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Live Reviews

The Game – Live

Hammersmith Apollo
17.07.09

After standing in a half-full Apollo watching J2K play unutterably boring UK Funky [if it goes away tomorrow, it will still have been around too long] and a random ska band complete with someone’s dad playing the bongos, The Game made his entrance, in the pitch black. The spotlight hit and the chants began that ran as a theme throughout the entire show – “Fuck Jay-Z”.

LA’s Game recently released a Jigga diss song “I’m So Wavy” and performed it as the first track of the show, garnering a surprising amount of cheers. Strange as it seemed, that was nothing compared to the entrance of 10 mean looking homeboys lining the stage – they weren’t hype men, in fact they didn’t really seem to be anything other than Jayceon’s mates, but that was soon forgotten when the rapper really got going.

Soon into the set he called for anyone wearing red to get on the stage, with his entourage providing a human barrier around him, but still the sight of a good 50 people on stage as he broke into crowd favourite “One Blood” was one to behold. The comedy value of seeing a clearly drunk, skinny white kid, throwing his West Coast signs much to the chagrin and then amusement of the, shall we say, liberally [un]clothed crew member next to him, goes beyonds words.

The entertainment continued when Game called Jay-Z fans to the stage and dissed them, albeit with good humour, for wearing skinny jeans – “Jigga don’t like them skinny jeans boy”, plaid and looking like Harry Potter before he got all the girls on stage for a bit of ego-boosting fun.

Regardless of all this though, what’s clear is that The Game has a lot more charisma than I assumed. He controlled the crowd from start to finish and breaking out songs like “Dope Boys”, “My Life”, “State Of Emergency”, “Love It Or Hate It” [whilst chanting G-UNOT] and “Let’s Ride” kept the audience happy from start to finish.

So, whilst I am a big Jay-Z fan and didn’t get involved in the baiting of the great man, I hold my hands up – The Game is a fucking good rapper and puts on a hell of a show.

Abjekt.