Dr. Dre and Ice Cube - Natural Born Killaz (1995)

Dr. Dre's impact on rap, hip-hop, and pop music in general is nothing short of revolutionary. His production informed the dominant trends for several decades of rap, updating the noisy clamor of Public Enemy's Bomb Squad-produced tracks by bringing in funky rhythms for his breakthrough work with his group N.W.A., single-handedly inventing G-Funk in the 90's by reworking George Clinton s spaced-out party funk into something aggressive yet still commercially viable, and then abandoning the style when it became too ubiquitous by the early 2000s.

Dre's rap skills were never as impressive as his production, but he played to his strengths by giving game-changing proteges the majority of time on the mike, first introducing the world to Snoop Dogg s laid-back charisma and then to Eminem s staggering technical abilities. Dre's multifaceted role in the music industry saw him forming labels Death Row and Aftermath, the latter of which released massively important records by 50 Cent, Kendrick Lamar, and Anderson Paak.

Along with production duties, label CEO status, and other business ventures like his celebrity headphones-turned-streaming platform Beats by Dre, the good doctor continued to slowly and steadily release music of his own as the years went by, bolstering a discography full of groundbreaking work like his 1992 debut "The Chronic" with projects like his 2015 full-length "Compton", and his six-song EP "The Contract", released in conjunction with Grand Theft Auto in 2022.