Dr. Dre’s Detox is hip hop’s Atlantis, a genius at his highest levels crafting a perfect, utopian work of art that most likely doesn’t exist. Most likely, which is to say there’s a chance that the final copy of Detox is sitting in a vault somewhere in California. But it most likely doesn’t exist.
Every historical era needs its myths and mysteries. But these myths are harder to find now with social media documenting everything (which is why the plane’s disappearance took on a new level of intrigue, but we seem to have figured that out too). Off the top of my head, here are some of the greatest myths of the 20th century:
– DB Cooper
– the Loch Ness Monster
– Bigfoot
– Dr. Dre’s Detox
And then it just kind of stops. We’re jaded by the phrase “it was photoshopped” to believe in things that are most likely not true anymore. I declare the rumored existence of Detox the last great myth, in that case. Detox has the longevity too. The Detox era started in 2000, and lasted until…well, it’s still going.
The idea of Detox pops up every now and then, like a backdoor cut in the Princeton offense that leads to a dunk and reminds you “Oh yeah, I should keep an eye out for that”. The story begins in 2001, when Scott Storch called it the “most advanced rap album musically and lyrically we’ll probably ever have a chance to listen to” (a riddle: if Dr. Dre creates something that is “advanced” in 2001, have we caught up by 2014?). Dre pushed the release date back to 2005, and gave a teaser on Game’s “Higher” (as the annotated note says, “Over a decade later, still no Detox). Then, Snoop said that album was done – in 2008. The closest Dre came to releasing Detox was through the two singles Kush and I Need a Doctor – back in 2010 and February 2011. And like Keyser Soze, that was the last we ever heard.
In the Meantime…
We’ve been waiting for Detox really since 1999 with the release of Chronic 2001. Needless to say, life changed in the following 15 years. 2001 sold 516,000 copies in its first week and sold over 7.5 million copies. Last year’s highest selling album, Justin Timberlake’s 20/20, sold 2.87 million copies, only the second time that a highest selling album of the year sold less than 3 million albums. And through all the tweets, Instagrams, Napsters, music downloads, and waiting for Detox, Dr. Dre became hip hop’s first almost billionaire with Apple purchasing Beats Electronics for $3.2 billion.
Think about that. While we waited for an album that probably never existed, Dr. Dre had time to build a billion dollar company from scratch. That’s the thing with Bigfoot – we can study those pictures for hours a day and debate theories on message boards all day, but life still goes on. This infographic puts the rise of Beats in perspective, from every commercial and partnership, while we waited, and waited, and waited.
We pictured it too. Detox leak night would go down as a top 5 night on Twitter, and you know how it’d go too – you’d have one section claiming “great album ever” and another claiming “we waited 15 years for this garbage”, all without listening to one song. Then there’s the possibility that on a random summer day, Dre leaks the album on Instagram with no warning. How Dre releases Detox might be the new Detox.
But that’s the point – Detox getting released in 2001 isn’t the same as Detox getting released in 2014. Netflix is the new music. Instagram is the new music. High art is the new music. A headphone is the new music. Or, as is the case with Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, Apple hardware is the new music. So maybe the spirit, creativity, and cultural impact of Detox won’t be in the form of an album, but in the form of Dre’s involvement in hardware, software, and apps. In that sense, Detox was with us all this time.

Jay-Z once bragged about how he held us down for six summers – and that was back in 2001. To put that into perspective, there was no Twitter, no hashtags, no smartphones. You could argue that the most consistent cultural presence in the last 15 years has been Jay-Z (or Pharrell).
Is three tours in one year too many for Jay-Z?
There’s no coincidence between Jay-Z’s stature in hip hop and his ability to tour, with live shows the heart of an artist’s longevity. Albums matter, of course – but tours are the event (in addition to where artists make most of their money). Jay-Z has nine annotated tours on Wikipedia. That list doesn’t include the Hard Knock Life tour, which, looking at the cast list, is probably the seminal tour of that generation (and it gave us the classic documentary Backstage, which introduced us to Dame Dash yelling at people).
But those days of oversized football jerseys are literally and figuratively last century. Jay-Z’s last three tours, Magna Carter World Tour (which ran in the Fall of 2013), Legends of Summer (with Justin Timberlake, taking place in the summer of 2013), and Watch the Throne Tour (with Kanye West, spanning Fall 2011 to Summer 2012) hit a cultural and music zeitgeist in their own way. The album Watch the Throne introduced the decadence of high art and high fashion in the most opulent ways. The tour was the concrete realization of that ideal, grossing $75 million in 57 tour dates, placing it as the highest grossing hip hop tour ever.
While Watch the Throne Tour featured the two biggest names in High Art Rap, the Legends of Summer featured Jay-Z and the biggest name in pop music. That tour grossed $69.8 million. Less than two months later, Jay-Z embarked on his Magna Carter victory laptour (he grossed $18 million in 10 of the largest cities).
And those numbers don’t include Beyoncé, who grossed over $100 million from touring in 2013. At this rate, if my math is correct, On the Run is set to make around $100 billion. And for Jay-Z? It’ll just be memories in the family scrapbook.
They’re Back, Although They Never Left
I divide Jay-Z’s career into three eras. The first spans from Reasonable Doubt to The Blueprint – these are the rap years. The second era spans from The Blueprint 2, to retirement, to The Blueprint 3 – these are Jay-Z’s wandering years. Now, we’re in Jay-Z 3.0: The High Art Years.
For a genre that’s supposed to be a young person’s game, hip hop’s elder statesmen are having a moment. From Outkast’s reunion at Coachella, to the 20th anniversary of Nas’ Illmatic, to Pharrell’s year, to Wu-Tang’s one million dollar album, the Golden Age performers are using all the tricks of their old man, YMCA game to be as effective as ever. Hip hop today is like the mid 2000s NBA – you had your Garnett’s, Duncan’s, and the ‘96 draft class battling against the Lebron’s and Melo’s of the new age ‘03 class. Except music isn’t athletics, and artists’ careers last as long as they can stand on stage.
In a way, social media has widened the gap between hip hop haves and hip hop have nots. As Bomani noted on The Evening Jones last week, people on the internet think the entire world is on the internet. We tend to think that that artist all over our Twitter timeline is making a dent in larger culture, and Twitter music culture is something – but have they sold out tours?
The early 90’s generation grew up, and grew older, right in front of our eyes. Reunion tours, albums, retirements, breakups, music festivals – that’s just part of the natural growth cycle of a music longevity – and hip hop has that. My friends and I used to joke about how one day, hip hop albums like 36 Chambers are going to be played on the oldies station. But that’s not necessarily a joke – that’s a symbol of a genre’s maturity.