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Jon Pareles of The New York Times described the production, writing "The bottom register is swampy synthesizer bass lines that openly emulate Parliament-Funkadelic the upper end is often a lone keyboard line, whistling or blipping incessantly. It's the benchmark you measure your album against if you're serious." Dre was listed at number 56, Kanye West wrote on the album's production quality: " The Chronic is still the hip-hop equivalent to Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life. In Rolling Stone's The Immortals – The Greatest Artists of All Time, where Dr. Dre only utilized one or few samples per song. Dre's efforts, "Here, Dre established his patented G-funk sound: fat, blunted Parliament-Funkadelic beats, soulful backing vocals, and live instruments in the rolling basslines and whiny synths" and that "For the next four years, it was virtually impossible to hear mainstream hip-hop that wasn't affected in some way by Dre and his patented G-funk." Unlike other hip hop acts (such as The Bomb Squad) that sampled heavily, Dr.
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The production on The Chronic was seen as innovative and ground-breaking, and received universal acclaim from critics. In 2020, the album was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The Chronic has been widely regarded as one of the most important and influential albums of the 1990s and one of the most well-produced hip hop albums of all time. Dre's production has been noted for popularizing the G-funk subgenre within gangsta rap. " Nuthin' but a ‘G’ Thang" peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and at number one on both the Hot Rap Singles and Hot R&B Singles charts. The album's three singles became top ten Billboard singles. The Chronic spent eight months in the Billboard Top 10. Dre becoming one of the top ten best-selling American performing artists of 1993. The Chronic peaked at number three on the Billboard 200 and has been certified 3x Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America ( RIAA) with sales of 3 million copies in the United States, which led to Dr. Although a solo album, it features many appearances by then-emerging American rapper Snoop Dogg, who used the album as a launch pad for his own solo career. On The Chronic, he included both subtle and direct insults at Ruthless and its owner, former N.W.A member Eazy-E.
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Dre's first solo album after he had departed from hip hop group N.W.A and its label Ruthless Records over a financial dispute. The album is named after a slang term for high-grade cannabis, and its cover is an homage to Zig-Zag rolling papers. Recording sessions for the album took place in June 1992 at Death Row Studios in Los Angeles and at Bernie Grundman Mastering in Hollywood. It was released on December 15, 1992, by his own record label Death Row Records and distributed by Interscope Records. The Chronic is the debut studio album by American hip hop producer and rapper Dr.
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