The Documentary Review

Nothing in rap in 2005 sounds like an event the way this does. The West Coast has been out of the national conversation for most of a decade, and Aftermath answers with a budget you can hear in every bar: Dr. Dre on Higher and Start from Scratch, Just Blaze turning Church for Thugs into something closer to a cathedral than a beat, Kanye West flipping soul on Dreams, Timbaland on Put You on the Game, and Cool and Dre building Hate It or Love It into the single that defines the year.

It enters at number one, moves more than half a million copies in seven days and clears five million worldwide, and it does that on the strength of the sound at least as much as the man in front of it. That is the honest note. Several of the reviews at the time singled out the central performance as the least remarkable thing here, and they were not wrong that the name dropping is relentless or that his myth arrives secondhand.

It does not matter, and two decades of playback prove it. Dreams and Hate It or Love It are permanent. How We Do still moves a room. The record puts Compton back on the map, hands 50 Cent a hook he cannot outrun, and sets the template every West Coast major label rap album chases for the next ten years. The writing is a grade below the production and says so out loud. Everything else is untouchable.