David: Welcome to another episode of Lexicon Late Night. I’m your host, David, here, as always with my colleague Justin.

Justin: Yo, yo.

David: Lexicon Late Night is where we break down great pieces of art storytellers and musicians as well. Today, to talk about how those pieces of work, pieces of art influence storytelling for business. So today we’ve got one of the best hip hop albums of all time to discuss. 2001 by Dr. Dre.

Justin: That’s right. It’s the D-R-E. This is going to be interesting. So this is our first hip hop artist that we’re discussing. Probably not the last interesting jump we’re going. We’ve done a bunch of comedians. And then last time we spoke about Lord of the rings, and now we’re talking about Dr. Dre 2001, I think we’re really showing that we’re just, uh, nerds from the late 90s and early 2000.

David: Yes. If you didn’t know that already, now, you know.

Justin: It’s probably.

David: Evidence. So check out our hot takes on an album from 25 years ago.

Justin: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. For you children out there, you don’t even know.

David: It’s a little bit of background. So, Dr. Dre was in a group called N.W.A. Wha. Yes, of course, stands for.

Justin: But we don’t need to get into that. It’s going to be difficult not to swear during this episode.

David: So he was a founding member of NWA. They broke up in the early 90s. He went his own way. Made The Chronic with Death Row Records classic album. Death Row Records, broke up, formed Aftermath, and then came out with his seminal album 2001 The Chronic, 2001.

Justin: That’s right. In 1999. So kind of confusing, but the album is called 2001. One of the most iconic hip hop albums of all time, if not the most. Uh, I heard it like my first introduction to it. I was about 12 years old, and I saw the video for Forgot About Dre with Dre and Eminem on TV. And you know, at 12 you don’t really have a personality yet. And I saw that and I was like, okay, I want to become those guys. You know, I had a very short lived, very hip hop phase, but I still listen to the album to this day. It still holds up. Like we were listening to it. The beats are fantastic. It’s just a great collaboration, bringing together all these different artists and different producers, different different people making the tracks and the result. It’s just like I said, it’s one of the best albums of all time.

David: Absolutely. And so the first lesson for today is about talking to himself. So Dr. Dre, his name is on the album. Of course, he raps on all of the songs, and what people might not know is that he actually isn’t what you would normally expect from a rapper producer, because while he’s the producer, the CEO essentially of the project, he didn’t write the songs, he didn’t write the beats, didn’t actually key the stuff in. He was the guy overseeing it all. He pulled it all together.

Justin: Hmm, interesting. I didn’t mean, we were talking about this obviously off camera before. I didn’t know that because, you know, wake up into AM, compose a beat. I thought he was the one making all of the beats.

David: So Mel-man, I believe, made the beats. Scott Storch did the pianos and he had an engineer also working with him. I’m sure he did a little bit of it. Yeah, but he’s more like, you know, go in the room for four days and play the piano for four days. And when I hear something that’s good, I’ll tell you it’s good.

Justin: And then I’m sure he was putting the pieces together. I’m sure he’s doing the mix and a lot of this kind of stuff, but that’s interesting. So it just shows that you don’t have to do everything. You can bring together talented people who each bring something different to the table, and then you can create a masterpiece from that.

David: Exactly. So it’s kind of just a classic CEO model. You know, I’m a CEO, but I don’t do all the things inside Lexicon. My job is to kind of guide the ship, make sure that the outcome is good. Right. Um, and Jay did the same thing. So, you know, just like in the business, the CEO’s job is to bring together the best talents, a team that can work best together.

Justin: So if you’re Dre, does that make me Eminem. Oh, nice. Nice tough role to fill. But I could do it in a Lexicon.

David: Maybe we can do some rapping for the outtakes.

Justin: Maybe, maybe maybe for the folks at home. For the diehard fans watching this on YouTube, not the LinkedIn clips.

David: Yeah. Comment if you want us to do some rubbing. Um, so I don’t.

Justin: Know if anybody wants us turning into middle aged white guys who run a marketing business to be rapping. But if you want it, we’ll do it.

