Getting a national holiday named after you is tough to do. In the U.S. you have basically two options: discover the country (already taken) or stand up for liberty and justice against the kind of opposition that tends to involve assassination attempts. The government is hardly likely to give everyone the day off to celebrate the birth of the guy who’s arguably the most important hip-hop producer of the past two decades. But Dre Day parties, held on Dr. Dre’s birthday, have become a nationwide phenomenon even without the blessing of the feds. I’m pretty sure they’re already a bigger deal than whatever people do for Groundhog Day.
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Davis says the inside jokes and chatter around the office have more or less always been thick with Dr. Dre references. But on that fateful day more than eight years ago, “Fuck Wit Dre Day (and Everybody’s Celebratin’),” one of the singles from Dre’s 1992 solo debut, The Chronic, sparked a train of thought that led somewhere. “Like, people would just joke about the idea of Dre Day,” Davis says, “and then we were like, ‘Oh man, what if there actually was a holiday called Dre Day.’ And you know, that just led to another idea and then another idea, and in about five minutes we had basically made the blueprint of what would become the first Dre Day party.”
“It was just a great party,” Davis says, “where everyone could listen to all the Dr. Dre hits from his long career and, you know, just celebrate all the music that he’s worked on.”
The traditional values of Dre Day demand that celebrants frown upon anyone who treats it like an ironic joke—and that’s one of the best things about it. “There is no irony with Dre Day at all,” Lorenz says. “We’re all guys who grew up on N.W.A, and we try to make it as cool as possible. And you kind of get to be like a big kid, you know. You can decorate the stage but not make it hokey. There’s still a lot of honor in it, you know?”
