From Vibe:
ON A COMING INSTRUMENTAL ALBUM:
You mentioned a hip-hop album without rapping. Will we ever hear a Dr. Dre instrumental album?
Oh yeah, that’s in the works. An instrumental album is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I have the ideas for it. I want to call it The Planets. I don’t even know if I should be saying this, but fuck it. [Laughs.] 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.
My favorite comment on this so far is someone hazily and/or sarcastically pointing out that it “seems like this has been done before“, here and there, one or twice. Perhaps a Dr. Dre/Kyle Gann collaboration would be appropriate here?
“The Afro-Futurist theme runs through black music, film, literature, and visual arts, often using using the imagery of space travel and other advanced technology to recast the turbulent black past in terms of a liberated technological utopia…these images may have proliferated because they offered a novel inflection to traditional forms of African-derived mysticism, naturalism, and magic, while inspiring a rearticulation of the historical experiences of colonization, slavery, immigration, frontier, and exile…” Michael Veal, Dub, Starship Africa.
I’m not a big fan of The Chronic’s misogyny or NWA but I wondered if the context for Dre’s work might be missing here…both at BoingBoing and here at the Gap…