David: Let the people have their voice. So obviously many, many great songs on our album. And he brought in the best talents from the time so late 90s. He had Snoop Dogg writing songs and performing. He had Eminem at his peak, pretty much writing songs, performing. He had Jay-Z, he had Royce, da 5’9″, all these great talents writing in his voice for him. Um, just a great example of what a good leader can do. He didn’t even let everyone, the whole world know. Everyone knows that he didn’t do these things himself. He didn’t care about it. All he cared about was that this album is the best it could possibly be. And that is a good leader. Yeah, it’s not about the individual.

Justin: There’s an interesting parallel here that this is probably not going to make it into a snippet, but to the episode we did recently on the Lord of the Rings and The Fellowship of the ring. So Doctor Dre is kind of like Gandalf bringing together all of these different people with different skill sets to go on a mission together. So yeah, that’s how that’s how nerdy we are.

David: Yeah. And there’s a guy on the album called Hitman, and this is a derail, too. Like, he’s on almost every song and he’s awesome. Yeah, but that was it. That was his whole career, that one album. Right? Nothing before or nothing after. I think he was meant to be the next Snoop, but Eminem blew up at exactly the same time, and Eminem was obviously way better. Yeah. So I guess he took a few gambles and most of them paid off massively, right?

Justin: Yeah. An interesting note on that is the album has a bunch of comedy sketches. So Eddie Griffin, the stand up comedian and actor, appears in a lot of little like, weird little funny sketches. So there’s so much going on in that album and it’s punctuated with those skits. I don’t really have a point on this, but it’s just like a key ingredient to the puzzle of what makes that album so great.

David: Would you like to quote any of those Eddie Griffin scripts?

Justin: No, no. Biggest. No, no, I’m not gonna do it. What happened to falling in love with a man with a bus pass Just because he loved them. man. Yes. That’s not how he says it.

David: But such wisdom. Yes. Even talented comedians, comedians, writers, musicians, piano players, all of it together for this album. So just in terms of being a business leader, it’s not about you as the CEO. You don’t have to produce everything. You don’t have to be the superstar. Just your job is Gandalf. Guide the ship, make sure it arrives at its destination. And no one does that better than Dre did that on that album.

Justin: Yeah, I think that brings us nicely to our second lesson. So it’s the same sort of subject matter here, but but just the fact, the point of ghost writing, the fact that he had other rappers writing his lyrics for him on that album, uh, in the rap game, it’s kind of seen as like, you know, if somebody’s writing you, you got a ghostwriter. Uh, other rappers are gonna talk bad about you. Um, see, I’m struggling so hard not to swear here because we’re talking about hip hop. You can say talk smack. Talk smack. Yeah. But, Dre, Ray. He’s never been like that. He’s always upfront about it. He goes, you know, I’m a producer. I bring the people together. Yeah, I rap, but I’m going to get other people to write my lyrics for me, and there’s absolutely no shame in that. Like, I didn’t know this until recently. Jay-z wrote the parts for both Dre and Snoop in the song Still Dre, which is crazy to me because it’s so them. It’s so authentic. So maybe we’ll do a future Lexicon late night episode on Jay-Z, because he is one of the most brilliant lyricists of all time. But like, he wrote that song in their voices and I, I don’t think there’s footage of him rapping as them. It’s got to exist somewhere. Mhm. Yeah. But it would be funny seeing Jay-Z doing a Snoop impression. Yeah. And I heard about the process of writing that song. He wrote all the lyrics except in the chorus. He goes. Jay-z originally wrote it as hitting the corners in the Bentleys girl. And then Snoop was like, we don’t drive Bentleys in California. So then they changed it to hitting corners in them. Low low girl. Yeah, yeah.

David: So ghost riding. So even now it’s more mainstream. Drake has Ghost Riders. Everyone seems to have a Ghost Rider, but in 1999 it was taboo for sure. Like nobody would ever talk about having a Ghost Rider. It would be for the most corny rappers like Will Smith. I think NAS wrote Miami. Oh really? For example? Um, that’s like that.

Justin: Least gangster thing NAS has ever written. Yeah, but you can tell the flow is pretty good. So like, you could see that makes sense. I didn’t know that.

David: Yeah. So Drake owned it. And that’s the lesson here for businesses is that Dr. Dre is an amazing producer, a great rapper too, but he’s not a writer. If he was writing his own lyrics, they would suck. The product would be bad. Probably the same is true for you. Whatever industry you’re in at home, it’s probably not content writing. I would imagine it’s quite a specific thing.

