No singer better exemplified the intersection of rap and R&B in the '90s than Nate Dogg, the Long Beach hook singer who died yesterday at age 41 after years of failing health. R&B singers had been adopting hip-hop attitudes for years before Nate Dogg's records with Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, but none had so thoroughly and convincingly adopted the thug persona. In a chest-puffed croon, Nate Dogg sang of the same routines that rappers rapped abouthustling, pimping, smoking, representingmatching the deadly confidence of Snoop Dogg's laconic flow with a brusque, sing-song style that never pushed him past his natural range. His was a voice that had nothing to prove.
That bravado helped make gangsta rap safe for R&B. Before Dr. Dre's Death Row productions, R&B hooks had been seen as a stigmatized as a sign of softness, the domain of neutered pop-rap acts like Heavy D or Young MC, but something no credible street rapper would touch. In Nate Dogg, though, Dr. Dre and like-minded producers found a conduit for smuggling R&B hooks into rap songs without compromising their edgeif anything, Nate Dogg's blustering choruses played so much like raps that they only bolstered each song's gangsta credentials. Nate Dogg's hooks helped reshape rap as more accessible (and just plain more musical) genre, laying the groundwork for the crossover rap hits to come.
Nate Dogg is so indelibly associated with '90s rap (and particularly his 1994 Warren G hit "Regulators," a song that induces '90s nostalgia like few other) that it can be easy to overlook his vast 2000s output. Even after Death Row crumbled and G-funk fell out of fashion at the end of the '90s, Nate Dogg continued to make hits, doing fine work with old friends as well as new kindred spirits including Ludacris, Fabolous and Eminem until a stroke paralyzed him in 2007. Make no mistake about it: His was a career cut short prematurely.
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