One of the most recent – MK Asante’s 2013 memoir BUCK – shot rap verses through its narrative, letting readers in on what rappers already knew: that hip-hop was the 80s’ take on this tradition of bright minds writing themselves out of the ghetto and (quite literally) into the history books.

Some say African American literature started with autobiography – with Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave – and since then each literary generation has had to give birth to itself in prose: Richard Wright’s Black Boy, James Baldwin’s essays, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. And in the end he says, over a G-Funk beat and Hennessy-to-the-head violins, “I’m just talking to my diary.” Take One Shot One Kill, roaring wavelike out of Deep Water’s gritty subterranea For The Love Of Money pumps the sort of cinematic blow-up-the-earth mentality of recent synthwave music through a nightclub PA, with rattle-your-dental-fillings bass then there's the larger-than-life scope of All In A Day’s Work, riddled with a sunset jazz-funk that only this guy can pull off in 2015.ĭre often feels everywhere and nowhere throughout Compton, managing to at once deploy and transcend the genre conventions he helped invent – as on Satisfiction, where he and Snoop play the admonishing semi-retired patriarchs a nasty Chronic-style throwback that makes you wonder, can we call it braggadocio if it’s true? Across these 16 cuts, Dre and his collaborators weave an array of jazz samples with imbricate storylines and barbershop harmonies into an engrossing hip-hop heteroglossia. A precursor to some of the most ambitious and tastefully layered production, composition, and arrangement to come out of hip-hop in some years. Compton opens in similarly celluloid style, channeling Universal's even more bombastic theme. and gangsta rap, to G-Funk, and most recently to Kendrick Lamar (present here, he'll inevitably square up to it in his own right with To Pimp A Butterfly for best rap record of 2015), but it’s also Dre’s life story, a hip-hop autobiography of the highest order – a combination which brings to mind the fire of Miles: The Autobiography, that rare quality of the self-made Übermensch’s well-earned arrogance.Ģ001’s opening – an unauthorized cover of the THX “Deep Note” – indicated Dre had an essentially blockbuster, cinematic vision of what LP entertainment could be.

So Compton is part encomium to and chronicle of the troubled city that gave birth to N.W.A.

Dr dre compton full album 2015