Justin: And the other thing is, as I well know, content writing is a pain. It’s a slugfest. You got to kind of slave over the document for a few hours and CEOs are busy people. Yeah. You’ve got all of the insight, you’ve got the knowledge. But you don’t need to be sitting there cranking out thought leadership pieces that take you, you know, five, six hours to complete. You could just work with a partner like us, give us your ideas, or even like we can brainstorm together on those ideas, get together and outline. You approve the outline, then we can crank that out for you, and then the results will be way better than you working on it on your own. No offense. Um, and then you save tons of time because you don’t need to be out there. You need to be out there growing your business, talking to clients, making sure your team is sticking to the company culture. You got a lot to do. And sitting at a desk typing away at a blog is just not a good use of your time, for sure. And it’s not.

David: Just saving time, it’s saving money too, because the CEO should be billing at 50,000 an hour or whatever it might be, spending time writing for four hours or editing some terrible first draft from a junior. It’s a terrible use of time. We cost a fraction of that, right? But it’s not just about content writing. The core lesson here is, um, focus on your core business and outsource everything else. So it’s not just writing, but marketing strategy, LinkedIn management. These are things that you probably can’t do well, even if you want to do them in-house. So just like Dr. Dre, he lets other people write. He focuses on making his business successful, which he does very well. And that’s a great lesson for all businesses. It lets other people do the stuff that you’re not good at, whether it’s accounting firms, marketing firms, recruitment firms, whoever that might be. You focus on making your widgets more efficient or your services better and outsource everything else. Just like Dr. Dre, you can have a classic album, you can have an amazing LinkedIn page if you focus on your core. Yeah, and have us.

Justin: Writing your lyrics for you.

David: That’s it, that’s it. All right. So anything else to cover on that topic?

Justin: Um, no, not really. But it’s interesting. So obviously Doctor Dre has appeared as a guest rapper on other albums throughout the years, but as far as I know, 2001 was the last album he’s released, right?

David: No, he released Compton.

Justin: Okay. When was that?

David: Ten years ago. Maybe five years ago. It wasn’t very good.

Justin: I never even heard of it.

David: It was a soundtrack to a movie, I think. The straight out of Compton.

Justin: Oh, and he probably had. There was that car wash movie as well, the wash. There was probably an album with that too, but. But 2001 is certainly his most famous album and most successful album. And so there was an album that was in the works for a long time.

David: Let’s come back to that in just a second. I think there’s another point to make about voice. Okay. You mentioned how Jay-Z was able to capture his voice. I think it’s interesting to see the opposite of that too, which is Eminem riding and forgetting about Dre. Yeah, sure. That Eminem style is so distinctive with the multi-syllabic rhymes and just a unique voice. And for certain companies, just like with Eminem, they need their tone of voice to be that visible, you know? So they need a tone of voice guideline, a brand book so that they can stand out. Not everybody needs that. Some companies, it’s fine to be generic. A white paper shouldn’t really have that much personality to it, but a social media post probably should. Yeah.

Justin: White paper doesn’t need to be funny or clever particularly. It just needs to provide valuable information. But when you’re communicating on social media, absolutely you should. If you want to stand out, you need to have a unique tone of voice. And if you have creative people working with you, they can help you mold that tone of voice and just help it crystallize or make it more entertaining or whatever the case may be.

David: Exactly. And by documenting it, you’re able to work with partners more easily. And even if there’s attrition in the company, the voice doesn’t belong to an individual. It belongs to the collective. So you can throughout time, throughout history, you can keep that same tone of voice even as the personnel changes if you document it right.

Justin: Do you think Dr. Dre has? Well, I guess he does have a documented tone of voice. It’s his discography.

David: Well, I wish Eminem would relearn his tone of voice from back then. Yeah, that’s another  for another video.

Justin: Totally different episode.

David: All right, so a man grows. In the. In the last episode, we spoke about how great Lord of the rings was and how terrible The Hobbit was. And the lesson from that was kind of don’t be greedy, don’t distill, don’t dilute the product by putting out a terrible version of it. And the next lesson is the same lesson, essentially, but the different way of doing it from Dr. Dre 2001, arguably the best hip hop album of all time.

