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. 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. 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. 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.”īack in the Dre … NWA (l-r) DJ Yella, MC Ren, Eazy-E and Dr Dre Photograph: CORBISīut 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. 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. 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.” 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. 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. T he circumstances surrounding the release of Dr Dre’s third album are intriguing.
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