Up in Smoke Tour launches — Dr. Dre, Eminem, Snoop, Ice Cube

Why it matters

The Up in Smoke Tour is one of the high-water marks of arena-rap touring as a commercial format. Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Ice Cube, Warren G, Xzibit, Nate Dogg, and D12 across 44 cities in summer 2000. The tour grossed around $22 million. The DVD released afterwards sold over a million copies. What the tour did, beyond the obvious commercial achievement, is bring a roster onto one stage that, on paper, had been adversarial for most of the previous decade. Dre and Cube had been at NWA war for years. Dre and Snoop had been Death Row labelmates and post-Death-Row business unknowns. Eminem was the new commercial center. Bringing all of them onto one stage every night was a statement that the West Coast had reorganized itself, post-Tupac and post-Eazy, into a single touring entity. The footage from those nights (the Sony Pictures documentary that came out later in 2000) is one of the better records of late-1990s and early-2000s rap as a stage production. You should watch the DVD if you have not. The lineup, on one stage, at that volume, is the kind of thing that does not happen often.