Erick Sermon has credited Dr. Dre with changing his approach to making music, saying the legendary producer made him never want to write raps again.
Speaking exclusively to HipHopDX, the EPMD member discussed his time working with Dre in the studio and how it made him reflect on his own creative process.
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“We go to Malibu. As soon as I press play, we do one record. I press play again, we do two records. I press play again, we do three records — in one night. The guys said, ‘Erick, we’ve been here for eight years, we ain’t never seen that before. Nobody has done what you did today.’
“I put another beat on and he calls Snoop over. Snoop been working on the records that I did. Then I come back and Dre is working on the record that he rapped on. So I said, ‘Yo, let me rap on that. Let me do your style how you rhyme and how you put your records together.'”
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Sermon then recalled pulling out his pad and pen and beginning to write rhymes, until one of Dr. Dre’s songwriters Smitty told him: “We don’t do that here.”
“Dre would say the cadence and then we would all say a rhyme, and then if the rhyme sounds good, then we put that down. So there’s no writing; it’s just 16 bars of whatever your freestyle may be,” E. Dub remembered Smitty telling him.
“The process was something I had never seen before in my life and had never experienced in my life getting produced by somebody. It makes you not want to [write rhymes] no more.
“That method is undeniable. You can’t go wrong because you got a room of people that is agreeing with the line and if the line is not right then it doesn’t go. So everything is right… and my verse was spectacular.”
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Erick Sermon previously revealed details of his work with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg.
In an interview with Bootleg Kev earlier this month, he said: “Me and Dre made five records. And he made three in one night — off of my production, though.
“And then we did another one with Snoop that’s supposed to be on the new Snoop record, and I also did one with him that me and him rhymed on which was crazy.”
Back in 2022, the former Def Jam signee shared images from the recording sessions and credited working with Dr. Dre with improving his mental health.
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“We worked on my new project #DYNAMICDUOS … the next day he called @snoopdogg we made something epic for him,” Sermon wrote on X at the time. “My mental health has been a factor for awhile .. thank u @drdre for changing that. # beautiful blessings.”
