Dear Dr. Dre: Forget ‘Detox.’ Focus on ‘The Planets.’ Please. Saturn needs a score.
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At this point, there’s no way Dr. Dre’s long-awaited “Detox” can live up to our expectations. It’s been almost a decade that the famed L.A. producer has been talking about the album, the follow-up to his 1999 album “2001,” and by now it’s just better served to go down as a hip-hop myth.
Look, right now some Best Buy employees are playing laser tag amid forts built out of unsold “Chinese Democracy” albums -- or at least they should be. “Detox” needs to avoid this fate, and there’s only one way that can happen: If it forever stays on Dre’s custom-branded fancy laptops. Think, how awesome would the much-hyped Guns ‘N Roses album had been if it had just lived in our dreams? Super awesome. The greatest album no one ever heard.
So it’s time to move on. Time to make like Janelle Monae and drop a space-themed concept album. It’s not crazy. He apparently has one in the works. Dre tells Vibe that he’s been working on an instrumental album called “The Planets.” Says Dre:
“It’s just my interpretation of what each planet sounds like. I’m gonna go off on that. Just all instrumental. I’ve been studying the planets and learning the personalities of each planet. I’ve been doing this for about two years now just in my spare time so to speak. I wanna do it in surround sound. It’ll have to be in surround sound for Saturn to work.”
YES! Want. Dre’s work with Eminem has produced numerous hits and all, but how about a collaboration with “Up”/”Star Trek” composer Michael Giacchino? It’s not totally out of the realm of possibility. After all, Dre already has the outfit, as witnessed in Eminem’s video for “We Made You.”
--Todd Martens
which is available for streaming on Vevo.com. (This post may or may not have been written solely as an excuse to reuse that photo.)
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