It starts with the story of a consumer. On October 1, 2001, an 18-year-old Compton native named Jayceon Taylor was playing Madden on a Playstation 2 in the apartment he sold drugs out of when two unknown assailants kicked in the door and shot him five times. Taylor was able to call himself an ambulance, but soon slipped into a coma. (In the future—when he was on the precipice of becoming a star—Taylor would rap: “I was two beeps away from a flatline.”) When he woke up in the hospital three days later, he had one request for his brother: That he return with copies of as many classic hip-hop albums as possible.
While he’d been a hip-hop fan from an early age, it was during his recovery that Taylor studied these records with a renewed attention to detail. He taught himself to be a rapper in the macro and micro—trying to mimic not only the musicality in The Notorious B.IG.’s verses, the precision of Jay-Z’s, and the IV drip of charisma that flowed through Snoop Dogg’s, but also the way those men and their peers pitched themselves to the public, framed their careers, and manicured their legacies in real time. As his body got stronger, so too did Taylor’s conviction that he would one day enter the canon he had begun to obsess over.
If the aspiration was not unique, the follow through was. Just over three years after that nearly fatal shooting, on January 18, 2005, Taylor—who had rebranded himself The Game, a nickname his grandmother gave him because she loved the 1997 David Fincher movie—would release his debut album, The Documentary, through Interscope Records, Dr. Dre’s Aftermath Entertainment, 50 Cent’s G-Unit Records, and Game’s own Black Wall Street imprint. It debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and was certified Double Platinum by March. More importantly, it confirmed Game as the first bona fide mainstream star to emerge from Los Angeles County in the 21st century.
By the time The Documentary hit shelves, Game had navigated several lifetimes’ worth of hardship. Jayceon Taylor was born in 1979 into a Compton that was already being carved up by gang divisions: His mother, Lynette, was a Hoover Crip, while his father George was from another Crip set, Nutty Blocc; his older brother, Javon, followed his father into the latter set. But when Javon was 17, he was shot during an altercation at a gas station. Shortly after visiting him in the hospital, Jayceon, who was only 13 at the time, got the call that his brother had passed away.
