12/28/2023 0 Comments Dr dre compton coverKendrick lends a sense of manic gravitas to three of the album’s darkest tracks: He’s thrillingly agnostic on “Genocide” (“Fuck your blessing, fuck your life, fuck your hope, fuck your mama, fuck your daddy, fuck your dead homie”), uncharacteristically casual on “Darkside/Gone,” and, it seems, coming for Drake on the impressionistic “Deep Water” (“Motherfucker know I started from the bottom”). Both records share a cinematic (and borderline operatic) quality, a nostalgia for the ghosts of West Coast rap past, and a sustained intensity that, as a listener, can sometimes feel downright depleting. In ambition, scope, and tone, Compton feels like a conscious companion piece to Lamar’s knotty epic To Pimp a Butterfly. More than any other guest, Kendrick looms largest over Compton - and not just because he has all the best verses. It’s instead a steely, braggadocious sneer from an elder: Is that the best you can do? Still, this ensemble is curated carefully enough to actually mean something - thinking about who’s not on this album is just as fascinating as who is.Įven though Dre doesn’t name names specifically, this is a record lobbing Molotov cocktails at hip-hop’s status quo: “Yeah, I mean, I listen to these rap records, half the time I’m suspicious,” he begins on the woozy and barbed “Satisfiction” a few lines later, Snoop drops in, delivering his lines with hilariously exaggerated disgust, as though he’s just smelled something foul in the room: “These labels always ask me to do a song with these niggas / Doc, I think it’s time for you to open up the pharmacy, nigga / And change this fuckin’ music shit, my nigga, you should consider.” Compton isn’t a record interested in glad-handing rap’s current reigning class or vampirically latching onto its proven hit-makers. True to form, Compton has enough guests to fill an Apple conference room: Kendrick Lamar, Eminem, Ice Cube, Xzibit, Jill Scott, Snoop Dogg, the Game, Marsha Ambrosius, Anderson. Dre has always been a reliable cultivator of new talent, and it’s easy to assume that Detox’s endless delays had something to do with him prioritizing other people’s records over his own. The first two voices we hear aren’t Dre but the boisterous, 25-year-old up-and-coming rapper King Mez (Dre has enough faith in him to feature him on the album three times, the kind of co-sign rising rappers’ dreams are made of), followed by the little-known Dallas rapper/crooner Justus. As far as savvily timed, corporate-tie-in-slash-comeback-albums go, the vividly panoramic Compton makes Jay Z’s Magna Carta Holy Grail look like a stick-figure drawing.Īnd it’s evident from its opening notes, beginning with a breathtaking moment when the monster-truck beat drops on “Talk About It”: This shit bangs. It’s not every day that you hear someone so successful still sound so genuinely hungry. It has, at its core, a fire that feels unexpected given Dre’s current level of material comfort. Compton is an ornately cinematic, meticulously realized ode to the embattled home Dre’s been repping since his days with N.W.A - the curtain opens on an ironically stuffy news broadcast: “Compton was the American Dream, sunny California with a palm tree in the front yard, the camper, the boat” - dotted with moments of technical daring and scene-stealing cameos. And how urgent, and how vital, and how audaciously, expensively weird. A bigger surprise than the simple fact of its (very rapid) release is just how self-evidently good this record is. As the years went by, the expectations became more impossible and the hype more biblical (in 2004, Dre’s onetime co-producer Scott Storch called it “the most advanced rap album musically and lyrically we’ll probably ever have a chance to listen to”), so it was something of a relief when Dre finally announced on Beats 1 last week that he’d scrapped Detox for the supremely humanizing reason that “it just wasn’t good.”īut, in the same breath, he confirmed that he had a new record on the way that he was actually proud of: Compton: A Soundtrack. Dre album” was a punch line in and of itself, thanks to the good doctor’s mythically delayed, over-ten-years-in-the-making third album, which, since 2001, was set to be called Detox. Before last week, the phrase “the forthcoming Dr. First, there is the fact that it exists at all. Dre’s new album, Compton: A Soundtrack, is a pleasant surprise. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes & Anderson. Death Row Presents From Compton to LongbeachĭJ Critical Hype, Kendrick Lamar & Dr.
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