Pitchfork

Game's been busy ever since he released his gazillion-selling debut The Documentary early last year. After a very public falling out with his G-Unit crew, he's waged an endless quixotic war against 50 Cent, hitting the mixtape circuit and unleashing torrent after torrent of deeply entertaining disses. He played an arm-slicing villain named Big Meat in the horrendous ghetto-action Tyrese vehicle Waist Deep. He got a butterfly tattooed on his face and then covered it up. He reportedly got engaged and then un-engaged. He launched a line of sneakers that I see prominently advertised every time I ride the subway, even though I've never actually seen anyone wearing them. He dropped former mentor Dr. Dre's name more times than anyone could count, even though, by all indications, Dre isn't even returning his phone calls. He got bounced around record labels like a virus. And he learned how to rap.

There were a lot of great things about The Documentary, but most of the time Game wasn't one of them. With all the album's glimmering, widescreen big-budget beats and nagging singsong 50 Cent hooks, the rapping grandma from "America's Got Talent" could've at least gone gold. A ton of money went into The Documentary, which turned out to be one of last year's best rap albums despite the guy who actually rapped on all the songs. Game had a gruff, clumsy cadence, and he obsessively namedropped every rapper he could think of; it was embarrassing. But on mixtape tracks like the 15-minute freestyle "300 Bars N Running", Game discovered how much fun it could be to play around with words. On The Doctor’s Advocate, Game mostly just updates the hamfisted style of the first record, still obsessively dropping names and making ill-advised proclamations about how he's the West Coast Rakim or whatever. But those quirks have hardened into a likeably bizarre personal style, and he's added some of the playfulness of his mixtapes. His constant self-mythologizing feels a little more convincing now that he can bring a certain vividness: "From the first clap I hurt rap; now watch the earth crack/ Bring the hearse back and take a lyrical dirtnap."

He's also found a much more interesting context for himself. On The Documentary, he was that new West Coast G-Unit guy. On The Doctor's Advocate, he's the guy who sold millions his first time out but still found himself abandoned by all the people who brought him into the world. And so he's become an army of one, a perennial underdog with a big mouth and a lot to prove. He makes contradictory claims all over the album, dissing 50 Cent and saying that he has no beef with him on the same song. The album, after all, is named after the guy who refused to have anything to do with it. On some songs, Game talks about how down he is with Dre: "The protégé of the D.R.E./ Take a picture with him and you gotta fuck me." On others, he casts himself as a victim of forces out of his control: "I was the Aftermath remedy till friends turned enemies." And on the title track, he's drunk and on the verge of tears: "Dre, I ain't mean to turn my back on you/ But I'm a man, and sometimes a man do what he gotta do." To make things even weirder, fellow Dre beneficiary Busta Rhymes shows up on the track to cosign Game's pleas for attention: "You gave him something that could make or break a nigga; you should face it/ So big I don't even think he was ready to embrace it." It's an expensively produced track from two star rappers, but it's apparently intended for an audience of one, and listening to it feels like eavesdropping.

To make matters even more complicated, the actual sonics of the album feel like a further entreaty to Dre. There might not be any Dr. Dre tracks on The Doctor's Advocate, but it sounds more like a late-period Dre album than The Documentary did. Game enlists Dre imitators like Scott Storch and Jonathan "JR" Rotem to steal Dre's chilly guitar plucks and screaming organs and smeary synths. On "Compton", the Black Eyed Peas' Will.I.Am., of all people, pulls off a great little simulacra of Dre's chunky, menacing N.W.A beats. Even the video for "Let's Ride" is basically a remake of "Nothin' But a G Thang".

The whole album is like that; Game airs out his dirty laundry and hopelessly tries to work out all his issues with rap and fame and failed relationships, and we try to figure out what the hell is wrong with him. "Why You Hate the Game", the epic nine-minute closing track, has a sparkling piano-heavy Just Blaze track and a guest appearance from an on-fire Nas ("Pro-black, I don't pick cotton out of aspirin bottles"), and Game ends it all on a note of unresolved ambivalence: "I still think about my nigga from time to time/ Make me wanna call 50 and let him know what's on my mind/ But I just held back cuz we ain't beefing like that/ He ain't Big and I ain't Pac and we just eating off rap." As rap music, The Doctor’s Advocate is good; as tangled psychodrama, it's better.