(Dre and a couple of other Death Row artists will eventually appear in this column.)īy 1995, a few rap songs had managed to top the Hot 100, but all of those conquering hits were novelty songs in one way or another.
For a long while, Dre and his Death Row labelmates couldn’t make it all the way to #1. (It’s a 10.) But Dre made unreconstructed street music, and it didn’t get the kind of radio airplay that its sheer popularity warranted at the time. “ Nuthin’ But A ‘G’ Thang,” the lead single from The Chronic, got as high as #2 on the Hot 100. Dre and his Death Row comrades did nothing to water down their music, and the sheer magnetism of their sound made them pop-chart fixtures. Dre, another former member, released The Chronic, an irresistible widescreen blockbuster that effectively turned reality rap into pop music. At the end of 1992, shortly after N.W.A splintered, Dr. That panic got louder after Ice Cube left N.W.A and positioned himself as a cold-blooded rap revolutionary. The moral panics probably started with N.W.A, who found nationwide cult fame by rapping bluntly and forcefully about drugs and sex and violence and hating cops. With “gangsta rap,” the Newsweek editorials practically wrote themselves. N.W.A, like Schoolly D and Ice-T before them, rapped about doing gangster shit one of their first singles was 1988’s “Gangsta Gangsta.” N.W.A and their contemporaries never used “gangsta” as a genre name they preferred to talk about what they did as “reality rap.” But you couldn’t start a moral panic by talking about reality rap. The term “gangster rap” dates back to 1989, when Robert Hillburn used it in an LA Weekly cover story on N.W.A. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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