A Brooklyn rapper wrote one of the best-known West Coast rap songs

Dr. Dre thought his album was finished. He played The Chronic 2001, his much awaited follow up, for Jimmy Iovine, the record executive, and said that was it.

Steve Stoute, a young music executive working with Iovine, was sitting in the meeting. Iovine did not accept the answer. He asked Dre if he was sure, and then asked what Eminem, who was hot at the time, thought. Stoute said Iovine trusted his instincts to sense whether Dre was confident or whether there was room to go further. The questioning led to the same conclusion Iovine always reached. Iovine said, "let's try to make one more."

That extra song became Still D.R.E., the album's first single, written by a man from Brooklyn.

Dre played several beats to find the extra song, and Stoute picked five. He was handed a CD with those five beats and told to help get the record made. Stoute said he felt the weight of the responsibility as he boarded a plane to New York carrying music from Dr. Dre.

There was one beat he privately liked, but he did not say so at first. In New York, he played the CD for Timbaland, the hit producer, who immediately flagged that same beat as crazy. Stoute then called Jay-Z, the Brooklyn rapper, and played it for him. Jay-Z picked the exact same beat.

Stoute asked Jay-Z to create the song, and Jay-Z delivered Still D.R.E. He did not just write Dre's verses. He wrote everything Snoop Dogg sings on the hook, word for word. Stoute was struck by how completely Jay-Z captured a California sound.

Play the track and the details are all there. Jay-Z name checks the 405 freeway in Los Angeles, and, as Stoute put it, describes "khakis with the cuff in the crease," the pressed pants uniform of the neighborhood. He had never lived that life, but he understood its language and its nuance.

Stoute compared that ability to Kobe Bryant copying Michael Jordan's moves, and to Bob Dylan sitting in a club and recreating another player's sound exactly. Jay-Z, though from New York, could rap as if he had grown up on the West Coast.