Dr Dre’s new album Compton was released in a haste. The details emerged less than two weeks ago, and it wasn’t immediately clear if it would have new songs, or just old tracks featured in the forthcoming NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton. I asked Ice Cube in August if he had any original verses on the album (he said: “No, not at all. It’s just music that’s more from the period”). In fact, Cube is on a brand new song on Compton, which dropped on Friday. It’s called Issues – and Cube kills it.
This shows how even Dre’s closest collaborators were kept in the dark about his plans. Dozens of people have recorded hundreds of hours of music for him since his last album dropped in 1999, and plenty, like Cube, probably thought the tracks would never see the light of day. The first question Dre fans had when hearing about Compton was: what happened to Detox? The mythical album, some 15 years in the making – originally planned as a “hip-hop musical” – has now been scrapped, Dre said recently on his radio show. Why? My best guess is because he didn’t want to play gangsta any more. When Rolling Stone asked Dre’s closest confidant Jimmy Iovine a few years ago what was up with Detox, he said: “That’s about the songs: ‘What do I do? Am I a gangsta any more?’ No.”
So, what is Dre? A nostalgia guy, it turns out. Compton is a companion piece to the Straight Outta Compton film, on which Dre is a producer, and which gave him the opportunity to plunge into his history. A close analogue is Jay Z’s 2007 album American Gangsta, which he put together quickly after seeing the Denzel Washington/Russell Crowe movie of the same name. American Gangsta gave Jay Z, by then a multimillionaire far removed from the Marcy Projects, an opportunity to tell stories from the perspective of the tough character he once was.
Dre is now, thanks to headphone sales, even richer than Jay Z, and Compton too lets him re-enact scenes from his former mean streets. It’s All on Me describes how the local hotheads and corrupt police informed his music with NWA:
Any minute niggas will start tripping and start shooting shit / On any given day I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’ / Face down on the pavement with the billy clubs / Took that feeling to the studio and cued it up
On the album we get a few interesting titbits about Dre’s upbringing in the titular city: how he received offers to make beats on his pager; how drug dealers would “overtip” him for his efforts. But Dre has always played his cards close to the vest, and the album is by no means a tell-all. The focus is on the sonic experience, and in this regard, Compton is a masterwork. It features untold layers of live and digital percussion, interpolations of other songs, effects and barely audible backing vocals. On For the Love of Money, for example, Jill Scott sings the chorus, but she does so below a layer of fuzz, as if to make it sound dated and remind listeners of the original hook on the Bone Thugs-N-Harmony track of the same name.
Compton sees Dre embrace audio abandon – any given line might be compressed, sped up, chopped or have its pitch manipulated. Dre’s rapping in particular has never been so heavily finessed and edited in post-production. In fact, it’s sometimes difficult to tell it’s him. The lumbering flow he was once known for has vanished, replaced with deft, aggressive bars that sometimes recall his protege, Kendrick Lamar.
Similarly to the work of another superproducer, Kanye West, Dre has clearly mined only the best bits from countless hours of his collaborators’ recordings. This explains why just about everyone featured delivers: veterans such as The Game, Eminem, Snoop Dogg, Xzibit and Above the Law’s Cold 187um, whose rapid, unhinged-sounding verse on Loose Cannons is particularly invigorating.
Not everything here is compelling. Dre’s verses sometimes feel thin lyrically, what with his complaining about people hitting him up for favours. It’s difficult to have sympathy for someone as rich, powerful and respected as he. And the work isn’t as timely as, say, Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, which tells a story about the years 2014 and 2015. But Compton has a timeless feeling that will likely help it age better. Its verses will take years to unpack, and the compositions will reward repeated listens. It’s clear Dre made the right decision. He’s always had brilliant instincts, and we should have trusted him to give us the wine when it was ready. Detox is dead. Long live Compton.
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