Compton, Revisited

Rapper and producer Dr. Dre finally dropped his long-anticipated new album, Compton, which takes him back to his roots, the eponymous small city just south of Los Angeles. This is the setting for Dre’s early, Yo! MTV Raps-era group N.W.A., and the 1988 Straight Outta Compton album that launched them on a path that most certainly will place them among the few hip hop artists in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. A biopic on N.W.A.’s rise (and disintegration), also called Straight Outta Compton, will be released in theaters next Friday.

Meanwhile, the constant variable through all of these titles and narratives is Compton, the small city that became the poster image not only of gang life in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but also of middle-class black suburban dreams-turned-nightmares. The monologue intro on Dre’s new album reminds us of this setting: