” simmer with fragile intensity, while “Snoopy Track”, featuring hot MC of the moment Juvenile, practically emits smoke from its backing track. – Craig Hubert
Most Memorable 1999 Albums
This article was initially published in June 2009.