Game - The Doctor’s Advocate

After hearing the first six tracks of this album I was ready to turn this website into gamehiphop.com and start up a new fan club. Well, maybe not, but the album opens with some fire. In particular, Will.I.Am’s Compton is a hard-edged, bouncy track that allows Game to do what he does best; reinforce the [...]

After hearing the first six tracks of this album I was ready to turn this website into gamehiphop.com and start up a new fan club. Well, maybe not, but the album opens with some fire. In particular, Will.I.Am’s Compton is a hard-edged, bouncy track that allows Game to do what he does best; reinforce the LA stereotype that we fans seem to eat up, ie low-riding 64’s, wire rims, gang culture and of course Dre (who is mentioned thirty times on this album).

Speaking of LA stereotypes, the Just Blaze-produced Remedy is probably my favourite track on this album. Opening with As my Dayton’s spin, low-rider sittin low / hittin corners so hard, you can taste my rims, we pretty much know what we’re gonna be hearing for the next three minutes. But despite the ’same old’ nature of the lyrics, Game’s delivery on this track sounds as though he’s channeled the spirit of mid-nineties Los Angeles hip hop, the west coast’s golden period. I can’t say he sounds like one particular artist, but hearing this track got me all nostalgic for the days when I would play this stuff on tapes in my walkman.

One Blood and Let’s Ride are also highlights, but we’ve all heard them. Scott Storch produced two cuts here, Let’s Ride & Too Much. If you thought Let’s Ride sounded too much like a Dre beat, don’t listen to Too Much. It’s almost embarrassing, but if you don’t think about it that way, Too Much is another good track.

It’s around this area of The Doctor’s Advocate where things deteriorate a little. It’s as though Game recorded the first six or seven tracks with Dre at the helm, and the rest after the split. You can almost hear good guidance and a certain assurance and confidence througout the album’s opening. The Kanye-heavy Wouldn’t Go Far, while worth a few laughs, is skippable. Swizz Beats’ Scream On Em is further proof that Swizzy can be the best producer in hip hop or an expensive way to ruin a song, depending on which day you get him.

From here, we get a few down-tempo tracks. Skip skip skip and the west coast anthems kick back in. California Vacation is more ‘weed & low-riders’ with Snoop & Xzibit, and Bang, produced by Jelly Roll and featuring Kurupt and Daz sits somewhere between filler and my personal frustration with Game.

The album closes out with a completely redundant Jamie Foxx collab and the Nas-Just Blaze collab Why You Hate The Game, which I personally found a little heavy.

I do like this album, but I can’t help thinking it’s not what it could have been. Game is at most times a surprisingly gifted rapper, and other times sounds kinda amateur (listen to him cram too many words in a bar more than a few times here). It was always going to be impossible to bounce back from The Documentary, particularly without Dre at the helm. However, if your’e thinking in that realm, this is much better than 50’s The Massacre or Obie’s sophomore LP.

Game can write a decent track and has put together a good, but patchy, album here. With the west coast behind him and his skills steadily increasing, I think he’s got more classic material to come. He’s just gotta stop thinking about Dre.