Ice Cube Says Dr. Dre’s New Album Comes Out This Weekend

All over the country, kids from the high school class of 2017 are taking SAT prep courses and sharpening their driving skills to lock down their learners permits. They have a lot in common: they were born in the last full year of Clinton's presidency, the last year of the millennium, when everyone was stockpiling water and flashlights for the Y2K crash. There's one more thing that ties them together--they were born the same year as Dr. Dre's last solo album. 2001 will turn 16 later this year, and while the follow-up (tentatively titled Detox, up until recently) seemed as if it would never come, Ice Cube announced in a radio interview today (July 29) that Dre's third LP will be out this Saturday, August 1. "Dre is dropping an album inspired by [Straight Outta Compton]," Cube said, calling it "mega" and the version of the legendary producer that "everybody's been waiting for."

The N.W.A. biopic hits theaters August 14. Cube was careful to clarify that what Dre's dropping this weekend is an album inspired by the flick, rather than a soundtrack in the traditional sense. Elsewhere in the interview, the revered MC touches on the legal hoops N.W.A. had to jump through when they were starting out and on how protest songs like "Fuck the Police" feel as prescient as ever. "We got harassed a lot," he remembers, "especially on tour." He goes on: "They would harass us. They wasn't coming to really protect the show, they was more coming to harass us, trying to intimidate us. They would always read us the city ordinances on what you can say. We would get obscenity laws read to us and threatened that if we did any of this, we were going to jail."