Nowadays it's all Eminem and Outkast. But it's only five years since Death Row Records were the biggest thing in hip hop, and hip hop became for the first time the biggest thing in American music. This double CD package makes a decent fist of telling Death Row's astonishing story. The first half is mostly essential and usually astounding, the remainder little more than filler. But that's Death Row in a nutshell - they served up brilliance and bombast in equal measure.
Founded amid much acrimony by Marion 'Suge' Knight and Andre 'Dr Dre' Young, following the latter's departure from NWA, Death Row was controversial from the word go. Knight had become involved with white rap superstar Vanilla Ice, allegedly acquiring the artists' publishing rights following an incident involving two heavies and a 10th floor balcony. Dre's release from his NWA contract was allegedly secured by Knight with the aid of baseball bat-wielding enforcers.
And for a while the music matched the machismo and hype. In his new protegee, Long Beach gang member Calvin Broadus, Dre knew he had a winner - recast as Snoop Doggy Dogg, Broadus was an obvious star. Together they set to work on an album called 'The Chronic', a record that changed hip hop history. Making LA rap's second power base after New York, and opening new and lucrative marketing avenues for every major label that wanted to sell tales of sex and violence to an ever-growing suburban teenage constituency. Death Row sold millions of records and became the hottest record label in the world.
The first disc here collates 17 undeniable classics, and it's impressive listening, particularly given hip hop's tendency to date quickly. It's broad, sweeping, expansive music, made for cruising LA's endless freeways with the soft top down, and at its best - Dre's seismic 'Keep Their Heads Ringin', Rage's magnificent ode to her bizarre haircut, 'Afro Puffs', Dre and Cube's spine-tingling 'Natural Born Killaz', and the Snoop-led 'Chronic' standouts 'Lil' Ghetto Boy' and 'Nothin' But A G Thang' - it's magisterial.
But Death Row was holed beneath the waterline when Dre jumped ship, and an ugly feud with Puff Daddy's Bad Boy label ended with both imprints' most bankable stars the recently signed Tupac Shakur and The Notorious BIG dead and gangsta rap marginalised and vilified. It's from this latter period that the detritus of disc two has been culled, a series of lacklustre remixes and the work of lost putative stars leavened only by Pac's hateful but at least animated anti-Biggie rant 'Hit 'Em Up'. And it's in this dubious chest-beating context that the record's current promotion fits. Stickers proclaiming that "No one leaves Death Row alive" accompany press copies of this record, and if it's only conspiratorially minded music journalists who read that as a thinly veiled threat from the soon-to-be-freed Knight directed at Snoop and Dre, then the moon is probably made of green cheese and my grandmother is a gerbil.
At the time they were made, these records attracted a uniformly negative media response, their makers accused of glorifying murder and violence, encouraging impressionable teens to copy their every action. The artists' defence - that they were no more promoting criminality than Joe Pesci or Robert De Niro were in Casino and Goodfellas - was deemed inadequate and self-serving
And while the pervasive misogyny here is inexcusable, much of that critique now seems as juvenile as the records made by Death Row's many pale imitators. How times change. These days rappers who play on the duality between their in-song characters and their real life personas are considered poets of considerable genius; sexism, homophobia and ultraviolence are all just so much cleverness inside a multi-layered dialogue within the music. (Just as long as you're white, of course.) And in a world where Dre is routinely accorded genius status while turning out tired retreads of his brilliant back pages, this is as good a time as any to return to the source.
