Real Hip Hop Lyrics | Warren G - Regulate ft. Nate Dogg (Lyrics) @RealHipHopLyrics | Uploaded October 2024 | Updated October 2024, 4 hours ago.
Artist/Group: Warren G
Album: Regulate... G Funk Era
Released: 1994
Label: Violator/RAL

Watch the Official Video of this song youtube.com/watch?v=1plPyJdXKIY

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"Regulate" is a song performed by American rapper Warren G featuring American singer Nate Dogg. It was released in the spring of 1994 as the first single on the soundtrack to the film Above the Rim and later Warren G's debut album, Regulate... G Funk Era (1994). It became an MTV staple and the song reached No. 2 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and No. 8 on the R&B/Hip-Hop chart. "Regulate" was number 98 on VH1's 100 Greatest Songs of Hip Hop and number 108 on Pitchfork Media's "Top 200 Tracks of the 90s".

The West Coast hip hop track employs a four-bar sample of the rhythm of Michael McDonald's song "I Keep Forgettin' (Every Time You're Near)". It also samples "Sign of the Times" by Bob James and "Let Me Ride" by Dr. Dre. The music video featured scenes from Above the Rim, including a cameo by Tupac Shakur. "Regulate" starts with a quote from Casey Siemaszko's character Charlie Bowdre from the 1988 film Young Guns:

We regulate any stealing of his property - we're damn good too! ...But you can't be any geek off the street, gotta be handy with the steel, if you know what I mean, earn your keep.

Warren had bought a stack of vinyl records for $250 from a poor man he felt bad for outside of a Rosco's in Hollywood. Among them was Michael McDonald's I Keep Forgettin’, a song he recalled from his stepmother and father's gatherings in North Long Beach. Warren decided to sample a four bar loop from the track for Regulate.

At the time, Warren was living in a dingy apartment which had no furniture and dog stools on the floor. It was located by Long Beach Boulevard and San Antonio Drive in North Long Beach. His setup included recording equipment in the bedroom and a vocal booth in the bathroom and closet. His gear consisted of a Numark mixer, Technics 1200 turntables and an Akai MPC 60.

While watching Young Guns, Warren was inspired by the line “Regulators: We regulate any stealing of this property, and we’re damn good, too”. He resonated with the term "regulate" which he and his crew frequently used. Together with his engineer, Greg Geitzenauer, Warren rented the film on VHS and recorded the sample using ADATs, a brand new VHS-based digital recorders technology at the time, allowing them to record the sample at home for cheap. Warren used his label advance to purchase a multi-track home studio rig. Geitzenauer went to Guitar Center to get a console, microphone preamps, speaker monitors, the ADATs, and cabling and set up all the gear in the apartment. The ADAT and VCR was then plugged with quarter-inch to RCA adapters into the MPC 60 sequencer to sample the line.

Warren also whistled a riff from Bob James' 1981 funk-jazz fusion album Sign of the Times. Geitzenauer added keyboards with a string sound derived from a Yamaha SY77, the riff was in the style of a Hammond organ at the end of every fourth bar. A Minimoog-type sound was used during the Young Guns dialogue, this was one of the last parts added to the song.

Before this session, Warren had been producing beats and saving them. When Nate Dogg was invited over to visit the apartment, he immediately liked the instrumental for Regulate. They began writing and recording the song together in the same session, inspired by the duet style of Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre's Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang, and Run-DMC. They decided the song only needed verses and no chorus. The lyrics were semi-autobiographical, but the lyrics related to the dice game incident happened to a friend of their's they witnessed on 61st Street.

In an NME interview, Warren G explained "That record was things that I went through, and friends of ours went through. We'd witnessed that and we'd been a part of it. We just told the story, and then on the hook we just let everybody's imagination flow."

Geitzenauer re-recorded the song's vocals at Track Studio in North Hollywood, noting that the track's lack of a hook was unusual with only the intro having the main riff. A radio-friendly version was also recorded, as Chris Lighty from Def Jam requested a cleaner version as the original would have had too many explicits words censored. The radio version became the main album version, while the original explicit version was never released.

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