Why Curtis And Jayceon Should Kiss And Make Up

By the time you’ll read this I’ll be on an Amtrak train headed from the former political home of OG basehead Marion Berry, Washington, DC, squashed in between the window and some relatively portly gentleman in a suit trying to hustle a mortgage to his homeboy over the phone. I do this for my culture.

Anyways, I’ve been doing quite a bit of travel lately to places I would probably never have visited anyways due to my troglodyte lifestyle, all thanks in due to the main hustle and by extension you, the faithful reader/shit-talker who comes here to at the very least take the time out of your schedules to be up on the latest in urban music and/or insult me (seriously, I’m even grateful for that). This sudden change in pace, however, has actually left me somewhat missing my old stomping grounds out West, so I’ve planned on making a return trip there within the next few weeks.

During my last days there over a year ago the indie rap scene was bubbling, with some of my now-current iPod mainstays slowly but surely gaining attention in lieu of the void left behind when the West Coast rap scene fell apart faster than you can say “German hacker.” One of the city’s recent hopefuls, The Game, was essentially a shell of his former self at this point, devolved from a snarling, menacing rhyme slinger into a mentally disheveled, rambling curmudgeon thanks to a public expulsion from Aftermath, a subsequent war of words and vain attempts to reconcile with a person known for holding lifelong grudges. Word to Ja Rule and his inability to ever regain the stature he once held in the early part of the Aughts.

In the case of trying to reconcile with 50, however, I’m going to have to side with Jayceon. This actually may be first, if not only, time Game has made sense post-The Documentary. Let’s face it: both G-Unit or Black Wall Street have done nothing as impressionable than their run over a half-decade ago. Sure, Lloyd Banks may be coming off of a resurgent year with a pair of hit singles and various notable guest appearances, but his record sales are nowhere near where they were during the Unit’s heyday. On the flipside, nobody knows about or even expects anything from the Black Wall Street thus far outside of a bunch of one-off mixtapes.

The person who stands to benefit the most from a Game-50 reunion would undoubtedly be Dr. Dre. Both Game and Fiddy were, in their respectively early stages, the rap Six Million Dollar Man. The Aftermath machine groomed them both from the raw rapster into the label-ready, multi-platinum superstar. Yet since their acrimonious split neither have ever come close to that synergy they had before, punctuated by (allegedly) 50’s influence on Game’s The Documentary: both artists have seen their record sales plummet dramatically, and both have made rather questionable decisions in their musical careers since. A reconciliation of sorts could quite possibly bolster their flailing careers, and perhaps give Dre some form of inspiration to not only complete Detox but actually make better songs for it as well. Think about it: who would want more songs that sound like “Under Pressure” than, say, “Heat” or “How We Do?”

All of this is wishful thinking, of course. We know that Game and 50 making up is about as likely as Shyne and Puff (of Black Rob and Puff. Or G. Dep and Puff. And so on.) making up, but doing so would do more help than harm at this point. What do they have to lose?