One of Dr. Dre’s All Time Favorite Albums is by Nirvana

When you talk about genres overlapping, rock and hip-hop don’t always mesh well.

Even though bands like Rage Against the Machine make the sonic marriage sound so effortless, there’s also a 50/50 chance of a project going to hell the minute that the singer starts thinking that he should show off his MC skills behind the guitar riffs. Both genres do have respect for each other, and one hip-hop great has nothing but love for one of rock’s greatest bands.

Speaking in an interview about some of his influences, Dr. Dre actually counts Nirvana as one of his favorite acts, jamming out to ‘Stay Away’ in the documentary The Defiant Ones in saying “Yo, I’m starting to sweat right now. just listening to this shit. It’s bananas. Nirvana, Kurt Cobain, that’s my favorite rock group of all time.”

It’s not that hard to see why Nirvana would appeal to Dre though, a similar attitude to the vicious beats found on The Chronic. Then again, most people could be fairweather fans of the grunge gods, but Dre goes a little bit deeper than that, going so far as to name the band’s debut Bleach as one of the best records he has in his collection, saying “That’s one of my favorite albums ever made. I still listen to that shit to work out.”

That love seems to be a bit of a two-way street as well, with Kurt Cobain actually expressing his love for hip hop back in the day as well, saying “I think rap music is the only vital form of music that has been introduced to music in a long time since punk rock.

“It’s one of the only original forms of music that’s been introduced, but the white man doing rap is just like watching a white man dance. We can’t dance, we can’t rap.”

So for as much as Kurt might have wanted to change up Nirvana’s sound during the last few years of his life, maybe there’s a chance that one of their classic hits could be swamped in one of Dre’s projects.