Artist: The GameTitle: Untold Story, Volume IIRating: 2 StarsReviewed by: Jay Peregrine
If The Game is rap’s self proclaimed MVP for 2005, Then JT The Bigga Figga
could be a candidate for raps 2005 Executive of the Year. Every couple of
months JT puts out some old Game material that apparently, he has the rights
to, then those records go on to sell a lot of copies with minimal expense to
JT. You can’t really knock that, unless of course, it’s your material that
he’s selling. In just a few months JT has released two albums by one of
Hip-Hops biggest superstars. The second of JT’s series, Untold Story Volume II
(Fastlife), featuring The Game seems to have made no improvements upon where Volume I
left off.
Untold Story Vol. II is clearly more of a JT project than a Game project.
A lot of the vocals were recorded by The Game years ago when he was still in
the early stages of his career. But even then, The Game displayed the
realness that makes him one of Hip-Hop’s biggest stars on songs like “Just
Beginning”, where he airs out his father over some smooth guitar licks, for
some of the things his father did to his family while he was growing up.
Another song that true Game fans can appreciate is “Truth Rap” where he
speaks about life in the ghetto in a way that only a few can when he spits
“Nobody knows there neighbors name/ unless they sell weed or cocaine/a lot of
black clouds on a block with no rain/The game got a lot to say/ so they
wanna take me down in my own front yard like Marvin Gaye.” But outside of a
few other decent tracks from The Game himself including “Business Never
Personal” – “Real Live on blocks, if we aint pushin the rocks, we movin the
stocks“, Volume II suffers from mediocre production and a lack of creative
direction mainly because the star of the show had NO input in the creative process.
It’s unclear how much of The Game’s material JT has left in his vault but
what is clear after listening to this album is that he’s probably getting
pretty low on his stash, which means that pretty soon JT is gonna have to
come up with a new hustle for 2006. Untold Story Vol. II has a similar
feel to a recent posthumous Tupac album where the lyrics seem a little
outdated and a little too familiar (heard some of these verses on the last
album) and the production and the M.C. just aren’t on the same page and
don’t compliment each other at all. Now, while Tupac can get away with
that, the same thing can not be said at this point for JT The Bigga Figga or
The Game.