FEATURE:
Groovelines
Warren G ft. Nate Dogg - Regulate
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I am including this song…
in Groovelines, as Warren G turns fifty-five on 10th November. Perhaps his best-known track is Regulate. That 1994 single featured Nate Dogg. Nominated at the 1995 GRAMMY Awards for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group, this track was a huge international success. I will come to features about the classic song. It was interesting reading critical reaction to the song. I am going to move on in a minute. However, Wikipedia collated some critical reviews. I think Regulate has gained in stature and legacy in the thirty-one years since its release:
“James Hamilton from the Record Mirror Dance Update named it a "lovely languid 0-95.3bpm US smash gangsta rap with catchy whistling" in his weekly dance column. Gareth Grundy from Select wrote that songs like 'Regulate' "are smooth jeep beats that even a fully paid-up Klan member would struggle to resist." Charles Aaron from Spin commented, "Funny (or maybe not) how pop's young soul rebels sound more comfortably sincere when they're romancing their gats than when they're sweet-talking their ladies. Guess you gotta start somewhere. Anyway, as a rapper, Warren G's a regular-joe version of childhood bud Snoop Dogg; as a producer, his gangsta fantasyland is even more slickly diminished than big brother Dr. Dre. Imagine a stripped Mothership up on blocks with a fresh paint job”.
I will start out with a feature from Billboard published in 2014. I may repeat some of the details later on, though the fact that this feature has Warren G and Michael McDonald discussing the track makes it worth a read. There are sections of the article that particularly caught my eye. McDonald’s I Keep Forgettin' is sampled in Regulate. Its hook. McDonald says how his kids prefer Regulate over I Keep Forgettin'! He also says how Regulate is this landmark track:
“Michael McDonald had just hit the Lower East Side of the N-Y-C, and while he wasn’t on a mission trying to find Mr. Warren G, fate was about to intervene.
This was 1996 or ’97, and the former Doobie Brother and blue-eyed-soul legend was on his way to a Manhattan studio to work on some tracks. Suddenly, a car rolled up, the window went down, and there was Warren, one of several West Coast rappers and producers instrumental in creating the “G-funk” sound that revolutionized hip-hop earlier in the decade.
In the time it took for the traffic light to change from red to green, the two exchanged compliments like old friends, even though it was their first — and to date only — meeting. Then they went their separate ways.
“The fact that he saw me on the street and recognized me, I thought, was kind of funny,” McDonald tells Billboard.com. “I wouldn’t think of myself as a recording artist that, in his generation, you’d know what I look like.”
Of course, this wasn’t the first time fate had brought the two seemingly disparate musicians together. On April 28, 1994, Warren G and his frequent collaborator, the late Nate Dogg released “Regulate,” a single based largely on a sample from McDonald’s 1982 hit “I Keep Forgettin’ (Every Time You’re Near).”
Originally appearing on the “Above the Rim” movie soundtrack, “Regulate” became a summer rap anthem, reaching No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Every teenager in America knew the words, even if they couldn’t really relate to Warren and Nate’s tale about “hitting the east side of the L-B-C” and getting mixed up in all sorts of inner-city drama.
The song succeeds precisely because of its contradictions— gangsta lyrics combined with Nate Dogg’s lover-man crooning and McDonald’s smoother-than-smooth yacht-rock sound — and that’s down to Warren’s reverence for the source material. Thinking back to that face-to-face meeting with McDonald, Warren downplays the strangeness of their stoplight chat.
At the time, Warren was living in a dingy apartment on Long Beach Boulevard with dog crap all over the floor. He hadn’t yet risen to superstar status like his stepbrother Dr. Dre or good buddy Snoop Dogg — with whom he and Nate had founded the group 213 — but he was a striver. Maybe that’s why he related to the Wild West outlaws in “Young Guns,” a movie he happened to watch one night on VHS. It was a fortuitous viewing, as one line of dialogue — “Regulators: We regulate any stealing of this property, and we’re damn good, too” — caught his ear.
“That was our word: regulate,” Warren recalls. “Oh, we gotta regulate that, or we gotta regulate this.”
Realizing the line would make a great sample — and pair nicely with the McDonald bass groove and melody already swimming in his head — he plugged the VCR straight into his Akai MPC60 sequencer. Lastly, he whistled a riff lifted from Bob James’ 1981 funky jazz-fusion cut “Sign of the Times.” Now all the track needed was lyrics, so Warren called up Nate and told him to come on over.
“Why don’t we do a duet-type song like what Dre and Snoop dig with “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang?'” Warren remembers thinking.
