Compton Rapper Game Returns to an Industry That's Gone Soft

To understand Game's ascent is to understand the Old Testament force of Dre. Since he first performed "Surgery" in 1984 for the World Class Wrecking Cru, he has reigned over commercial L.A. street rap with no real peer.

"At first, we would get into wars," Game remembers. "I'd come in with endless freestyles and tell him that I didn't want to change my style. He taught me how to count bars, write hooks and bridges. I didn't get it at first — it was like math."

PHOTO BY BRANDON SHOWERS

PHOTO BY BRANDON SHOWERS

Related Content

• Dr. Dre on His USC Academy: "This Is the Biggest Thing I've Ever Been a Part Of"
  May 16, 2013
• Dr. Dre, Jimmy Iovine Donate $70 Million To USC For Arts Academy
  May 15, 2013
• How's That "Millennium of Aftermath" Going?
  August 20, 2012
• Ice Cube Talks About His Favorite Projects He's Ever Worked On
  April 24, 2013
• Jay-Z's Great Gatsby Soundtrack Is a Failure
  May 8, 2013

More About

• The Game (Rapper)
• Dr. Dre
• 50 Cent
• Hip-Hop and Rap
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

After two years of tutelage, Game's debut single, "Westside Story," was released. Replacing Sharks and Jets with Bloods and Crips, Game boasted, "The West never fell asleep/I was just asleep in Compton." It also introduced his trademark tic: name drops upon name drops. He compared himself to Snoop, Kool G Rap and Deebo from Friday — similes that almost exclusively drew upon the hip-hop game itself. He was a vestige of a vanishing order of khakis, Cadillac Coupes and Chuck Taylors, the final model assembled before the factory lights were switched off.

Yet even with its hook from 50 Cent, "Westside Story" was snubbed by national radio. The successive Curtis Jackson collaborations, however — "Hate It or Love It" and "This Is How We Do" — soundtracked everything from Beverly Hills bar mitzvahs to Compton BBQs.

For a coast hungry for resurrection, Game's battering-ram voice, flawless ear for cinematic beats and eerie approximation of past greats like Dre, Cube and MC Eiht ensured him an eternity of goodwill. The West needed new blood to sustain tradition, and Game seemed to emerge fully formed out of a lost draft of Menace II Society, the missing link between bipolar gunman O-Dog and scholarship football player Stacy. Released in January 2005, The Documentary went double platinum domestically, sold 5 million copies worldwide and was nominated for a pair of Grammys.

Hostilities resumed one month later.

You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away.

An abridged list of people Game beefed with between 2005 and 2008:

Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Rass Kass, Bow Wow, G-Unit, Lil Eazy E, Big Fase, Memphis Bleek, Xzibit, Mobb Deep, Suge Knight, Joe Budden, Ja Rule, David Beckham, wrestler Triple H and video vixen Vida Guerra.

Ironically, the most vicious feud stemmed from Game's refusal to choose sides in a 2005 squabble between 50 Cent and his then-rivals Jadakiss and Nas. Deeming him disloyal, 50 used a Hot 97 radio appearance to dismiss Game from G-Unit. Predictably, Taylor responded to his pink slip with Bloods.

"I was in New York with 40 Pirus, and 50 was traveling around with off-duty police," Game remembers of the now-infamous February 2005 incident. "We showed up at Hot 97. My dudes hopped out the cab. Both sides had guns. Shots started to go everywhere. Shit was flying off. Bodies falling into the show, people slipping, hopping into Escalades."

Game spent the next year engaged in scorched-earth warfare fit for Single White Female. At one point he released a street DVD titled Stop Snitchin', Stop Lying, where he urinated in the woods behind 50 Cent's Connecticut estate and stole his basketball rim. 50 countered with claims that he'd written the entirety of Game's hits; the Compton native said he'd written only the hooks for two songs and half of a third.

Later that year Game and Fase fell out, allegedly over financial matters. In an interview with allhiphop.com, Fase claimed that the strength of his street cred had "created the backdrop for Game ... [and] certified his gangsta."

The two have since resolved their differences, but Fase did not respond to interview requests for this story.

The conflicts alienated his patrons. Iovine sent Game's contract to Interscope subsidiary Geffen, and Dre's aegis was absent on his sophomore record, 2006's Doctor's Advocate, ironically named in his honor.

"Me and Dre were always cool," Game says. "At the time, I felt like he was turning his back on me, but I understand why he did it now. He'd already been through beefs with Dee Barnes, Eazy and [Knight]. He didn't need that bullshit in his life."

Dre declined to comment for this article, but the lyrics of Doctor's Advocate contradict Game's story — particularly its title track, a tearful, drunken threnody to the disintegration of their relationship. It's the closest gangsta rap will ever get to (500) Days of Summer. It was also the emotional centerpiece to what Game rightfully considers his finest work, and the album that best captures his tortuous complexities (at least, he says, until R.E.D.).

A vulnerable and ragged document of alienation, Doctor's Advocate is unstintingly prideful in its regionalism. There are odes to Compton, Olde English and gangbanging; cameos from Snoop, Daz, Kurupt and Nate Dogg; and sinister piano lines that slink like a drive-by. The storytelling on songs like "Compton" is familiar but precise: "Once upon a time in the projects yo/I watched my uncle Greg put D's on his six-fo'/I washed it on Monday so he bought me a gold chain/Shopped crack and watched Colors and I soaked up game." Later, he describes his uncle's murder by a crack fiend, and his father's retaliation.