While it's still a bit unclear how much new music will appear on the soundtrack, director of the long-in-development N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton F. Gary Gray announced today that contributions from Dr. Dre, Kendrick Lamar, and Eminem will appear on the tracklist. Speaking with MTV News at Comic-Con in San Diego, Gray confirmed that Dre led the charge on the soundtrack and curated a set of songs that showoff his development as a musician.
“Dr. Dre, it took him 15 years to step out and say, ’I want to do music again’ in the way that he’s doing it,'" Gray said. "The soundtrack is insane. Seriously, it’s incredible. He went deep and you can hear some of his influences, with jazz and soul and a little bit of funk. And Kendrick Lamar is on, Eminem; a lot of great guest stars. But it’s really Dre and how he’s evolved and how he’s matured as not only a person, but as an artist. It’s deep and it’s great.”
Hopefully we can also count on some N.W.A. music—classic or unreleased—and we already know that Dre was on-hand for the scoring of the movie itself. (Joseph Trapanese, who helped Daft Punk with the Tron: Legacy soundtrack, made use of a 60-piece orchestra for the Straight Outta Compton score.)
Speaking about the movie, which will release on August 14, Gray pledged that the story will fill in gaps for a lot of fans. “The details, the stories, the authenticity that you get and you can draw from these guys, it goes beyond Googling what happened in the Death Row days or Googling what happened when the group broke up,” he said. “And I think that’s what people want to see.”
