He’ll still drop a verse here and there and produce, but it’s hard to imagine another album after this, not after hitting AARP age. Unlike other rappers who retire and come back so much that it makes Brett Favre blush, there’s every reason to believe Compton is Dre’s swansong. He didn’t change his game to adapt to them, he found rappers who could fit inside his own style of beats, which is why, despite sounding different, Snoop, Eminem and Kendrick Lamar - Dre’s three biggest proteges - all have a similar stylistic flow. And therein lies the beauty of Dre’s talent discovery. The bevy of guests help the album, as they always have. The track Genocide could have been on either of Dre’s first two albums, yet sounds as modern as Still D.R.E. His verse on Satisfiction is a perfect sendoff to his mentor. The first appearance of Snoop Dogg on Compton is the musical equivalent of a superhero coming into focus. The way he uses symphonic sound to change mood - that’s something that could portend a move to scoring movies, a la a much different musical voice, Trent Reznor. It’s unmistakable Dre, from beginning to end. It’s a brand new, old-school album, very similar to Guns N’ Roses similarly long-awaited 2007 epic, Chinese Democracy, especially in that a lot of Compton is about the struggle to get the album (long rumored to be called Detox) completed. Compton isn’t a concept album as much as it’s a 62-minute ode to west-coast rap, a journey through a quarter-century of music, but one that never recedes into nostalgia, except when giving late-NWA member Eazy-E a shout-out. In the past year, Dre and Kendrick have proved that theory wrong. When the song turns into a murder gone wrong, the kind that Dre himself has made a purpose of insulating himself from during the east coast/west coast battle, it becomes a four-minute trilogy and insta-classic.įor years, people in the music industry have buried the concept of an album over and over, saying such collections of music are passé. Then, midway through, Xzibit gets his turn to bat in this musical All-Star game and gets a retro, Chronic-like, piano-driven beat behind him. Loose Cannons starts like late-period Jay, all flash, no sizzle. It’s boring.ĭre, though, still has the capacity to surprise. Too aware of this, Jigga has been relegated to writing rhymes about Tom Ford, but not as aspirational rap, as an “I just texted Tom Ford” style rap. He can’t rap about D’Evils in Marcy and knows this - not with a famous wife and hundreds of millions in the bank. He was speaking from experience not his current stature. Years ago, when he rapped the sage advice “don’t stop at stop signs with bullet holes in ’em” you knew it had been ages since Dre had to heed those words but it nonetheless sounded as hard as hell and all-knowing as intended. Dre, like Nas before him, pulls this off. After that, rapping becomes about acting. And though hip-hop prides itself on authenticity, that goes out the window the instant your first album becomes a hit. But who cares? Frank Sinatra didn’t write his own music either. You can practically hear the criticisms that Dre isn’t from the streets anymore and that he doesn’t write his own material (guessing who ghost-wrote each of his verses is a fun parlor game - finding the Eminem verse isn’t very difficult). “I want it all/ I forgot I’m old enough, I have it all,” he raps on the album starter Talk About It. Instead of rapping about guns and weed, Dre speaks about those in the past tense. That Hennessy smooth voice you remember from that album, particularly in Nuthin But A ‘G’ Thang is gone, which is fine - anyone who wanted The Chronic II is about 20 years too late. But, as is his style, he’s judicious, frequently letting others have the spotlight, just like he did in his first album track ever, when he essentially let Snoop have Dre Day. With a little more bulldog in his voice than usual, maybe from working so much with Kendrick Lamar, Dre shines on the tracks he allows himself to dominate. Dre of 19, but it hardly matters on Compton, the companion soundtrack to the NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton, which hits theaters next week. Dre’s third and final album, Compton, somehow manages to live up to 16 years of mythic expectations, taking the raw west-coast sound that made him a star with N.W.A and turned him into one of the biggest rappers alive, mixing it with the modern hip-hop sensibility that should have passed him by years ago and dropping another classic CD for y’all to vibe with, 23 years after his first.
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