“This here’s Dr Dre! And I’ve pulled this one out of the vault! Come on!” Shouting over the top of the unreleased ‘Naked’ – played for the first time on his Beats 1 show The Pharmacy on Saturday (November 7) – the Compton rapper sounded like he was foaming at the mouth with excitement. Fair enough. ‘Naked’ comes only three months after the solid ‘Compton’, Dre’s first release since ‘2001’. He’s on a bit of a roll.
Like many of the songs on that album, this is bold, brash and banging. The beat is a monster: its screeching and pounding mean the song always feels on the verge of explosion. Vocals from Liverpudlian neo-soul singer Marsha Ambrosius (who appears on four tracks on ‘Compton’) soften things up only a little. Sly Piper (aka Sylvester Jordan, a relative unknown who has worked with 50 Cent and Kelly Rowland) is also somewhere in the background, but ‘Naked’ is all about Dre. His forcefulness makes a sub-two minute snippet feel tangible and exciting. However, his steamroller presence is let down by his subject matter (stripping) and ham-fisted lyrics (“If she hot enough to get it/ Well get it girl”). You can’t have everything. ‘Naked’ isn’t better than the 16 songs that beat it onto ‘Compton’, but a beat this good deserves its reprieve from the cutting-room floor.
