The one freestyle battle The Game admits he lost
The Game isn’t afraid to boast about his skills as a rapper, going so far once to declare himself as the best to ever emerge from Compton, which is to say, he thinks he’s better than the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Ice Cube and Dr Dre. But, despite his immense self-confidence, he does sometimes bear the humility to recognise when he’s been outdone.
During an interview with Complex in 2015, Game reflected on the time he got into a freestyle battle with someone he had just met at a party. This new guy wanted to go up against Game, which he was only too happy to oblige. He wasn’t worried about it at all.
Game had heard about this guy before. He knew he was a producer, but he hadn’t ever heard about his rapping. How good could he be? He surely wasn’t going to be any better than The Game himself. Except, there was a problem. Because this person who’d challenged him happened to be an up-and-coming Kanye West.
“After the party was over,” The Game recalled to Complex, “because I was like the freestyle king around this motherfucker, they was like, ‘There’s this n—a named Kanye West. He wants to spit against you.’ I had heard of Kanye, but I didn’t know he was a rapper; I only thought he produced.”
The Game left the party to go meet this Kanye person. “So we went over to the parking structure,” he explained, “and here comes this kid in his tight jeans, and this fucking Nike hoodie, and these Air Maxs, and I’m like, ‘This is the dude? Right here?’ So we start fucking freestyling.”
It didn’t go so well for The Game. Kanye, it turned out, had skills. “When I say that if I ever lost a freestyle battle, that’s the one I lost,” Game admitted. “Because Kanye got in my ass, bitches was laughing, and shit was just fucked up and crazy man.”
The Game had underestimated Kanye West, but, clearly a little bruised by the experience of being beaten, he eventually squared up to him again. He came prepared for this second battle, telling Complex that he had his “shit ready for him that time.”
Clearly, these rap battles created a certain bond between the pair, and it wasn’t long before they were working together in the studio. Kanye called Game up one day, having just come up with the beat to a track that would become ‘Dreams,’ which would feature on The Game’s debut album The Documentary in 2005. “Yo, you’re not going to believe this shit Game,” Ye apparently told him. “I’ve got this crazy sample. It’s called ‘Dreams.’”
Kanye sent over the track to The Game, and he liked what he heard. But, as much as he enjoyed the track, it wasn’t an easy one for him to figure out. “I had writer’s block for like two months,” he told Complex. “Then one day, I was sitting in the crib, and I don’t remember what the fuck happened. But something sparked me to go sit on the couch, put that shit in this old ass CD player. I played that shit for like four hours and then the words started coming to me.”