The Game: West Coast Resurrection [Clean] : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Before Dr. Dre signed the Game, hooked him up with 50 Cent and made him a star, another veteran West Coast producer saw potential in the young Jayceon Taylor. JT the Bigga Figga, who runs the Bay Area hip-hop label Get Low, flew the Compton, California, MC to San Francisco to cut some tracks in 2002. West Coast Resurrection, the second disc of material from those sessions, is timed to cash in on the Game's chart-crushing success. Solid tracks like "Krush Groove" and "Troublesome" pair the Game's off-the-cuff-sounding flow ("Spittin' a hundred bars straight without breaking a sweat") with spooky pizzicato strings and hard-edged 808 drums. But too much here is cookie-cutter gangsta rap, with muddy beats and boilerplate choruses ("We gangstas, nigga/So you better watch what you say/Or I'll empty the whole Glock in your face"); for the most part, the tracks on Resurrection would have been better off unrevived.