Game: The R.E.D. Album
When The Game released his debut album, The Documentary in 2005, he had only been rapping for about four years. Armed with an almost scholarly knowledge of classic hip hop, The Game synthesized his knowledge into a classic album that resuscitated a nearly dead West Coast gangsta rap scene. But after falling out with 50 Cent, something clearly changed in The Game. He seemed more and more concerned with proving himself and proving his knowledge of hip hop rather than letting his work speak for itself. The Game seems to go further down that rabbit hole on his latest offering, The R.E.D. Album.
The R.E.D. Album is Game’s fourth album. By the time an artist has released four albums, listeners should have a pretty good idea of who the artist is. Yet I found myself several times during my listen of The R.E.D. Album thinking, “who is Game?” His messages seem to get garbled. On “Good Girls Go Bad,” Game raps “All the girls that hold it down, gettin’ beat on by their man/Respect women, I don’t care if they a 2 or a 10/We don’t beat on Kat Stacks we just bring it to an end/And we don’t wanna see Nicki fighting Lil Kim/There’s missin’ women out there, let’s just focus on them.” This is the type of refreshing message that the Beastie Boys started promoting with Paul’s Boutique. Yet the message is nullified when you take into account a few songs earlier on “Martians Vs. Goblins” when Game raps “Fuck you, I spit like I had kids with Erykah Badu/I fucked her on the day of that naked video shoot/I was sucking that pussy like it was wonton soup/Then I hit Lebron’s mom in bron-bron’s coupe/With Delonte West taping, we had bon-bons too.”
“Martians Vs Goblins” is the unequivical low point on The R.E.D. Album. The track shows Game completely losing everything that makes him the Game and instead adopting the style of his featured artist, Tyler, The Creator. In interviews when asked about the track, Game says that having Tyler on the track gave him the license to rap like the black Eminem. The quote begs the question “by your fourth album, should you still be trying to rap like another rapper? Shouldn’t you have your own style and pathos by then?”
Over and over again, Game seems to prove that his style has been lost on The R.E.D. Album. The few classic West Coast hip hop tracks he has on the album (“The City”, “Drug Test”, “Ricky”) are negated by tracks that feel completely driven by their featured artist not the Game. In the end, The R.E.D. Album is Game’s most mediocre album to date.
Rating: 5.6/10
MP3: Game featuring Drake “Good Girls Go Bad”
Buy: iTunes or Insound!
Game: The R.E.D. Album
