With the new studio, new freedom, and new botanical muse, Dre began crafting a sound that would redefine rap, both for his coast and the genre at large. It started with the spirit of George Clinton: “At the same time [Dre and I] were like, ‘We need to do some P-Funk–sounding shit,’” Dre’s Chronic cowriter, multi-instrumentalist Colin Wolfe, told Wax Poetics in 2014. “We wanted to make a real Parliament-Funkadelic album.” The influence is apparent on “Let Me Ride,” which samples “Swing Down, Sweet Chariot” on its hook, and especially on “The Roach,” a Mothership homage bordering on parody updated for 1992 Los Angeles. But Parliament had been sampled plenty of times before—the flower children in De La Soul scored their biggest hit with a flip of “(Not Just) Knee Deep” three years earlier, and Dre himself had mined George Clinton records for N.W.A’s albums.
What changed in The Chronic sessions was Dre’s approach. Hip-hop music at the time was largely beholden to production techniques created by its East Coast practitioners: jazzy samples from dusty records that sounded analog even as they were pumped through digital mixers. While Dre later said The Chronic was inspired in part by A Tribe Called Quest’s 1991 classic The Low End Theory, he would largely forgo direct sampling on his solo debut, instead asking musicians to replay melodies and bass lines. This came at a time when live instrumentation in hip-hop was seen as a gimmick at best and a faux pas at worst. But the undeniably thumping grooves gave the naysayers little ammo; “Nuthin but a ‘G’ Thang” doesn’t get its full-bodied sound by Dre simply running a Leon Hayward record through an S900.
Crucially, Dre added one signature element to many of the tracks: a high-pitched Moog synth line, à la the Ohio Players’ “Funky Worm.” Dre had previously attempted something similar on songs like N.W.A’s “Alwayz Into Somethin’,” and while Cold 187um—the producer from Ruthless Records group Above the Law—has repeatedly said he invented the sound, it took on addictive properties on The Chronic. Beats like the one on “Deeez Nuuuts” were meticulous blends of melody, bass, and pounding drums; they could blow out subwoofers while also worming themselves into a listener’s ears. Others sounded as suspenseful as any horror movie score, but the underlying groove drew the audience in. It’s not that the music on The Chronic was pop—it was undeniable.
The sound also had a name—G-funk—and suddenly, the man who desperately needed 1992 to break his way professionally had an aesthetic that would become the platonic ideal of West Coast rap for the rest of the decade.
