The Game has no dignity, but it certainly hasn't hindered his career, which was built entirely without it, and even predicated on its absence. Dignity's overrated, anyway; if you leveled the accusation at him, he'd probably work it into a rhyme about Blackstreet so he could remind you how much he likes "No Diggity". When you've sold 10 million albums abasing yourself at every available opportunity, there's no reason to change course, and on his fifth studio collection, the Game is still happily, busily, thoroughly ethering himself beyond all comprehension: "I don’t care if Kanye hit it/ I don’t care if Jay hit it/ I’ma eat it up and I’ma lay with it" he says on the first verse of "I Remember", a song that is a bald imitation of Future's "Same Damn Time", with Future himself on the hook. Looking away yet? He's just getting started.
Here are some other things the Game says on Jesus Piece: He reminds us on "Freedom", again, that Eminem murdered him on The Documentary's "We Ain't", as if if wasn't embarrassing enough when he exclaimed it on that very song. He tells us that his iPod is "shuffling between Common, Jay Electronica, and Bono" on "Heaven's Arms". At one point, he interrupts himself to say "Hold on, I gotta take Birdman's call," before interpolating audio of a Birdman voicemail. He yells "Murder is what I do to these Just Blazes," on an album produced entirely without Just Blaze's input. Game's business is making you cringe for him, and business is...well, it remains a business.
Truthfully, it's a little shocking to see another Game product in stores a mere year after The R.E.D. Album, a project with a development so troubled it redefined the lengths a record label will go to double down on a losing hand. It hit the top of the charts with what felt like a dead-cat-bounce, but here the Game is, seemingly unscathed, with another full platter of his signature blend of desperate-networker hip-hop. He is the rap game Wile E. Coyote; no matter how many times he blows himself to smithereens, he survives to do it again another day.
What presumably keeps him going-- besides, of course, a frightening, "Walking Dead"-like tenacity-- is that when you scrape away all these irritating quirks, he remains reliably good at cobbling together poppy gangsta-rap songs. He's always boasted excellent, if unadventurous, taste in beats, and he sources some excellent ones on Jesus Piece from SAP, a 22-year-old kid from Delaware whose biggest hits thus far have been Mac Miller's "Donald Trump" and Meek Mill's pre-MMG street hit "In My Bag". SAP provides the catchy Bone Thugs redux "Celebration" and the choir-sampling "Name Me King", a song that also has a sharply focused verse from Pusha T. Jake One gives him an infectious early-Kanye-style beat, reminiscent of "The Glory", for "Hallelujah", and Game makes a very early-Kanye-style song out of it. Longtime collaborators Cool & Dre soak his ruined voice in greyscale synth tones in "Can't Get Right" and "Pray" and then give him a helium-filled bouncy castle of New Jack Swing vocals on "All That".
The album and song titles hint at a sustained religious fascination, but this isn't Game's concept album. Even so, it's more focused than he's been in awhile, and while you couldn't call an album featuring 2Chainz, Rick Ross, Meek Mill, Lil Wayne (twice), Future, Young Jeezy, Chris Brown, Common, Pusha T, Jamie Foxx, J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar and more "lean," Jesus Piece is less all-over-the-place than The R.E.D. Album. Except for an embarrassing breakout of "hanhs" on the Kanye-sampling title track and his blood-draining Future imitation on "I Remember", he mostly keeps a lid on his irritating habit of mimicking other rappers' flows.
The flip side to being prone to saying any fool thing that pops into your head is that you can occasionally be hilarious: on "Church", he for some reason kidnaps and attempts to drown a woman before saving her and explaining to her that she was baptized. On "Can't Get Right", he continues his long string of overly attached girlfriend messages to Dr. Dre, telling us that after Dre passed him up to work on Kendrick Lamar's record, he had "nightmares" that someone shot him. The Game's contract with Interscope is up after this record and something tells me that wherever he goes next, it will be messy to watch, and probably just as entertaining. Seven years into a career that's resembled a slow-motion wreck as often as a highlight reel, and I remain morbidly fascinated with what will happen to him next.
