"It's not a game, it's just called a game"

Speaking of good yarns can we stop for a second and remember how incredible it was when Dr. Dre had to choose between 50 Cent and The Game after the two of them had their fight and Game was kicked out of G-Unit? Like, Dre had to have known that Game was the more honorable of the two, that 50 might make him more money but that Game was the one with the real promise and heart. And yet he sided with 50 and refused to contribute any beats when Game started working on Doctor's Advocate. Spoke out against him in interviews, even, if I recall, and generally disowned him even though a year before he had heralded him as his own second coming.

Doctor's Advocate is an album I love because Game is not just plainly and unabashedly heartbroken throughout the whole thing about Dre abandoning him, but confident and sober-minded and conflicted too. "I done been to hell and back," he says on the first song, "left for dead, you know who to thank for that / finished my second LP without a Dr. Dre track / You can take my soul but can't take my plaques."

He is defiant and yet, later, totally honest about the fact that a wound has been inflicted: "Everybody wanna know what the fuck is going on -- am I signed to Aftermath? Interscope? What's up with Geffen? I'ma just say it like this: one day I walked in the motherfucking house, and all my shit was gone."

Later still, on the impossibly sad, teary title track, in which the man's voice can actually be heard cracking: "Now it's my turn to carry the torch / And I still got the chain that you wore on the cover of The Source / Remember when we got drunk to do "Start From Scratch"? / I told you you was like a father to me, I meant that! / Now I'm sitting here looking at my platinum plaques, thinking 'what the fuck am I without a Dr. Dre track?'"

He mentions Dre on literally every song, and never once does he sound vengeful or petulant. Dignity in the aftermath of betrayal: not a single 'fuck you too' or 'who needs you anyway' to be found in a single line. Game stands alone, forsaken and disowned, and yet:

I still think about my nigga from time to time,
Makes me wanna call 50 and let him know what's on my mind,
But I just hold back 'cuz we ain't beefin' like that,
He ain't Big, and I ain't Pac, and we just eatin' off rap.

Which is up there, I think, with that verse Keyhole and I like from "I'm Not You" by the Clipse, in its earnest self-deprecation and its economy of words.

Which is all to say, this was a remarkable thing that happened in rap and I don't think people paid enough attention to it when this album came out. I mean, sure, everyone were excited when the beef first ignited and Game was kicked out of G-Unit, but did anyone follow up post-Doctor's Advocate and like, really get into it? In any case, now would be a good time to interview Dre about it, especially considering how embarrassing it probably is right now to be the guy who brought 50 Cent into the world.