Dr. Dre's Jay-Z Team-Up "Under Pressure" Hits the Web

On baseball's opening day, Dr. Dre told fans that "Under Pressure," the Jay-Z collaboration reportedly earmarked for Dre's long-delayed Detox, would be released in "the next two weeks or so." A third of the baseball season had since passed, but today, a version of "Under Pressure" arrived via New Music Cartel, who posted what appears to be a tagged and unmastered version of the track. UPDATE: Dre has since clarified that the leak is real, but unfinished. "I want to set the record straight for everybody who's been waiting to hear my music. The song that's on the Internet is an incomplete song that I'm still working on.  When it's ready, you'll be hearing it from me," he said in a statement posted on Interscope's website.

Opening with a sequence lifted directly from Kraftwerk's "Trans-Europe Express," Dr. Dre steps up to the microphone, making his first vocal appearance since Eminem's "Crack a Bottle," delivering his verse over a beat that sounds like the German kraut-rockers updating Beyoncé's "Naughty Girl." Dre had previously gone on the record stating Kraftwerk — along with Parliament Funkadelic, of course — served as major influences on Detox. Listen to the track over on Nah Right.

"Maybe I'm a real doc and this is CPR, maybe we need to breathe life in this shit," Dre raps in his first verse, making references to both Detox and Eminem's Relapse — a hint as to when these verses were probably recorded. (Jay-Z adds digs at Tiger Woods and beleaguered Washington Wizards guard Gilbert Arenas, further lending to the notion the track dates back at least six months ago.) "Trying to grow but I just can't seem to, having trouble cleaning up like FEMA," Jay-Z raps in his lone verse before Dre returns to close out the track. While this "Under Pressure" is already worthy of constant replays on Beats by Dre headphones, with no chorus to speak of and clocking in at under 2:30, the final version will likely expand on this early blueprint.

As Rolling Stone previously reported, Dre and Interscope exec Jimmy Iovine both promised that Detox would "definitely" arrive in 2010. Dre went one step further, telling Rap Radar last month the album would be released this fall. However, Snoop Dogg once bragged that Detox was completed and ready for the public, and that was June 2008. "I'm definitely gonna be putting the album out this year, finally," Dre said after Opening Day. "I think everyone is gonna be happy with it."

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Song Stories

“All Along the Watchtower”

The Jimi Hendrix Experience | 1968

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."

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