Announcing My Next Book
It's like this and like that
I’m happy to announce my next book: Dr. Dre’s The Chronic. The forthcoming book is part of Bloomsbury’s much-loved 33 1/3 series of books, each devoted to a single music album. My book will focus on Dr. Dre’s groundbreaking 1992 album, his first solo album after leaving N.W.A. and Ruthless Records. I don’t have a publication date for the book yet, but I’ll share that when I do. My book was announced along with the other forthcoming books announced for the series. You can peruse the entire 33 1/3 catalog on the Bloomsbury website. And the series is available on Amazon.
The album
“The first time I encountered The Chronic, I was high, I’m sure of it.” That was the first line of my book proposal. Earlier this year, I learned that Bloomsbury had an open call for proposals for books for the 33 1/3 series. The Chronic was the first album that popped into my mind. I’d first heard “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” on the radio. It didn’t sound like anything else. In the early Nineties, I was living in the Bay Area, in Northern California, where I grew up. The album was a product of Los Angeles County, in South California. This was a new West Coast hip hop sound.
The book
Here’s another excerpt from my book proposal, about the album’s complex production:
According to Dr. Dre, The Chronic was “the toughest record that I recorded in my career.” Produced in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, the twenty-seven-year-old rapper and producer’s debut solo album would go on to sell nearly six million copies and introduce the world to the Parliament-Funkadelic-inspired “G-funk” sound, but its recording was marred with problems. During the production, Dre was shot in the legs, his house burned down, and a twenty-year-old rapper he intended to feature on the record, then performing under the moniker Snoop Doggy Dogg, was incarcerated and had to record his vocals for the first demo track for “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” on a prepaid call made from jail.
Last year, Dr. Dre recounted recording Snoop from jail on Jimmy Kimmel Live!
The contenders
I knew from the start I wanted to write about The Chronic, but before I wrote the book proposal that I submitted to Bloomsbury, I considered a few other albums. One was Free to Be… You and Me, the 1972 compilation of songs and stories created by Marlo Thomas and the Ms. Foundation for Women, which I loved as a kid. Another was Prince’s Purple Rain, which blew my teenage mind when it was released in 1984. Yet another was John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, because my father was in the early stages of working on a Coltrane biography when he died in 1996, at 60.
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