Dre sort of apologises a little

Both Dr Dre and Apple have been forced to sort-of engage a bit with the allegations that Dre used to beat women up.

Dre had been ignoring these claims for years, but discovered that when someone makes a biopic about you and also ignores them, it becomes hard to pretend it didn't happen.

So, sit back and see how Dre tries to make amends for beating women up, and then ignoring them for decades:

"Twenty-five years ago I was a young man drinking too much and in over my head with no real structure in my life. However, none of this is an excuse for what I did. I’ve been married for 19 years and every day I’m working to be a better man for my family, seeking guidance along the way. I’m doing everything I can so I never resemble that man again.”

“I apologize to the women I’ve hurt. I deeply regret what I did and know that it has forever impacted all of our lives.”

This raises a whole bunch of questions - Dre being a man of whom the world's most famous leading question, 'when did you stop beating your partners', can legitimately be asked.

More pressingly, if Dre deeply regrets what he did, isn't a bit of a coincidence that this regret has only just bubbled over into acknowledging that what your accusers have said is true the week after the movie came out?

And finally: even if your regret is heartfelt, why would you end it with the line about "all of our lives"? You think that the best way to say sort-of-sorry for beating women is to remind people that, hey, it's affected you too.

Apple, for their part, have popped out a statement which shrugs and says "well, he's never hit a woman so hard he cracked her ribs while he's been here":

“Dre has apologized for the mistakes he’s made in the past and he’s said that he’s not the same person that he was 25 years ago. We believe his sincerity and after working with him for a year and a half, we have every reason to believe that he has changed.”

What galls most here is the word "mistakes", as if repeatedly attacking women was a bit like speeding in a built-up area because you didn't see the sign.

Maybe Dre really is contrite. But it'd be easier to believe if we spoke about what it was he did then less than what he doesn't do now.

Left out of Compton

There's showbiz for you. One moment, you're a threat to the status quo, with the President worrying over your lyrics. The next, you've been assimilated into a Hollywood biopic.

So it is that NWA, who once threatened revolution in the streets find themselves atop the multiplexes. It shouldn't be much of a surprise - after all, we're several years past the time Eazy-E took lunch with President Bush at a Republican fundraiser:

The good people of Compton, though, won't be able to see their neighbourhood's moment in the sun - Compton doesn't have a cinema.

Although that's not quite as isolating as Digital Spy tries to make it sound. Because...

Dr Dre and Ice Cube fans will have to journey 4 miles east to Paramount's Bianchi Stadium theatre to witness their city depicted on-screen.

A four mile trip to the cinema isn't exactly onerous, is it? People in the suburbs of Brighton have to travel further than that to get to the pictures, and nobody's suggesting Straight Outta Withdean is going to get green lit soon.

More worryingly is the excising of Dre's treatment of women. Dre beat Dee Barnes, and she wonders why this isn't mentioned in the biopic:

That event isn’t depicted in Straight Outta Compton, but I don’t think it should have been, either. The truth is too ugly for a general audience. I didn’t want to see a depiction of me getting beat up, just like I didn’t want to see a depiction of Dre beating up Michel’le, his one-time girlfriend who recently summed up their relationship this way: “I was just a quiet girlfriend who got beat on and told to sit down and shut up.”

But what should have been addressed is that it occurred. When I was sitting there in the theater, and the movie’s timeline skipped by my attack without a glance, I was like, “Uhhh, what happened?” Like many of the women that knew and worked with N.W.A., I found myself a casualty of Straight Outta Compton’s revisionist history.

Hollywood likes its gritty stories. But just not with too much reality. After all, you don't want your heroes to be unrelatable, right?

Dr Dre finally catches up with Cliff Richard

There's a lot of excitement at the idea of Tupac's "guest appearance" with Dr Dre a short while ago at Coachella.

Isn't this just what they used to do to get Laurence Olivier onstage at Time: The Musical back in 1985? Slightly better technology, maybe, but it was duff when Cliff Richard and Dave Clarke invented the idea; now it's just an expensively duff idea.

Still, given this slow moving of technology from the West End to hip-hop, expect a flying car onstage at Coachella sometime around 2025.

Beats buys MOG

MOG, which those of you with longer memories will recall as plotting to turn music blogs into pure gold, is going to be bought up by Beats, the only faintly ridiculous headphones/somehow-musical-laptop brand.

I know what you're thinking: why would you buy MOG? In god's name, why would you do that? Why?

Well, the New York Times helpfully points out that while Dr Dre is the face of Beats, it's mostly owned by mobile phone company HTC; they might think MOG's music streaming service (or at least the deals it has cut to make it possible) could be valubale if you wanted to plug a music service into a telephone handset.

Not entirely sure what will happen to the blog network, but the smart money would be on it having a sack pulled over its head and being driven out of town.

Dr Drinks

The days when a celebrity brand extension had some sort of logic behind it have long since gone, so we're no more surprised that Dr Dre is launching a range of vodkas and cognacs than we would be if he told us he was selling sink plungers and doweling.

What is surprising, though, is Dre's going to be pushing fizzy vodka. Either he's spotted a gap in the market which has somehow been missed in the last two hundred years, or he'd been drinking an awful lot of vodka before coming up with idea.

Aha! Maybe there's the link between personality and product - they can use a slogan "Drink enough of this, and you'll forget about Dre."

Dre stares Death Row in the face

A long-bubbling bout of disagreement between Dr Dre and Death Row Records is heading for the courts: Dre claims the now-bankrupt label is touting rights for The Chronic to raise funds; he wants rights to the record back claiming that his deal allowing the label to keep exploiting the title had been broken when Death Row failed to pay him royalties.

The courts are having to decide if a dead man locked in Eminem's basement can, legally, sue a defunct record label.

Music to shoot girls by

Together at last - Dr Dre and Burt Bacharach.