Justin: Whoa, whoa. One of.

David: It’s right up there in the conversation. 

Justin: Yeah, well, okay there is another. Come on man. Illmatic. Ready to die.

David: It’s up there.

Justin: Yeah. Marshall Mathers LP.

David: It’s in that tier for sure, for sure, for sure. So it’s in this top tier of best albums of all time, whether it’s number one or number seven. It’s in there. Right. Um, and then that was 23 years ago, almost 24 years ago now. No major album since then. Um, he had for years an album called detox, which was due to come out. Many songs were released from it. Even I Need a Doctor was supposed to be on detox, and it was hype about it for years and years and years. There was talk about how he’d scrapped the whole thing, started again multiple times, but the album never came out. Mhm. Um, why?

Justin: Well, I think he, first of all, is successful enough as is. So it’s not a money thing. So I don’t think he’d be interested in a cash grab of any kind. And in connection to that, I don’t think he wants to dilute, as you said, his brand, so. Or he doesn’t want to tarnish his legacy by releasing something that’s not up to his standards. Right. Do you think that’s what it is? I mean, obviously money ain’t a thing for him. You know, in the interim between these two albums, he, you know, created the Beats by Dre headphones, which were purchased by Apple. And, you know, he’s a billionaire now, so he doesn’t need money, that’s for sure. But I think he really does care about his legacy, you know, in the annals of hip hop.

David: So I think the lesson here is about R&D. So obviously Dre produced the album. He made it but never released it. But at the same time, he did put out the headphones and they became a smash hit. So Quality control. You need to invest, I think. William Malek says like 10% of your budget or 5% has to be R&D into R&D for the future. So he’s obviously been thinking about different types of things, but he had the good sense to not put out anything that was below par. So when you’re doing R&D, you’re going to stumble across something brilliant, but you’re also probably going to do a lot of rubbish. Yeah. So being able to have the confidence to to throw it all out because it doesn’t meet your brand standards, that’s bold and it’s brave, but that’s what Dr. Dre did with detox. Yeah.

Justin: Yeah, absolutely. So you shouldn’t be afraid to try new things and make mistakes. But if you make mistakes or if you’re not happy with something, there’s no rule that you have to release it. And as a separate but related point, there’s a lot of brands on social media. They feel compelled to just release content for the sake of releasing content, and then that does no favors to the brand or their reputation. And it’s, you know, it’s kind of disrespectful to the audience because it’s, you know, doesn’t release something. Yes, create content constantly, but don’t release any of it just for its own sake. Release it because it serves a purpose, because you’re happy with it, because it represents you properly.

David: Yeah. Callback to what we just mentioned about Eminem on that topic. We actually recorded an episode of this. Yes we did. Yeah. And then when we watched it, it wasn’t really, uh, at the level it needed to be at to be released. So we scrubbed. It gives you an.

Justin: Idea of the standard we’re looking at here. Oh, yeah. That that episode is unreleasable. Maybe someday it’ll be like the lost episode of Lexicon Late Night. Yeah.

David: We’ll be. It’ll be worth $1 million.

Justin: Sure.

David: Yeah. Those recordings. Um. So that’s it. Basically. So, from Dr. Dre, what we’ve learned is that it takes a team, a great team and a great leader. And a leader shouldn’t have a big ego too. It’s a big ego. Thank you. Songs. I thought that I shouldn’t have a big ego. Uh, they should be, uh, putting together the best team for the best interests of the company and the project. The. It’s good to focus on your core. Outsource the rest. Ghost riding agencies, all that kind of stuff. And don’t put out anything until you’re fully satisfied with it. As Dr. Dre did with detox, any of the lessons we should learn, especially about marital decisions from Dr. Dre?

Justin: Yes. You cannot make a particular. No, there’s no way for me to say this euphemistically. Um, but just be careful who you decide to form long term partnerships with.

David: Yes. Richard Gere. Be aware. Yes.

Justin: Of course. All right.

David: And on that note, thank you for watching. Seriously, if you’ve stuck around to the end of this, you’re a legend and we love you. Thank you for your support. And we’ll see you in the next episode. That’s right.

Justin: Whatever happens, don’t forget about Dre.