Ten years after his smash hit (meaning multi-platinum) debut album, rapper The Game is back with the sequel. He becomes a professor in that he teaches the listener about the last twenty-five years of West Coast rap music. The link is he is from the heart of it all hailing from Compton and it was the backdrop of his own life. Tagging along for the ride are a variety of big names in hip hop like Dr. Dre (The Game’s hero/mentor), Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West, Drake, Q-Tip,will.i.am, Fergie, Future and Diddy. Along the way he shows the link between albums Straight Outta Compton to Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. When you take that into consideration that it is not surprising this is a large piece of work. The Documentary 2 contains two discs with thirty-six tracks. To listen to the album in it entirety you need to set aside two and a half hours. It is a commitment and rewards you with both low brow and high brow stuff and a variety of emotions. At times it feels like a work that has been done in stream of consciousness style, but the fact that you know how long it took to make you know that every moment of it was thought out and sweat over. That being said The Game obviously was not looking to make something that would play on the radio or be an obvious seller of millions of copies. However, it is his best work since The Documentary filled with ambition, sprawling and demonstrates his obvious love for hip hop music.
The Game – The Documentary 2
