Why The Game named his album ‘1992’ and how that year changed his life
For his eighth album, released in 2016, The Game got nostalgic. Named for a hugely significant year in his life, 1992 looked back to his younger days.
Game would have turned 13 in ’92, a time when hip-hop’s golden age was still in swing. His youthful love of early ’90s rap music is apparent throughout the album, especially on the songs ‘The Juice’ and ‘All Eyez,’ which served as a nod for his love of 2Pac, as well as on ‘I Grew Up on Wu-Tang,’ which should be self-explantory.
But the album’s title of 1992 isn’t strictly a reference to a good period in hip-hop. Wu-Tang’s 36 Chambers came out the following year, in any case, but the broader point is that ’92 was a consequential year for the young Game for another reason.
“1992 was the first year that I joined a gang,” he told The Wendy Williams Show in 2016. “At that point in my life, I was getting pulled in both directions.”
What he meant by being “pulled in both directions” is that his loyalties could have gone to either the Crips or the Bloods. He and his brothers grew up in a Crips neighbourhood, and their parents were themselves members. But they ended up going the other way.
“I grew up in a Crip neighborhood,” he recalled, “but my brothers were Bloods. It was sort of a tug-of-war. That’s how it is in Compton.”
Game explained that, as a boy in Compton approaches his adolescence, “gangs start pulling at you.” By his estimate, it’s “almost 99 percent that you’ll probably join a gang.”
For The Game, that meant defying his parents and neighbours by following his brothers into the Bloods. He was specifically a member of the Cedar Block Piru, which is a set of the wider Piru gang, which, in turn, forms a part of the Bloods alliance.
The significance of The Game joining a gang for the first time in ’92 was why he called the album after the year. But the album also references events from other points throughout the early to mid-’90s. He touches upon the LA Riots, which actually did take place in 1992, but also the trial of OJ Simpson, which took place throughout ’95.