Dr. Dre has announced that he will be donating all of his artist royalties earned from Compton, the pioneering gangsta rapper-producer’s long-awaited new album, to help fund a new performing arts and entertainment facility in Compton. The news was announced today on Beats 1 radio DJ Zane Lowe’s program.
“I feel it’s the right thing to do and I hope everybody appreciates the work I put into this album,” Dre said. The mogul revealed that he’ll be working with Compton Mayor Aja Brown and her office on the center. “We’ve reached out to Aja Brown quite a few times in the last month or two,” Dre said. “I’ve been really trying to do something special for Compton and just couldn’t quite figure out what it was. She actually had this idea and she was already in the process of working on it. I said, ‘Boom, this is what we should do.'”
Dre will premiere the album tonight on Apple Music, by playing it as a loop for three hours beginning at 6 p.m. PST. At 9 p.m., Lowe will host a radio show dedicated to the album. The LP will come out officially on Friday, August 7th.
Speaking to Lowe, Dre mentioned the help he got from emerging artists on the album. “The new artists I got like King Mez and Justus, these two guys actually came in and just grinded with me throughout the entire project,” Dre said. “As a matter of fact, most of the lyrics are written by us three. We would just go into the studio, put up the track and for some reason, the stars aligned and we killed it, man.”
When it comes out, the record will boast 16 new Dr. Dre songs and feature appearances by Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, the Game and Xzibit, among others. Its release also signals an end to years of speculation about the release of Detox, the long-in-gestation, mythical album which he says he has abandoned. Compton, Dre has said, will be his “grand finale.”
Compton is subtitled “A Soundtrack by Dr. Dre” and serves as a companion piece to the N.W.A biopic Straight Outta Compton, which will hit theaters next Friday. “During principal photography, I felt myself going to the studio and being so inspired by the movie that I started recording an album,” Dre said on his Beats 1 program The Pharmacy earlier this month. “I kept it under wraps, and now the album is finished. It’s bananas…. I’m really proud of this.”
Regarding why he put the kibosh on Detox, Dre explained on The Pharmacy that it wasn’t up to snuff. “This is something you’re not gonna hear many artists say,” he said. “The reason Detox didn’t come out was because I didn’t like it. It wasn’t good. I’m gonna keep it all-the-way 1,000 with you, seriously. I worked my ass off on it, I don’t think I did a good enough job, and I couldn’t do that to my fans and I couldn’t do that to myself, to be perfectly honest with you. I just wasn’t feeling it.”
Compton, however, is an album he’s proud of. “I just wanted to do something special for Compton,” the producer said.
