Raleigh rapper King Mez has the most writing credits on Compton besides Dre. He also served as the reference voice for every Dre verse on the album and recorded backing vocals on every track save for one. Mez has as much to do with the industrial-grey tone of Compton anyone (at one point, our interview is interrupted when he gets an impromptu call from Dre himself).

To hear Mez tell it, he was brought in late last year, between the death of Detox and Dre’s decision to press on with his new project. "When I got the opportunity to write for Dre I knew it was a dream come true, but a lot of people were worried for me,” he laughs. “Like, ‘Oh man, you’re going over there to write for that album? So many people have tried and have been unsuccessful.’ But I wasn’t around for the times that he’s been uninspired or whatever—the second I met him, we had chemistry. I knew the album was gonna come out.

“We originally built on older music he had, stuff that sounded like an updated 2001,” Mez adds, referencing Dre’s slick 1999 opus. He’s diplomatic, but there is a distinctive lack of enthusiasm in his voice describing those early tracks, all of which quickly fell by the wayside once Dre enlisted a fresh batch of younger MCs and producers. "The people that came in really changed the sound of the album,” Mez says.

According to the rapper, the turning point came when DJ Dahi, the Inglewood producer responsible for Drake’s “Worst Behavior” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Money Trees”, submitted the clattering beat for what would become the album’s fanfare, “Talk About It”. “That’s one of the more right now-sounding records on the album,” Mez observes. "I think it really changed Dre’s perspective. Before that, we had a different intro that was really big, and it sounded good, but we all decided it wasn’t right for the album."

When DJ Dahi first sent over the beat that became “Talk About It”, it was without much hope: Dre’s camp had been collecting music for years, all of it eventually dying on the broken-dreams heap of Detox. “I didn’t think anything of it,” says Dahi. “He hadn’t done anything in 16 years, and a lot of people had been working with him, so I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t meet Dre until much later, and then I asked him what the project was, and he just said, ‘It’s not The Chronic and it’s not 2001.’”

The final version of “Talk About It” begins with Mez bleating “I don’t give one fuck” in a strangled voice that sets the record’s hectic pace. Mez co-wrote most of Dre’s verses with the producer’s 25-year-old protégé Justus, including Dre’s own “Talk About It” salvo. “Justus was like, 'Man, we gotta come in and say something outrageous. It’s gotta be like buying the state of California or something,'” Mez remembers. “He was joking, but I was like, 'That actually should be it.’ So I went in, rapped the cadence, and we came up with the next eight to 10 bars before we presented it to Dre. It ended up being the first verse he rapped on a solo record since 2001."

Dahi says that watching Dre was an education in surgical adjustments. “When I think about Dre’s music, I think of these really vivid colors—his tracks always feel like a movie, you know?” he says. "I feel like so much of his music happens in mixing. It’s almost not fair. He has his own way of tweaking a beat. You give him anything, and he finds a way to make it hit differently, and you say, ‘Oh, that’s some dope shit.' It’s his ear."

For “Talk About It”, Dahi paid close attention to those tweaks and says the changes were subtle but profound: “The kick and snare were so much further up than I would have put them; the snare and kick are the motor of hip-hop records, and Dre’s really good at finding that motor so that everything else falls into place behind it."