The Game: Doctor's Advocate : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Even before The Game became rap's biggest success story of 2005, his rise felt inevitable. He had a personal tale full of white powder and bullet holes, he had a strong mix-tape background, and he had 50 Cent and Dr. Dre, who helped outfit the rapper's debut, The Documentary, with a bucketload of hooks. He also had a straightforward style and shout-along rhymes, which gave the album an anthemic quality. He repeated his talking points -- namely his criminal past, his hospitalization, his hip-hop epiphany -- in a raspy flow that hinted at Tupac but was more like the rap equivalent of John Mellencamp's tenor: In-your-face and Everyman-simple at once.

It didn't always work. Nothing gets corny faster than a forced down-home approach. The Documentary was long on awkward name-dropping and heavy-handed drama: "I had visions of makin' a classic/Then my wall turned black like I was starin' out of Stevie Wonder's glasses." On the disc's worst moments, there was little suggestion the Game had the skills to ever match Dre's other proteges.

Now the Game is back with Doctor's Advocate, which comes after a prolonged feud with 50 Cent and includes no music from Dr. Dre. The question is, Can the Game become his own man?

Yes -- sort of. Doctor's Advocate isn't the classic that message boards are calling it, but it is a middling yet pleasurable record. Dre may be gone, but the Game and superstar helpers such as Scott Storch, Kanye West and Will.i.am have held on to Dre's M.O.: classic West Coast hip-hop streamlined and spruced up for 2006, with sturdy boom-bap and breezy funk decorated with 808 bass, squiggly keyboards and plenty of hooks. "Too Much," a Storch-produced cut with slashing strings, sounds almost disco, and "It's Okay (One Blood)" is a shit-hot, slow-rolling banger. But that's about as adventurous as Doctor's Advocate gets.

Lyrically, it's a mixed bag. The Game is still kind of corny, but his skills have improved. If Jay-Z is "the Mike Jordan of recordin'," Game is actually more akin to Yao Ming: a star with early hype but late-blooming skills. He's more nimble and more assured than before, and he switches up his flow more often: On the excellent "Compton," he sounds like top-shelf Nas; he kills on the standout "Let's Ride"; and even the ridiculous title track -- a self-pitying slow jam about missing Dr. Dre -- finds Game adopting a choked sob somewhere between Eminem's manic cry on "Stan" and a weepy scene from One Life to Live.

There are more hot one-liners -- "Get another job/Hip-hop is not hiring/I'm the reason Dre feel comfortable retirin' " -- and less reiteration of his talking points. Amid ghetto soap operas and melodramatic autobiography, he also covers high times on the West Coast ("California Vacation"), gold digging ("Wouldn't Get Far") and violence-laden, street-cred-bolstering threats ("It's Okay [One Blood]").

Doctor's Advocate has two dozen rhymes that sound as dumb on record as on paper: "You can't get rid of me/I'm HIV" or "Switched the Impala from gold to chrome Daytons/And every time your bitch hear my voice, she masturbatin'." And though the Game knows he owes Dre a debt, the tributes to his mentor feel as insincere as Bill Clinton feeling your pain.

More than anything, Doctor's Advocate is about supreme confidence in the face of medium talent. As he says on "Too Much," "It's evident, my flow is heaven sent." Coming from one of the Game's heroes -- Pac, Biggie, even Dre -- that line would sound perfectly reasonable; here it's just shy of silly. The upside: The gap between the Game's talent and his opinion of himself is shrinking. And if Doctor's Advocate blows up like it should, he's not going anywhere.