The circumstances surrounding the release of Dr Dre’s third album are intriguing. By his reckoning, he was so inspired by the sight of his younger self, as played by actor Corey Hawkins, at a screening of the NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton, that he resolved to junk a decade’s worth of work on the endlessly delayed Detox, and start afresh. The result is Compton, an album that seems preoccupied with Dr Dre’s past: there is much reminiscence about the early days and initial success of NWA and it concludes with a track on which his former bandmate Eazy-E smiles proudly down from heaven at him, having presumably reconsidered the stance he took in the last years of his life, which he largely spent suggesting that Dr Dre was everything from a fake gangster who’d get shot if he ever went back to Compton to a closet homosexual. The album keeps reiterating that the 50-year-old billionaire who made it is no different from the 23-year-old who made NWA’s debut album: “nigga with an attitude, still getting active”, “that’s just the way it is and how it always was”, “fuck money, that shit could never change me.”
This is obviously a fairly bold claim, not least because it’s a little hard to imagine the man behind Express Yourself coming up with some of the more middle-aged opinions expressed on Compton. We variously learn that that the rapper feels girls grow up too fast these days, rolls his eyes in horror at reality TV, thinks that the way young people dress is evidence that the end of the world is nigh, doesn’t like modern music, worries that kids spend too much time on the internet and suspects that an honest day’s work would kill some people: “anybody complaining about their circumstances lost me, homie,” he offers in one surprisingly Daily Mail-ish outburst, “we ain’t even talking, fuck that energy.”
But in one sense, Dr Dre really hasn’t changed at all: he’s certainly still every bit as adept at making an impact as he was 27 years ago, albeit of a slightly different kind. The market was almost comically overstuffed with fantastic hip-hop albums in 1988 but Straight Outta Compton still managed to stand out, as Dre puts it here, “by making parents live in fear”: it was more brutally realistic, more amoral, more gleefully unpleasant and nihilistic than anything hip-hop, maybe even pop music as a whole, had come up with before. Three decades on, and the market is almost comically overstuffed with legendary artists unexpectedly releasing new albums without any of the usual warning or fanfare – over the last couple of years, everyone from Bowie to Beyoncé has done it – and yet the sudden appearance of Compton has made a pretty startling impression. It’s not just a major artistic statement – amping up its importance, Dre declared the album his “grand finale” – it’s also an act of philanthropy: he announced he’d be donating all his artist royalties to fund a performing arts centre in his beleaguered hometown. It’s a remarkable piece of PR for the Apple Music streaming service, which is currently the only place you can hear it: as a piece of exclusive content, it certainly makes rival Tidal’s artist-curated playlists – not least the one that exclusively revealed Coldplay like U2, Oasis and Redemption Song by Bob Marley – look a bit feeble.
You might expect an album hastily constructed in the teeth of a rare failure – the abandoned Detox was supposed to be “the most advanced rap album ever” – to betray a certain confusion or tentativeness, but what’s striking about Compton is the sheer boldness and confidence you can detect in everything from the nature of its launch to Dre’s willingness to cede centre stage throughout the album. Clearly aware that his skills in spotting talent, and in getting the best out of other artists, exceed his abilities as a rapper – “I’m the motherfucking one to breed ‘em and lead ‘em”, as he puts it – you hear far more from his guest stars than you do from him over the course of Compton: his voice doesn’t appear at all on two tracks. His own ghost-written verses are fine, more workmanlike than spectacular, although there’s fun to be had speculating which of his collaborators are responsible for which of his lines, not least the surprisingly politicised slant of Animals and Deep Water, the latter of which unexpectedly shifts from the standard topic of Dr Dre’s vast success and wealth to referencing the death of Eric Garner at the hands of the NYPD. The rest of the cast, however, really dazzles: the sense of artists upping their game in Dre’s presence is hard to avoid. The first line you hear out of Kendrick Lamar’s mouth, on Genocide, is the head-turning “recognise whatever side the sides reside until the dead is risen”, and the quality and depth of his contributions never falters from that point on. Old hands like Ice Cube and Cold 187um sound remarkably fresh, Eminem’s bug-eyed verse on Medicine Man continually ratchets up the tension – his flow and rhyme scheme changing and shifting to astonishing effect – while of the array of new Dre proteges the album introduces, Anderson .Paak is particularly striking and forceful: midway between rapping and singing, his hoarse presence dominates All In a Day’s Work.
But nowhere is Dre’s boldness and confidence more apparent than in Compton’s music. An occasional hint of trap about the beats and an intriguingly warped use of autotune in Darkside/Gone notwithstanding, it seems to stand slightly apart from current trends in hip-hop. Occasionally, on Loose Cannons or For the Love of Money, what it sounds most like is a 21st-century reboot of the hazy, soul-sample fuelled g-funk style Dre minted on his 1994 solo debut The Chronic. Elsewhere, it spirals off in unexpected directions. In Talk About It’s opening 30 seconds alone, the beat behind King Mez’s rap runs backwards, flips between the left and right speakers, tumbles forward like a cut-up drum’n’bass break, vanishes to be replaced by military-style rolls, is usurped by gunshots and suddenly shifts so it seems to be emphasising the lyrics, like someone banging a table as they make their point. It’s like the production of Compton in microcosm. It’s almost over-burdened with ideas, but they’re handled so deftly that it never feels clotted or difficult. It’s packed with fantastic moments: the sudden, dramatic key shifts that propel Loose Cannons forward; the paranoid chaos of Issues, with its needling, trebly electric guitar over a clomping, heavy beat; the dense mesh of electronically treated voices on Deep Water; the interlude in All in a Day’s Work’s that audaciously sets a gorgeous, soaring trumpet solo over the sound of what appears to be a cartoon chain gang.
Its only real flaws come when Compton tries a little too hard to underline the similarity between the Dr Dre of 2015 and the upstart producer of NWA. Loose Cannons ends with a horrible skit in which a woman is murdered and her body buried. It doesn’t seem to have any purpose whatsoever, other than to remind listeners that the same person who made Compton – dense, smart, complex and thought provoking – also once came up with the grim, witless second NWA album Efil4zaggin, home of One Less Bitch and To Kill a Hooker. You listen to it and think: why on earth would anyone want to suggest they haven’t moved on from that?
Similarly, there’s something weary and wearying about the awful line that pops up midway through Eminem’s guest appearance: “I even make the bitches I rape come,” says Marshall Mathers, who is 42 years old. It’s not shocking so much as pathetic, a pointless, uninspired moment in the middle of an astonishingly inspired display of Eminem’s prowess as a rapper. Like the murder skit, it smacks of an artist who feels suddenly impelled to go through the motions, which means it doesn’t have any place on an album that never otherwise appears to do that. Quite the opposite. Compton is part dewey-eyed reminiscence, part angry state-of-the-nation address, part episode of Grumpy Old Homies, but mostly it’s an hour-long demonstration that Dr Dre’s skills as producer and curator alike are still as potent as ever: so potent, that you can’t help but hope he’s bluffing about it being his grand finale.
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