![]() Dre produces five of the album's 17 songs, applying his recent stripped-down cinematic style, and many of the record's other producers follow his lead. All of the G-Unit solo albums thus far have been aesthetically unified, a rarity in hip-hop the tracks on The Documentary actually sound like they belong on the same album. Now he has: The Documentary is the best West Coast street-rap album since DJ Quik's 2002 LP Under tha Influence. And having spent the past few months embroiled in pointless beefs with also-rans like Joe Budden and Yukmouth- and getting hammered from all sides- Game needs more than ever to deliver a debut to back up his talk. The Compton MC made a name for himself on the mixtape scene that made 50 Cent a star it made perfect sense for him to become the first West Coast representative of G-Unit. So The Game, Dre's newest protégé, has a lot riding on him. Dre's kept his name in circulation by producing Eminem and 50 Cent- but even he hasn't released material under his own name since 1999, constantly delaying the release of his supposed masterpiece, Detox. Since then, 2pac's been gunned down, Snoop and Ice Cube have fallen off hard, and DJ Quik and the Bay Area scene have had little success breaking through to the mainstream. ![]() Dre, 2pac, and Snoop Dogg all but owned the rap landscape. ![]() But the article's unspoken question was: What's going on with the West? A pie chart showed that California rappers only constituted around 3% of those same playlists- a far cry from the early 90s, when Dr. With Southern and Midwestern rappers rising to prominence over the past few years, the birthplace of hip-hop has only constituted about a third of rap radio playlists. ![]() A couple of months ago, Vibe published an article lamenting the decline of New York hip-hop. ![]()
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