#documentary 2

The Documentary 2 by the Game - A review by Michael Schwartz

The Documentary 2 by The Game is a decent album as a whole, but if you want to listen to this album straight through, don’t. There are a nice amount of good songs and interesting parts in this album, but they seemed to be put in the shadows of the other songs, which were mediocre at best. And it is LONG. Way too long. This album is 73 minutes!! Who has time to listen to an album of that length with only a couple of standout songs? That aside, on with the album.

The first thing that stands out is the feature list. The Game brought out the big guns, with Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Kendrick Lamar, Future (both Kendrick and Future off one of their best albums), and Kanye West.

The album starts out wonderfully with Kendrick on the first song, “On Me”. It starts off with a deep murky feel while The Game is rapping, and right when Kendrick comes in it turns to this funky bass line. This song is stellar and so is Lamar, but that’s just expected by now. There’s an interesting beat, cool background vocals, and The Game is very good as well. This might be the best song in the album.

“Don’t Trip” is also a very good song with great verses from Ice Cube and Dr. Dre. Somehow a will.i.am feature doesn’t make this a bad song. 

“Standing on Ferraris” ft. Diddy is just great. It has a sampled horn line from Screamin’ Jay Hawkins “I Put A Spell On You” and a great beat behind it. The clever writing adds to the songs already standout qualities.

Now, “Circles” ft. Q-Tip, Eric Bellinger, and Sha Sha is definitely one of the most interesting songs on this album. The trade off between Sha Sha and The Game’s vocals creates a beautiful dissonance with her sweet melodic singing and his rough rapping. Eric Bellinger’s chorus fits perfectly and creates a wonderful hook. This song is very different from the others on the album. It’s about a complicated relationship between two people and is about something other than thug life, easily my favorite song off the album. Other songs of note are “Mula” ft. Kanye West, “Dedicated” ft. Future and Sonyae, “100” ft. Drake, and “Summertime” ft. Jelly Roll.

“The Documentary 2” isn’t a bad album. Not one bit. But it’s not a great album. It’s filled with a couple good songs, a lot of decent songs, and one bad song,

“LA” ft. Snoop Dogg, will.i.am, and Fergie. This song should’ve been scrapped. It’s a five minute song with a disgusting hook and boring verses that end in this stupid “La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la, look at me in my Impala” or “in my Cadillac car” or “fancy car.” It just makes me cringe. When Snoop Dogg was featured on Dr. Dre’s “Compton”, we saw a Snoop Dogg who sounded interesting again. He was aggressive, and this was something I hoped he would keep doing, but with “LA” he goes back to this played out, floaty style, but even Snoop at his best doubtfully could have made this song better. The hook sounds like two annoyingly autotuned voices vying for our attention. This song was a terrible choice for the end song and is a big disappointment.