For hip-hop legend Dr. Dre, his latest album, Compton, brings his career full circle. Stating the effort will be his last – and killing off Detox – the album, inspired by the forthcoming film Straight Outta Compton, debuts in a time where society mirrors that of Dr. Dre’s NWA days; filled with social injustice and police brutality. Compton has its share of strong names that assisted making for historic collaborations such as the assistance of producer DJ Premier, a genre deity in his own right, who worked with Dre for the first time on the track “Animals.”

DJ Premier tells us the song from he and Dre didn’t initially start as a song titled “Animals,” nor did it originally have the input of the NWA member. The song was a product of a visit for DJ Premier to Moscow, Russia to work on a song with rapper MF Doom and a producer with notoriety that would be the equivalent of Premier’s in the states, BMB Space Kid. Not one to normally collaborate with another producer, Preemo agreed to the trip after Doom assisted on his PRhyme album.

The track was set to combine Russian samples with the craft of Premier, however, a switch in the plan occurred as MF Doom fell ill. Before making the trip Premier was alerted that the song would feature a singer, Anderson Paak, resulting in the request of listening to his work in which he was “blown away” by a song title “Suede,” produced by Knxwledge, a familiar producer to DJ Premier. After building a rapport with Paak in Russia, two beats were created with BMB Space Kid, one of which became a different song titled “Till It’s Done,” another unused and agreed upon by BMB and Premier that it could go back to the states with the producer and Paak for their own use.

“When the shit started popping off in Baltimore with the police Anderson called me really upset about what’s going on and killing unarmed black men,” Premier shared. “When the whole riot thing was going on he wanted to send me some vocals he laid to the other beat and it was called ‘FSU,’ which stands for ‘Fuck the Shit Up.’

“That’s what he says in the hook, ‘don’t come around these parts, the world thinks we a bunch of animals, the only time they want to keep to keep the cameras on is when we fuckin’ shit up.’ The whole Freddie Gray thing really had an impact on both of us.”