Beats go on for ‘Defiant Ones’
Series tracks unlikely duo of Iovine, Dr. Dre
In May 2014, Dr. Dre and actor Tyrese Gibson leaked the news that Apple was buying Beats Electronics for $3.2 billion in a drunken, boastful video posted to Gibson’s Facebook page late one night.
Dre’s friend, filmmaker Allen Hughes ( Menace II Society), had just started rolling cameras on HBO’s The Defiant Ones (Sunday, 9 ET/PT), a four-part documentary series about the rap icon’s longtime partnership with storied producer Jimmy Iovine, with whom he co-founded the headphone giant. The premature revelation threatened the Apple deal, and left the film’s prospects similarly shaky.
“No one told me it was over, but I (thought) it was because Jimmy went silent on me,” Hughes says. But weeks later, he breathed a sigh of relief when the Beats purchase was made official, leaving Dre and Iovine’s friendship intact.
Defiant continues Monday through Wednesday, and will be available to stream in its entirety Sunday night. The project tracks the parallel rises of the music giants through archival footage and candid interviews with their collaborators, including Bono, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, Gwen Stefani, Snoop Dogg and Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor. Dre, 52 (real name: Andre Young), got his start as a DJ in Compton, Calif., before cofounding gangsta rap group N.W.A and branching out into a successful solo career.
Iovine, 64, grew up in workingclass Brooklyn and paid his dues as a studio assistant in Manhattan. He quickly worked his way to become a recording engineer for the likes of John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith; went on to start Interscope Records with Ted Field in 1990; and more recently mentored contestants on Fox’s American Idol for three seasons. He recalls his first time meeting Dre in 1992, when the rapper came into Interscope’s offices to play him his seminal solo debut, The Chronic.
“It reminded me of the first time I heard Phil Spector, but with the elegance of (The Beatles’) Sgt. Pepper or Pink Floyd’s
The Wall,” Iovine says in an inter- view. “So I said, ‘Whatever this guy’s doing, I want to be in business with him.’ “
After merging Dre’s Aftermath Entertainment into Interscope, the unlikely duo signed and kickstarted the careers of hip-hop titans such as Eminem, Kendrick Lamar and 50 Cent. But their proudest accomplishment, Iovine says, was creating Beats headphones and speakers, which later spawned online radio station Beats 1 and the since-shuttered Beats Music, which was replaced by streaming service Apple Music shortly after the brands merged.
“It’s a culmination of our own relationship,” Iovine says. “Hardware is not easy — that’s why they call it hardware. We were able to pivot into something different in popular culture.”
Dre released Compton, his first solo album in 14 years, in 2015, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year as a member of N.W.A. Iovine now heads Apple Music, which is moving into video programming.
The former producer counts Adele, Drake and Lorde among current artists most likely to stick around, but he has no plans to go back to the studio himself.
“I don’t like looking back, even though I made a documentary.”