On July 11, YouTube will release a documentary called G Funk that outlines the birth of G-funk music in the early '90s and explores the impact it had on hip-hop in the years to come.
Directed by Karam Gill, the documentary focuses in on Snoop Dogg, Warren G, and Nate Dogg of legendary California group 213 and tells the story of their innovative sound. "We wasn't shit until we all came together," Snoop says in the extended trailer. "We took all those powers and maximized our strengths."
Discussing the impact of the G-funk sound on rap music of today, L.A. radio host Big Boy says, "If you were to delete G-funk music, rap today would be totally different."
Younger artists like Wiz Khalifa agree: "That era of music is always going to be a part of me."
Last year, Warren G told Complex about the creation of the documentary and explained, "I’ve been trying to do my own documentary for a long time. One day I was doing a show and met Karam and I told him 'just follow me around, I want you to get some footage so I can have content for my website.' He got a lot of content. He was so good at it, I told him 'I want you to shoot my documentary.'" He added, "We sat down and I told him the whole run down of how everything went. And he nailed it, he put it in story form, laid it out, mapped it out with a storyline."
Speaking on the research that went into G Funk, Gill said, "I had a 20-page document that outlined the entire chronological history of Snoop, Nate, Warren, Dre, Death Row Records and G-funk's entire trajectory as it progressed at the time. I had two 6-foot boards that outlined acts one, two and three; the question I need to get in each act, where each interview pieced in, where the archival pieced in, where we do re-enactments..."
The documentary—which will be available exclusively for YouTube Premium subscribers—features interviews from Snoop Dogg, Warren G, Ice-T, Chuck D, Too Short, Kurupt, The D.O.C., Big Boy, Khalifa, and more. You can watch the extended trailer up top.
