† Dr. Dre †
André Romelle Young is better known as Dr. Dre He was born on February 18, 1965, He is an American record producer, rapper, actor and record executive. He is the founder and current CEO of Aftermath Entertainment and a former co-owner and artist of Death Row Records, also having produced albums for and overseeing the careers of many rappers signed to those record labels. As a producer he is credited as a key figure in the popularization of West Coast G-funk, a style of rap music characterized as synthesizer-based with slow, heavy beats.
He was a member of the influential gangsta rap group N.W.A, which popularized the use of explicit lyrics in rap to detail the violence of street life. His 1992 solo debut The Chronic, released under Death Row Records, led him to become one of the best-selling American performing artists of 1993. In 1996, he left Death Row to found his own label Aftermath Entertainment, producing a compilation album Dr. Dre Presents the Aftermath in 1997 and releasing a solo album titled 2001 in 1999. In the 2000s, he focused his career on production for other artists, while occasionally contributing vocals in other artists’ songs. Rolling Stone magazine named him among the highest-paid performers of 2001 and 2004. In 2008, his final solo studio album Detox will be released, following much delay and speculation.
He was the first child of Verna and Theodore Young; Verna was only 16 years old upon giving birth to him after being impregnated by teenage boyfriend Theodore, whom she later married. She gave her new child the middle name "Romelle", which came from Theodore Young’s unsigned, amateur R&B singing group The Romells. In 1968, his mother divorced Theodore Young for another man, Curtis Crayon, and had other children with him, including two sons named Jerome and Tyree (both of whom now deceased) and daughter Shameka. As a young child, he was fascinated with vinyl records spinning on phonographs; his family’s record collection included many popular R&B albums of the 1960s and 1970s, from such singers as Diana Ross, James Brown, and Aretha Franklin. According to an interview with the Los Angeles Times, his mother Verna found R&B music to be a relief from the two jobs she had to work daily. Despite economic troubles, she continued to encourage Andre not to give up in life. During Verna’s marriage to Curtis Crayon, Andre and brother Tyree were cared mostly by their father Curtis or grandmother as their mother struggled to find work.
In 1976, Young began attending Vanguard Junior High School and had a new sister named Shameka. However, due to gang violence around Vanguard, he transferred to nearby Roosevelt Junior High School. Later, Verna married Warren Griffin, whom she met at her new job in Long Beach, and thus brought in three new stepsisters and one new stepbrother, Warren Griffin III, who would eventually become a rapper under the stage name Warren G.
Young attended Centennial High School in Compton during his freshman year but transferred to Fremont High School due to poor grades. On December 15, 1981, a young woman that he impregnated gave birth to his biological son Curtis Young, whom Andre would later meet as the rapper "Hood Surgeon" about 20 years later. He was nearly enrolled to an apprenticeship program at Northrop Aviation Company until poor grades at school made him ineligible. Therefore, he focused on social life and entertainment for most of his high school years.
