In March 1996, in dispute with Suge Knight, Dr. Dre left Death Row to found his own label, Aftermath Entertainment. Until that moment, only three people have been lucky enough to leave the label and survive to tell it: co-founder The D.O.C., RBX and 2nd II None, if you don't also count Lil Bow Wow at seven years-old.
After their departure, Suge Knight increases his suffocating control over his paddock, however, he's seen losing one of his most valuable thoroughbreds: producer Andre Young will discover commercial success with rnb crossovers, will be dissed by everyone, but then it'll be a diaspora, and soon they'll all be leaving the Suge label. Up until that point, Dre has produced at least one track on every record that Death Row has released: in addition to his debut (1992), the debut of Snoop Dogg (1993), "Above the Rim" (1994), "Murder Was the Case" (1994), "Dogg Food" (1995) and "All Eyez on Me" (1996). Excluding the compilations, the other four are certified classics. Perhaps the Dogg Pound album is more of a misunderstood and hidden classic, a "timid classic", but the sales results have been so impressive that it would be unfair to underestimate it.
In any case, when Dr. Dre founds his new label, he decides to reward quality rather than quantity, for a banal reason: he's forced to make this choice, because his roster is empty. He has no one. And he starts signing artists whose careers started and ended on this album: RC, Sid McCoy, Mel-Man, Kim Summerson, Misc?, Hands-On, Maurice Wilcher, Jheryl Lockhart, Who'z Who, Sharief and Nowl. I've never heard of them and will never hear them again. Besides them, the guy signs King Tee and RBX, cousin of Snoop Dogg who was part of the inner circle of artists who worked on the g-funk finest records signed Snoop & Dre of the biennium 92-93, but that after leaving Death Row, he wasn't on very good terms with Dre, releasing a poisonous single "A.W.O.L." aka "Escape from Death Row", dissing against the top of the label and against Dr. Dre. Later, RBX makes peace with the producer and signs with his label.
The production is half done by Dr. Dre and the rest of the time by amateurs, even the live instrumentation is forgettable. The songs themselves aren't bad. I think producer Chris "The Glove" Taylor fully understood the matter: "People were mad because they wanted a Dr. Dre album and not a compilation, plus Dre took out the gangster style people wanted". Yeah. No, no, no, wait, this guy just didn't understand anything. People are mad 'cos this album is horrible. This compilation is awful. I don't even care whether or not it's a Dre album. You can put 16 ballads, but they've to be done right and these aren't. It's not good music. Then if you're one of the best producers of the moment, you comes from a huge masterpiece deeply revolutionary LP, and you put your name on such a disk, you cannot expect the audience response to be as great as four years ago.
There's no good rap here most of the time, barring King Tee's work, easily the best, and RBX's. "Been There Done That" is mediocre: those synths are cheap, the boom bap is meager, the drum is tired, the samples sound bad, and Dre's rap is uninspired. I wonder who wrote this and is J-Flexx, his ghostwriter at Death Row. I leave aside the posse of the supergroup Group Therapy, to write about it later. The rest of the choices are annoying: whiny synths, harsh, weak, limp, mushy drums, hard to digest, random noises, the mixing is hasty and coarse. This set of tracks, the more you delve into it, the more casual it seems, it's all assembled in a hurry to monetize as fast as possible and create efforts worth making in the following years. There's an unbearable mockery of ballad, one of the greatest and best legacies of the Middle Ages, which is continually ridiculed in the course of this project, for no reason: it's interesting what happens in Maurice Wilcher's "Please", where the drum is excessively evident in its scarcity, while the singer's voice is barely audible, not even the hook is heard.
"East Coast / West Coast Killas" should be an easy banger: it's published a few months after 2Pac's death, Dr. Dre rounds up a couple of East Coast MCs and a couple of West Coast MCs, in order to take the first steps towards definitive peace between the coasts in a rare bicoastal collaborative song. Over an honest, but not memorable, rhythm by Dr. Dre, there are RBX, KRS-One, B-Real and Nas. There should also be Scarface of Geto Boys, and some publications accredit him, but he's only featured in the music video in which he performs the hook. The song is one of the best on this CD, but it's not good: the boys all spit without effort, with no real intention, in a really sleepy way. Nas in 1996 is still one of the best MCs of the moment and kills the piece with embarrassing ease.
Distributed by Interscope, the same distribution house as Death Row, the album is received poorly by critics, and sells much better than you might expect from listening to it, reaching the top ten on the pop chart, third place among rnb releases, and platinum certification in less than a year. The album is poor, slow, bloated and excessive at 71 minutes, and completely forgettable, so much so that it isn't even considered Young's work by critics and fans. After the commercial flop of the other supergroup run by Dr. Dre, the East Coast infamous act The Firm, the label would seem doomed to oblivion until rescued by the Bart Simpson of rap, Marshall Mathers.
Rating: 4/10.
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