N.W.A: American Gangstas
Dr. Dre rubs his mountainous right deltoid through a snug black T-shirt, not quite allowing himself to wince. His shoulder hurts. He has an online radio show to record, a sort-of-secret album to mix, a call from Jimmy Iovine coming any minute. But in the middle of an overscheduled July afternoon, Dre — genre-shaping beatmaker; oft-reluctant MC; mentor to Snoop, Eminem and Kendrick; walking, bass-heavy headphone brand — exudes a leonine air of serenity and control, as if he’s executive-producing his own behavior, moment by moment. A diamond-speckled watch is on his wrist (“I think it’s a Rolex — it was a gift”), and crispy white Air Force Ones are on his feet (legend has it he wears a different brand-new pair each day). He’s perched on the edge of an oversize brown leather ottoman in the dim lounge of the sleek, gated Sherman Oaks recording-studio complex he just bought and remodeled, after years of renting it out.
It was, under his current circumstances, a trivial purchase. “Right now, financially, I’m so fucking good,” says Dre, with some understatement. In the mid-Eighties, a couple of years before the formation of N.W.A, Andre Young was crashing on his cousin’s couch; he was so broke he couldn’t afford to bail himself out of jail as he collected piles of speeding tickets. Last year, when he and Iovine sold Beats to Apple Inc., Dre took home roughly $500 million. Witness the strength of street knowledge.
“I’m not a billionaire yet, man,” Dre says. “I will be, hopefully. One day. But let me tell you something: I never have to make another dollar in this lifetime. For the rest of my life, it’s just about having fun, being creative.”
Dre turned 50 in February, and has had a lot of chances lately to ponder the full breadth of his life’s journey. A big-studio but credibly gritty movie version of N.W.A’s story, Straight Outta Compton, is out on August 14th — Dre and his former bandmate Ice Cube were deeply involved as producers, with an eye toward preserving both verisimilitude and their legacy. The film was directed by F. Gary Gray, who spent some of his childhood in South Central Los Angeles and made Cube’s 1995 hood-comedy classic Friday. It lifts itself beyond the standard stuff of music biopics with its attention to the realities of life in Compton and South Central in the Eighties, where it was easier to find an AK-47 than a job, where the crack trade, gangbangers and cops — under the militaristic command of LAPD Chief Daryl F. Gates — were all out of control. “You had to see why we did the music,” says Ice Cube. “You know, not just ‘we were young, angry n—–s out of South Central,’ but why did we make those kind of records? We were living in the middle of dope dealing, gangbanging, police brutality, fucking Reaganomics, and there was nowhere to escape.”
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