![]() ![]() Even if Kendrick isn’t writing Dre’s verses, Dre is, at the very least, attempting some version of Kendrick’s style. Also: Dre has long worked with ghostwriters, and often on Compton, he adapts a halting, tourettic flow that has Kendrick’s fingerprints all over it. In a lot of ways, the album’s ambitious formlessness, its maximalist arrangements, and its everpresent conscience make it feel like Dre’s answer to Kendrick’s To Pimp A Butterfly. And I’m willing to bet that those three verses aren’t Kendrick’s only contributions to the album. It’s absolutely exhilarating everytime his voice drops in. He never adjusts his style so it’ll fit into Dre’s sonic universe, but he does rap a bit harder and more directly than he’s been doing lately. Kendrick gets three verses on Compton, and they’re all tricky and fiery and purposeful. This is the most confrontationally political album that Dre has helmed since Straight Outta Compton.įor that reason, the most important of the many, many guests on the album is Kendrick Lamar, Dre’s most recent prominent beneficiary. Paak denounces people who don’t come from the ghetto but who act self-righteous about rioting. But he also addresses larger ills, as he sees them: “Kids sipping Actavis and they ain’t even activated / Married to the internet, stuck in place, salivating / Ain’t nobody graduating.” Dre makes explicit reference to Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and on the lovely DJ Premier-produced “Animals,” the singer Anderson. Just as he did on 1999’s 2001, Dre grouses about his place in the world and the idea that the rest of the world isn’t doing gangsta rap right. And it’s the first of Dre’s three albums that’s more interested in societal forces and social injustice than in partying and street-level violence, though there’s still plenty of both. #Dr compton movieBut like American Gangster, it uses the release of this movie as an opportunity for Dre to look back on his past and to look inward at his motivations.Ĭompton opens with a newscaster’s voice explaining how Dre’s hometown went from suburban idyll to dangerous slum. The album doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the movie it’s like Jay-Z’s American Gangster in that way. But after keeping it on repeat all day, I’m more inclined to believe Dre. And it seemed like there was no way Dre could put together an album this elaborate on any sort of constrained timeline. For a little while, I had a theory that the album really was Detox, or at least the most recent version of it, rebranded and thrown out into the world so that Dre wouldn’t have to deal with the weight of all those years of expectation. And so it seemed strange that Compton was going to be something else: A relatively quickly-assembled record inspired by the release of the new N.W.A biopic Straight Outta Compton. Dre is a notorious perfectionist, a Kubrick type who forces vocalists to record their parts over and over until they’ve nailed exactly the sound that Dre had in his head. When Dre announced the album’s existence last week, he also said that he was shelving the long-gestating Detox because he didn’t really like it anymore. So he’s made the conscious decision to ignore that impulse entirely. ![]() Dre is richer than God, and he doesn’t have to make hits anymore. But he’s also taken that gift for expansiveness and allowed it to become messy and idiosyncratic. That’s absolutely there on Compton musically, this might be the brightest, most expansive thing I’ve heard all year. ![]() Dre has already operated on the principal that rap music can and should sound as bold and expansive and huge as, say, Quincy Jones’ production for Michael Jackson. On the first few lessons, it becomes hard to tell when one song ends and another begins - partly because the songs themselves are changing so much, partly because there’s so much sonic information that it takes your brain a few listens to even process it. Songs switch up halfway through, completely interrupting their own flows and becoming entirely new things. Instead, those textures are ends unto themselves, towering monuments to themselves. There’s not a single surefire radio single on the album. All those flourishes don’t necessarily serve songs or prop up hooks. #Dr compton fullCompton is an album absolutely stuffed with music, with vast orchestrations full of expensive sonic details and gleaming gunmetal textures. Instead, he’s come back with something overwhelming. Dre has done with Compton, his first album in 16 years. When an important artist disappears for years on end, the fear is always that the artist will finally return with something underwhelming. ![]()
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