The Game's album titles tend to be more revealing than intended. His first, 2005's The Documentary, claimed raw street level objectivity but also foreshadowed the fictional street stories and publicity beef that would soon follow. 2006's Doctor's Advocate was a frenzy of name-dropping, much of it reserved for Dr. Dre, the title's medical expert. Shortly after the album's release though, Game and Dre (the engineer of so many gangsta rapper's careers) had a major falling out. The advocate had been dismissed. With LAX, Game is again saying more than he means. Named for his hometown's airport, the album marks the departure of a hip hop subgenre, the end of gangsta rap's journey to the top of the charts and back down.
Game will never be remembered as a great gangsta rapper – a fact sadly confirmed here, on the weakest of his three albums – but he will go down as the last "big" gangsta rapper. After the disastrous turn in 50 Cent's career, the failure of the refashioned gangsta Busta Rhymes (brought to you by Dr. Dre, who else?), and the takeover by the Kanyes, Weezies and Lupes, Game is the only guy left rapping hard about drugs, cars, guns, women and (occasionally, evasively) his feelings. How fitting then that LAX is book-ended by prayers from one of Game's biggest East Coast predecessors, DMX. More fitting, even, is Ice Cube's appearance on the chorus of the disappointing 'State of Emergency'. The first man to completely inhabit the gangsta rapper paradigm appearing with its final incarnation – at least in the current cycle of hip hop styles, presumably we'll see a resurgence of the gangsta somewhere down the line.
Tellingly, some of LAX's best moments come from those artists who've slowly edged gangsta rap off the hip hop charts. This is Game (no longer apprenticed to gangsta enabler and media mastermind Dr. Dre) trying to adapt to his shifting fortunes. Lil Wayne provides a roboticized hook on the melancholic Cool & Dre-produced 'My Life', a moving, optimistic rumination on death and perseverance: "ain't no bars, but niggas can't escape the hood/and it took so many of my niggas that I should hate the hood/but it's real niggas like me that make the hood." Meanwhile, 'Angel' featuring Common and produced by Kanye is a terrific melding of styles and sounds. Game and Common casually wrap their words around Kanye's amazing Gil Scott Heron-sampling beat, a strangely engrossing hybrid of fluttery, synthy psychedelia and deep, funky West Coast smoothness.
As with other "big" rappers, a Game album is as much about production as it is about the Angeleno's lyrics. Generally, LAX falters where The Documentary and Doctor's Advocate were non-stop contests of one-upmanship by the most gifted producers around. Aside from that terrific entry by Kanye, two excellent (if successive and suspiciously similar) Cool & Dre beats, and a handfull of others, the majority of LAX's 19 tracks are disappointing. There's nothing here as amazingly awesome as Timbaland's space anthem 'Put You on the Game' from The Documentary, or Just Blaze's drum-fueled party-starter 'The Remedy' on Doctor's Advocate.
The overwhelming absence of such incredibly upbeat tracks isn't entirely surprising though, given LAX's ostensible subject. Taken as a swan song for a surprisingly resilient subgenre in a particularly short cultural cycle, Game's inadvertent goodbye to gangsta rap (possibly his final solo album, he claims), is appropriately somber. From the moody opener 'LAX Files', through the Eazy-Biggie-2Pac memorial 'Never Can Say Goodbye' and the closing MLK Jr. elegy 'Letter to the King' with Nas, LAX isn't the state of the union album that Game's first two were. Instead – as the album's airport title suggests – it sounds like the gangsta rapper's last stop, his final destination on a decades-long journey Westward.
A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.
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