Doctor's Advocate Review

The reviews in 2006 run warmer than this grade and it is worth saying why. The beats are legitimately strong. Kanye West on Wouldn't Get Far, Scott Storch on Let's Ride, Just Blaze in the corner again, and It's Okay (One Blood) is an enormous single that carries a whole radio year on one loop. The rooms that reviewed it well were reacting to a record that sounds expensive and coherent, and to a rapper whose technique has plainly improved since the debut.

What sinks it is subject. Nearly every track is about an argument he has already had: the G-Unit split, the Dre absence, the question of whether he is allowed to say who made him. On the title track he sounds close to tears over a man who simply moved on, which is affecting once and exhausting by the third pass. The name dropping that was a tic on the debut becomes the entire vocabulary here.

He is a better rapper across these sixteen songs than he was on the first album and the album is worse, because a chip on the shoulder is not a subject. The production carries it well above its writing and that gap is the story of the record. The rest is a man arguing with an empty chair.