The Game: Thuggery at the Blender

On Friday, when I told Strats I had tickets to see the Game at the Blender Theatre on Saturday, he smiled, looked away and said, "get ready to see the worst concert of your life." Strats had seen him perform at Cornell a few years earlier. We both agreed that Game could have potentially honed his skills over the last few years. Nevertheless, as I entered Blender with two of my compadres and a bit of a buzz, I wasn't expecting to see anything special. And although Game proved that he is not one of the great performing emcees in the 'game', what we witnessed was very special indeed.

Blender is a relatively small theatre. It could probably hold 800 people at capacity. It seemed like about 500 showed up for the Doctor's Advocate. 80 percent were male, 60 percent were black. About half the crowd was wearing red (including myself, if only by coincidence) and maybe half of them looked like actual Bloods. This was a sleeper advantage to seeing the Game in a city rather than a gang-less college. DJ Crystal held Game down on the ones and twos, and before the rapper got to the stage, Crystal made it very clear where Black Wall Street's allegiances lie through song selection. Fat Joe, Weezy, Jim Jones, Rick Ross, TI, Jada, basically everyone that is a admitted Blood or has beef with 50.

In case you weren't sure (which is fair in an industry where everyone pretends to be hard, and some really aren't) Game is very much a thug. He rolled out on stage with a 15 person entourage that looked like they stepped out of 'GTA: San Andreas'. His chain was gold and enormous, his vest was red, and of course, he was rocking a Jason mask with Louis Vuitton print on it. Even amidst his overly-sized entourage, Game didn't have a hype man, which was too bad, because he doesn't really move when he raps and rarely finished a line. The third song in his set was "One Blood" which is fuego, but was even better cuz he asked everybody wearing red in the crowd to come on stage. I rightfully assumed he meant Bloods, so I remained in the crowd, but about 75 people that could definitely pass for gang members and a few confused kids from the suburbs rolled up on stage (one of whom was so krunked, his jaw hung lower then his pants and he quickly got into an altercation with a dude that looked like the bad guy in the Friday movies). Those adourned in red remained on stage for the remainder of the show, smoking blunts and throwing up occasional Blood signs. Suu Woo!!

What else happened? Game threw money into the crowd twice (about two hundred in ones all together), and pretended to drink a liter of Grey Goose (definitely did not, it doesn't take a VodkaTron to know that chugging a liter of Goose would give a Siberian hunter severe alcohol poisoning let alone an average rapper). He smoked a blunt and called 50 cent, 'Officer 50'. Although I think that Game has the right to talk about 50 all day, it was slightly off when at least a third of his set featured Curtis' vocals on them. Mr. Jim Jones came out which was more exciting than it should have been, especially considering Capo's beef with Killa Cam who is one of my favourite rappers and probably my favourite person to be bourne in the twentieth century. The show ended abruptly with a poorly executed rendition of "My Life".

So what was so special about Saturday's Game concert? Was it the small ocean of red, which allowed me to imagine what the Game's LA concerts must be like? Was it the two lone Crips posted in the corner with their rags across their heads, looking scared as fuck, forcing us to remember that the notorious gangland rivalry of the West Coast is oddly relevant to a select few people, thousands of miles and two decades removed from the eye of that once-bloody storm? Or was it such a special night because it was not so special at all? Because it proved that all those hip hop cliches- large chains, bad lyrics, baggy jeans and XXXXL tees, gang affiliations, beef, Louis Vuitton printed Jason masks- which we grew up despising, which have largely faded away in the current era of auto-tuning and nerd glasses, are still around and for some reason that's a relief. Maybe all that shit, which old-school purists, backpack b-boys and coffee shop hip hop heads always called the death of hip hop, is as necessary as good stage presence, positive content, and freestyling. Mediocre? Yes. Ignorant? Maybe. Primal? Perhaps. Awesome? Oh, fa sho. From Harlem this is VTron for You Wildin' dot com.