The Game
1992
(Entertainment One Music/Fifth Amendment/Blood Money)
Key: 1984 1977 1966 1994 1974
It’s been a month since I returned to Los Angeles, my hometown, where I haven’t lived in 25 years. I’m adjusting and breathing, the sun burning off the uppermost layers of the depression-dome I made—and though LA has changed a lot in a quarter century, it’s still the glorious, messy experiment it always was.
I’ve always wondered how much of what I think of as me is caught up in my crystalized memories of South Central at the dawn of the 1990s—and maybe that’s why I’ve always had such a love/hate dynamic with The Game. For the last 11 years, he’s annoyed me with his antics but also thrilled me with some great rap music. All the best and worst moments have always had to do with The Game’s own personal 1992—hence the title of this, his eighth solo album.
1992 starts with a Crenshaw Swap Meet velvet portrait of the fire that time, painted stroke by stroke on “Savage Lifestyle” over a sample of “Inner City Blues” by Marvin Gaye. “Was you here?” Game challenges. No, I wasn’t, and I hated that. I left LA the day after Christmas in 1991—just one of the many Black kids shipped out by their parents before the fuse ran out. The year 1992 found me trying to adjust to a new life in Seattle while I watched my old home burn on national television and heard that my brother got hemmed up during the riots.