Dr. Dre f. Kendrick Lamar - "Genocide" Is A G Anthem For The Michael Brown Era

It's safe to say that the jury's still out on Compton, Dr. Dre's unlooked-for yet paradoxically hotly-anticipated soundtrack to the N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton (if you want a seat in the jurybox, you can stream the whole thing via Apple music). But even while we wait for the verdict to come down on whether this is Dre's weakest album (or whether it could be his weakest yet still a classic, you know, Love Movement-style) certain joints are grabbing the attention of DJs and music heads. It hardly takes a DJ (or a rocket scientist) to know that the first move would be to scan the tracklist and hit play on the first track that has the name Kendrick Lamar next to it.

If you did that, the first sound to assault your earhole would be "Genocide"; a collage of gunshot snares and de-tuned bass which is best described as whimsically evil, managing the near-impossible before the first syllable is uttered; a hip-hop beat so distinctive as to be truly original. The beat is just prelude, however, to the combined vocals of Dre, Kendrick, Marsha Ambrosius and the patois-inflected opening verse of Candice Pillay. The lyrical content ranges from murder of the audio variety ("reload the protools and got clips in both trays") to gang-related ("recognize whatever side the sides reside until the dead has risen") and interpolates what sound like subliminal shout outs to Shakespeare and Super Cat. But even with all that, the track's true power resides in the collision between its title, its moment and its chorus: "It's Murder / It's Murder / Call 911, Emergency / Hands up in the air for the world to see / It's All Murder").

There's no doubt that countless young people are examining their feelings about this track and these words as we are--from inside the one-year anniversary of Michael Brown's death at the hands of the police, listening even as they absorb the news that another young black man lost his life when shots were fired by plainclothes police, putting a tragic punctuation mark on a peaceful protest in Brown's memory. Whether by accident or prophecy, in crafting a G-anthem for the post-millennial landscape, Dre and Kendrick have gifted the #BlackLivesMatter movement with a powerful mantra, an indelible hook that boils the reality of extra-judicial killings down to this baseline truth: It's Murder.

>>>Stream Compton In Full (via Apple Music)