The two went back and forth, Warren penning the first four bars and then passing the pen to Nate. Before long, they’d banged out the first verse and set the scene for the song’s strange, somewhat dreamlike narrative. In the opening lines, our heroes are cruising around Long Beach in separate cars, looking for female companionship. If Warren and Nate had a rough idea of where the story was going next, they didn’t have a chorus”.
I want to come to a feature from Pitchfork that was published in 2014. They talk about “The story of G Funk linchpin Warren G, from his fated break at a bachelor party hosted by Dr. Dre to his debut LP, which soundtracked the summer 20 years ago”. If you have not heard Warren G’s debut album, Regulate... G Funk Era, I would recommend you listen. Pitchfork talk about Nate Dogg and Warren G hooking up. The elegance and simplicity of Regulate. The perfect samples and fusions that make the track so enduring and rich:
“With a marijuantra of “whatever you do, young brother, you best not choke,” Nate Dogg staked his first claim as the most formative hip-hop singer. Had he embarked on a non-secular path, the bowler-hatted Bodhisattva might’ve wound up one the great missionaries of history. Save for Too $hort, it's difficult to think of anyone who could make people lovingly sing such profane things. To a 7th grader growing up in the G-Funk era, the imbalance was obvious: Nate Dogg telling you to smoke weed everyday > D.A.R.E..
“Indo Smoke” peaked at #56 on the Billboard Hot 100, but looped constantly on Power 106, 92.3, and "The Box". It transformed Warren G from a prospective inmate idling around Death Row into a rising prospect. 2Pac became a fan. Searching for his own contribution to the Poetic Justice soundtrack, Warren furnished the future rap martyr with “Definition of a Thug Nigga”. That same session at Echo Sounds in Atwater Village also induced “How Long Will They Mourn Me?”[3]
But nothing anticipated “Regulate”. It ran the summer of '94 with the sort of blockbuster rampage usually reserved for radioactive lizards. The multi-platinum ode from the Above the Rim soundtrack eventually reached #2 on the singles charts. It’s so tattooed into our collective memory that you can pick out any line (“It was a clear black night,” “If I had wings I would fly,” “Nate Dogg is about to make some bodies turn cold”) and the next rhyme is already in your head.
“Regulate” has an elegant simplicity, inasmuch as that’s possible for a song with a plot point hinging on a spontaneous orgy at the Eastside Motel. Warren stitched a loop of Michael McDonald white-linen soul with some whistling from an old jazz record by Bob “Nautilus” James. The cherry on top was the “regulators” speech from Young Guns. The rules were clear: No geeks off the streets, and only people who could earn their keep need apply. You didn’t need to understand the laws to know that they were ones to live by.
In essence, “Regulate” is Nate Dogg and Warren G’s version of “Nuthin But a G Thang”. The narrative revolves around a sliver of Eastside Long Beach: from the neighborhood hub at 21st Street and Lewis to the hourly motels on PCH. You’d have to scrap the entire conceit if you wrote it today, though—Nate Dogg and Warren G wouldn’t need to swerve solo in search of one another, they could just text. But in Motorola pager days, serendipity was possible through Nate catching his best friend in a dice game gone awry, using his marine skills to terminate every attacker, and play seductive Good Samaritan to some curvy girls with a broken car. He said it himself: It went real swell.
By its June 7, 1994, release date, Regulate…G-Funk Era ranked among the year’s most anticipated albums. Most teens didn’t even realize it wasn’t an official Death Row release. I always considered it the last in the Holy G-Funk Trinity, a smooth Sunday cruise to the hydraulic drive-by of The Chronic and Doggystyle. If Dre and Snoop were mythical Gin and Juiced Robin Hoods, Warren was the laid-back younger brother in the sweatshirt—the rap version of Mitch from Dazed and Confused, less intimidating and eager to pass the blunt.
Warren G’s debut received two Grammy nominations, was certified triple platinum, and finished as the year’s fourth most popular rap album—behind Doggystyle, Salt-N-Pepa’s Very Necessary, and the Above the Rim soundtrack (which inevitably sold a million strictly off “Regulate”). During a period where Def Jam and its sister company Rush Associated Labels faced bankruptcy, Warren G’s sales kept the company solvent”.
I might wind up here. Because Warren G is fifty-five on 10th November, I did want to shine a light on that amazing collaboration with Nate Dogg. The lead track from Regulate… G Funk Era, this amazing track was one I first heard when it came out in April 1994. Regulate is one of the best tracks of the 1990s. I think it still sounds completely remarkable and original today. How it has been passed through the generations. One of those indelible songs that stays inside the head, it is a Hip-Hop masterpiece. Undoubtably, this is a gem that is…
ONE of the classics.