The thing lopes and mumbles and crawls toward a moment of coherence that never comes, as if the entire undertaking were just one long chord progression waiting forever for resolution. I think - or do I only think that I think? - that this album is uncommonly good. Take the case of the soul singer D’Angelo and his album Black Messiah, 14 years in the making, slyly released (and, considering the stories of his wandering in the wilderness during that time, slyly titled) at the end of last year. The anticipation, hope, and wild conjecture that mark the wait take on lives of their own, complicating consumption at every turn. 2 on the Billboard charts and claimed 25 million streams on Apple Music in its first week, while the reception of Harper Lee’s first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird as some sort of long-lost sequel helped power over 1 million sales in less than seven days.īut the intervening years make critical success harder to ascertain.
Salinger to Axl Rose, has always functioned to build mystery, to frustrate, and also to tantalize: When will the masterpiece arrive? Has the artist gone crazy? Or become simply too good for this world? When it finally appears, the long-awaited work is often met with raging commercial success - Compton debuted at No.
The conspicuous pause in production, central to the mythos of artists ranging from J.D. I know that Dre, sort of miraculously, can still really rap.īut I also know - and here is where the confusion begins - that Compton is the first album offered by Dre since the last century, and that this kind of elongated delay is as much of an instrument as a drum machine, or a sample perfectly placed. I know that the album is also a testament to the mogul’s ear for talent, ever true: Some of Compton’s most electric moments come by way of old protégés - Eminem, Kendrick, the Game - and promising unknowns like the Bilal-reminiscent Anderson. I know that the distention and wooziness that stretch across the album double as a subtle reminder that several of the qualities now commonly attributed to southern rap have their provenance in and around Los Angeles County. Here is a partial list of the things I think I do know: I know that the drums on almost every track are characteristically Dre, a study in perfected slap and kick. Dre’s new album, Compton, released earlier this month as the official soundtrack to the new ( and increasingly, and rightly, controversial) N.W.A biopic Straight Outta Compton. I’m worried that in the end I’ll never know, not really, what I think about Dr.
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