On August 1, Dr. Dre announced that his third (and final?) album, entitled Compton: A Soundtrack, was being made available for streaming over Apple’s music streaming service in less than a week. We’ve all become familiar with the ‘no advance marketing campaign’ marketing campaign since Beyoncé dropped her self titled album without warning in 2013, but Dre’s announcement came as a bit of a surprise, especially for old hip-hop fans like me, who’ve been waiting for Dre’s third album when it was called Detox and was supposed to come out in 2003. During the ensuing period, I attended and graduated law school, passed the bar exam, got married and had a kid, and moved three times. If you were introduced to hip-hop around the same time that Taylor Swift and her brother started listening, you’ve never heard a new Dr. Dre album.

The one thing that I don’t love about my fifteen minute commute is that I don’t have
time to binge albums that aren’t toddler-safe. (I am aware that this is not actually a problem, and kind of sounds like a humblebrag.) I used to inhale albums the moment they were released. When I first bought Big Punisher’s Capital Punishment (from a spot in the Bronx that had the album on sale the Thursday before it was released in stores), I think I listened to the album six times during a two day stretch. When I added Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly to my Google Music Library (and marked it for offline listening), it took me about two weeks to finish the album. Dre is different. Compton came out on Thursday evening and by Saturday morning I listened to the whole thing twice.

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