On the third full track on Compton rapper The Game’s 2011 release The R.E.D. Album, the Kendrick Lamar featuring “The City,” Game said, “Gave you The Documentary, shit was a classic/Gave you Doctor’s Advocate, you ripped it out the package/Came with LAX, since critics said it was average/I was stressed the fuck out, torn between Aftermath and Geffen, Interscope, now I got you in the scope.”
The Game put a fairly objective backstory on his career to that point so succinctly that it would be a waste to expound on those years from a critical standpoint. However, there are a few more dots that line The Game’s road, including acclaimed mixtapes, an absurdly anticipated debut album, beef with Death Row and his fallout with G-Unit. That The Game was as celebrated as he was in 2005 could explain his approach to the first track of his sixth album, Blood Moon: Year of the Wolf, “Bigger Than Me,” which is an O.G. announcing his presence by name dropping his peers and calling this generation’s rappers homosexuals who write bad verses.
Incidentally, Blood Moon: Year of the Wolf sees The Game at his most energized since Doctor’s Advocate. It makes what turns out to be another bloated The Game album a bit easier to listen to, but The Game is putting more of his energy into telling and less into showing. When The Game does show, it’s in bite-sized morsels. Take the outro of “The Purge,” where he talks about how surreal it is that his studio engineer is mourning his wife’s death and he’s celebrating his song’s life. It’s perhaps the best track on the album, but even that suffers from some of the downside of a bloated, big-budget album. While Stacy Barthe’s lyrics fit with the underlying fear The Game expresses, it sounds like it was forced onto the beat.
When The Game is more focused on telling than showing, mixed results give way to uninspired chest puffing. There’s the first verse of “Married To The Game,” where most of his bars end with variations of “-airy in this motherfucker”, such as “If gay is happy, I’m Tyler Perry in this motherfucker.” It is displays like this that show that The Game is washed; despite the intensity he does bring to a few of these tracks.
At the end of “Bigger Than Me,” The Game, who has been more or less a protectorate of the music industry since his falling out with G-Unit, calls the record industry soft. That he does so feels calculated because he does get a great deal of industry help on this album. Like any other Game album, this is a star-studded affair. 2 Chainz, T.I., Ty Dolla $ign, French Montana, Tyga, Bobby Shmurda, Lil’ Wayne, Chris Brown, and Young Jeezy all make appearances here. This isn’t really The Game biting the hand that feeds, but rather his co-sign of a rap aesthetic that values the triptych of occasional political commentary, raunchy humor, and the trap over rappers singing love songs. But even the guests have trouble saving this album. When a guest has an inspired appearance, such as Freddie Gibbs’ verse on “Hit Em Hard,” which would not qualify as a show stealer by any means, it further illuminates how uninteresting of a rapper The Game is in 2014.
To that end, Blood Moon: Year of the Wolf is such a downer of an album that it foretells history slowly starting to de-value The Game. It’ll be known that The Game stood tall for a few years on the West Coast in a time where the south was making the most hit records and The Game did influence his fare share of the same rappers that are selling records today. The Documentary and Doctor’s Advocate are still excellent albums, which is in large part because The Game’s shtick was fresher and the guests more sharp. Like Jesus Piece before it, Blood Moon: Year of the Wolf is a rapper stuck in 2005. He does point out that he was popular in a time when Andre 3000, Kanye, Eminem, Lil’ Wayne, and 50 Cent were releasing albums, but the difference between The Game and these five rappers is that nobody listens in to The Game in 2014. Based on Blood Moon: Year of the Wolf, I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
Album Rating: 2/5