It’s generally accepted that white rock'nroll has a long and unhealthy obsession with both psychologically unstable individuals and premature death.
Hip-hop is no different in this respect. Check Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” video or the cottage industry already building around the late OBD. This follows the more puzzling deification of original thug ‘poet’ 2Pac, along with more understandable lamentations for Aaliyah and Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopez. What self-respecting hip-hop sleeve would leave off its lengthy roll-call of dedications to “dead homies” or “fallen soldiers”?
Yeah, death sells, but, to paraphrase Megadeth, who’s buying? Acquaintance with the Grim Reaper might make for a good career move, but it’s not exactly an attractive one if you’re the artist in question.
Luckily for the desperate hip-hop artist, America also loves a survivor. In 2003 it was 50 Cent, last year it was Kanye West – even if that was a traffic accident - and in 2005 it’s Jayceon Taylor, who trumps Fiddy’s nine bullet wounds (the pussy) by having recovered from a three-day coma. (Fiddy appears here on two cuts and you can almost imagine the two battle-scarred rappers comparing exit wounds as they re-enact Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss’ aquatic injury scene in “Jaws”.)
Certainly, Taylor’s is the kind of story that virtually guarantees success in a genre which pretty much exists between the blur of fantasy and reality. And with producers like Dr Dre, Kanye West and Just Blaze onboard he really couldn’t fail. Musically, this is probably the greatest major label hip-hop album of recent years – a near faultless succession of hi-tech beats and ominously catchy hooks that easily trounces 50’s debut for consistency and Eminem’s recent anaemic effort.
Of these, the highlights have to be “Westside Story” which surely contains Dre’s greatest riff since “Family Affair”, West’s soul-laden “Dreams” and future G-Funk classic “Where I’m From”. All would perfectly soundtrack rolling down Compton streets in a big f*ck-off car “sucking on endo, sipping on gin'n'juice”.
If only these were matched by the lyrics, but rapwise, it’s questionable what exactly The Game brings to the, err, game, aside from a near-death experience. The lineage from “Straight Outta Compton” to “The Chronic”, “Doggystyle” and “Get Rich Or Die Trying” is pretty obvious, but “The Documentary” is almost totally lacking in shock value, humour or insight. Instead, we get a depressingly familiar litany of “bitches”, “chronic” and “Bloods/Crips”. It’s almost laughably clichéd. If you fed The Game’s CV into a record company’s marketing machine, this is undoubtedly what would spew out.
The overriding impression is that “The Documentary” could be the biggest fanboy album of all time (Taylor sports an NWA tattoo while “More Fun and Games” lifts liberally from “Gangsta Gangsta”) and that The Game, as much as he thinks he’s a player, is being played by others far more powerful than himself.
