(Focus… ditched the label in 2009 after spending years on end piling music into the Detox dump.
Throughout, session musicians polish out the edges, and Dre continues to lean on live keys and bass to fill out chunky bottom ends.ĭre's quietest and most stalwart collaborator behind the boards on Compton is Focus…, son of Chic bassist Bernard Edwards and a longtime Aftermath in-house guy. At one moment, he's sampling an obscure modern funk band from Italy (for "One Shot One Kill") and the next, lifting a guitar riff from a random Turkish psychedelic burner. Musically, the album is a reminder that Dre's palette and appetite for sound has always been eclectic, and rather than retread, we hear him pushing into new territory. To be sure, he's always been an obvious conduit as a rapper, unashamedly channeling the flow and cadence of his ghostwriters, but here he's adopted a delivery that spills out in bursts, his register is higher, and he's snarling it's not the only place on Compton that Dre's rapping is both impressively light-footed and almost unrecognizable. The song is also the first instance on the album of Dre sounding completely unlike himself.
"Genocide" is the earliest and clearest standout, carrying one of two showstopping Kendrick Lamar appearances, who bends and stretches his voice to the limits he encountered on To Pimp a Butterfly. It's a reminder that Dre is the richest hip-hop artist ever, but he actually seems more interested in pinning down and framing his influence than bragging about his bank account. (Either one or both of them are credited on all but one of Dre's vocal tracks.) When Dre comes in on verse two of the sweeping opener "Talk About It", he brags about his unopened Eminem royalty checks and jokes about buying the state of California. On Compton he's taken the approach and doubled down, and while the album is frequently personal, it's also communal, pushing his own voice towards the margins in favor of other vocalists. The first raps we hear on the album are delivered by King Mez, a Raleigh native who, alongside Justus, the least known of the album's features, appears to have helped Dre with the bulk of his lyric writing. Dre has always relied on other rappers and producers for inspiration and his own legacy is tied up in showcasing talent, lifting and rearranging it for his own cause. If there's a surprise here, it's that Dre, a 50-year-old near-billionaire long suspected of drifting out of touch, sounds charged-up, nimble, and relevant. Instead, the album finds Dre coming to terms with his career for himself, not others.
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In that way, he's toying with the bookends of his career, polishing the story of his come-up while coming to terms with how to step away for good.ĭre has been here before, of course, years removed from a game-changer with an entire industry's eyes trained on him, wondering, "How might he do it again?" But he's less invested in building a comeback narrative on Compton than he was on 2001.
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For the first time in more than a decade, Dre's inspiration met up with a corporate deadline, and you can see the appeal for him: an opportunity to bundle his final record with a blockbuster movie about his career's origins. And yet, that haste helps the album sound more of-the-moment and free-flowing. Dre claims the recording was inspired by the set of Straight Outta Compton, the just-released biopic about N.W.A., and for a guy who's been helplessly coddling music in private for years, Compton ended up being a bit of a rush job. If anything, the album is undersold by its billing as a soundtrack, a tag that misleads how well it stands on its own originality. It must have been a unique catharsis, purging an undeliverable hype with something tangible finally in hand. Years of build-up washed away in the cancellation. News that Dre had scrapped Detox entirely was confirmed alongside the announcement of this new album.
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