Did you forget about Dre? No one would blame you if you did. The godfather of gangster rap has spent more time making headphones than releasing new music lately. In fact, over the past 16 years he's released just two songs, apparently sleeping on a Chinese Democracy-style album called Detox that he says he canned because: "I worked my ass off on it, and I don't think I did a good enough job."
It doesn't matter. Scrapping Detox in favour of Compton, Dre's quickfire soundtrack to the legacy-cementing NWA movie Straight Outta Compton, might be his best musical decision in more than a decade. A companion piece to Kendrick Lamar's similarly-themed To Pimp A Butterfly, Compton shows Dre's ability to craft a unified story out of seemingly disparate threads, to bamboozle with incredible studio trickery, and to pull together an incredible cast of gangster rap's major players, remains undiminished. Quite simply, Compton is a stunner.
It works as a soundtrack, it works as Dre's comeback, and it works as a showcase for some very fine hip-hop. Dre's own contributions are among the weakest here. He's not the world's best rapper, and at 50 he can't even claim to be the best left in NWA. On the otherwise excellent banger, Talk About It, Dre sounds sluggish and a little grumpy, while rapping lines like, "I'm too old, I forgot I got it all."
Dre's much better at drawing the best out of those around him. And he succeeds in getting a career-best performance out of Game on Just Another Day, brings Xzibit back from the dead on Loose Cannons, fires Eminem up on Medicine Man, and even manages to make Snoop Dogg relevent for the first time in years on the rowdy guitar rumble of Jon Connor.
Best of all is the presence of Lamar, Compton's finest, who's quickly ascended to world-beater. He shows his greatness on three tracks here: the crushing grind of Genocide, the wheel-spinning tension of Darkside/Gone, and Deep Water, which throws back to Dre's last album, 1999's 2001, with its clattering beats and slurred bass tricks.
