Where early rap was built on breaks-records excerpted and looped by a DJ in real time-Dre’s production on N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton (alongside other mid- and late-’80s work by Eric B., Rick Rubin, The Bomb Squad, and others) brought about the era of the sampler, leading to tracks that were denser, harder, and more reference-heavy. Not only did Dre (born Andre Young in Compton in 1965) help legitimize hip-hop in the cultural imagination, he changed the vocabulary of the music itself. But when it came to the kind of institutional respect that something like a Grammy confers, rap was still considered an insurrectionary fad: exciting, controversial, and above all the kind of thing that mainstream America seemed to hope would go away. 1 album on the Billboard charts (1991’s Efil4zaggin). Not that rap wasn’t popular: A few years earlier, N.W.A.-of which Dre was a key part-had been the first hardcore rap group to have a No. Dre got his first Grammy in 1994 (Best Rap Solo Performance, “Let Me Ride”), the idea of mainstream audiences taking rap seriously was still pretty new.
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