To the most shriveled and sexless of UCSD introverts: There’s something wonderful to be learned from this year’s FallFest headliner.
Jayceon Taylor probably has fewer friends than you — but he makes up for it in enemies. His voice may be the dry-then-mucusy caricature of a constant head cold, but that only makes him all the more eager to croak out another rap. His cheekbone butterfly tattoo — recently corrected with an LA logo (but those little fluttering wings are still under there somewhere!) — is somehow even less cool than that armpit hickey you gave yourself last year. He indisputably plucks his unibrow.
But you won’t see the Game hiding out in his nerd box anytime soon.
In 2004, over two independently pushed albums — both god-awful, not that he cared — Taylor talked himself into a big enough blimp to set off the dollar-sign radars of top-game G-Unit thugs and scrambling Interscope cronies alike. By the time 2005’s star-streaked Documentary dropped, smack-dab in the middle of the West Coast hip-hop revival, the Game had gathered an almost unprecedented fire trail of support on the beat — Hi-Tek, Storch, Timbaland, Blaze, Kanye and Dre himself all saw something big busting from that painfully scratchy, unremarkable throat.
Even the ogreish 50 sounded a smidge more endearing next to the Game’s revving engines — if only because the latter out-ogred him. The Cool and Dre-produced “Hate It or Love It” was bone-chilling; whether or not 50 and Game knew how ridiculous they were, low-riding on a wavy live-jazz loop like they could turn cobblestones platinum, a shared noble air of stony self-importance was enough to make us forget the former’s tear tattoo and latter’s medically unsound ape stance.
Which is why it’s so sad, really, that Game has sparked over 20 beefs since then, from pay-attention-to-me darts at Dre to unthought monkey shit like “Banks is a bitch, 50 is a bitch, Buck is a bitch, Yayo is a bitch, Olivia’s a bitch — no, Olivia’s a man.”
In this way, the Game schemed his own demise: Doctor’s Advocate and LAX didn’t even outsell his debut combined. But there always seems to be a genius on his side. With Lil Wayne’s help, Game made last year’s “My Life” the ghetto tearjerker of the new millennium, and may have learned to rap in the process.
He’s headed this way, and hip-hop’s biggest loner is about to teach RIMAC to swag.
