Album Review: Gangsta Grillz: Every Movie Needs a Trailer by The Game & DJ Drama
The Game hypes his first official Gangsta Grillz tape as a film. The mixtape wants to be an event, but the show playing on screen is a looping trailer for a movie the director never made.
You come to a record like this knowing the narrator. Jayceon Taylor is 46, two decades removed from his major‑label debut that turned twenty years old this year, newly minted for DJ Drama’s storied series. He has been on podcasts dismissing the current rap scene as “trash” and declaring himself “one of the best rappers on Earth” while promoting The Documentary 3. He also claims he tried to sign Kendrick Lamar before TDE, a boast quickly dismissed by TDE’s security chief as fabrication. Outside the studio, his behavior looks uglier. Not too long ago, he grabbed a microphone at his own party and barked, “Free Kells, nigga. Free Diddy. Free all the freaky homies,” an act made more callous by jokes about “baby oil and some pee pee.” He has a $7 million sexual‑battery judgment he has refused to pay for nearly a decade; appellate judges noted that he “evaded process, trolled Rainey on social media, dodged a settlement conference, and did not bother to show up at trial.” This May, a court ordered the sale of his Calabasas mansion after concluding his shell company was a sham. The tension between the self‑mythologizing film he wants to screen and the unresolved mess around him runs through everything.
DJ Drama introduces Every Movie Needs a Trailer like a blockbuster: “A film twenty years in the makin’, think Boyz n the Hood meets Goodfellas meets The Avengers”. The opening “Silver Lining” loops the Isley Brothers’ “Movin’ Down the Highway,” and Drama’s commentary sets up the theme as a documentary of survival. The Game responds in a pitched-down vocal with vignettes about fiends on fentanyl, sleeping in tents, and mothers crying; there is an urgency in his delivery and a heaviness in the sample. But the “movie” conceit quickly becomes little more than an excuse for name‑drops and recycled slogans. In “Good Enough,” which rides Stephanie Mills’ “I Feel Good All Over,” he opens by saying he woke up and that might be enough, then abruptly adds, “We see what they did to Puff.” He acknowledges the possibility of introspection (“What would my daughter say if she knew who I was on the inside?”), but such moments vanish under bullet‑point machismo.
That slipperiness defines his bid for authenticity. He spends much of the tape railing against “fake” rap. On “Amerikkka’s Nightmare,” he rails at “fake‑ass followers, fake‑ass streams and fake buzz,” “fake beefs on podcasts, fake Crips and fake Bloods,” and complains that “fake chains” and “fake thugs” dominate the culture. He barks at social‑media lawyers and podcasts that want him “erased out of the history books.” He bemoans that the industry sends “lawyers to take my crib” and “bitches I never touched to set me up”—a reference to Priscilla Rainey couched as if he were framed, ignoring a court record that found he evaded process. Instead of confronting why he owes a woman millions, he lumps her in with haters and law enforcement. This rhetorical sleight of hand appears elsewhere: after his party rant, “Good Enough” proclaims “free lil’ Smurk and free all the guys,” aligning victims of the justice system with a friend who pleaded guilty to a federal gun charge and, implicitly, Diddy and R. Kelly. In the movie of his life, he is always the underdog, never the perpetrator.
His fixation on lineage surfaces again and again. “Can I” is built from a simple question that becomes a laundry list of icons. He wants to write raps “like Nipsey still somewhere on Slauson” and “like Biggie off his stoop,” to spit like he is “freestylin’ for Nas” outside Hot 97 while leaning on 50 Cent’s car. He wonders whether he can rap like he is Crip‑walking with Snoop while wearing red Nike Tech. In his second verse, he promises to have his brain studied at Harvard “so they can understand why Malcolm X never met Marcus Garvey” and asks listeners to pray his next album wins a Grammy. The song is revealing, but not in the way he intends. Rather than offering a reflective look at two decades in rap, he places himself through other men. When he praises Kendrick (“Cheer for Dot ’cause I knew one day he’d be great”), it reads as opportunistic, especially in light of TDE insiders’ dismissal of his claim that he tried to sign Lamar. He brags about standing next to Pac and Pac’s ghost (“Standin’ next to Dot when the concert stopped/Like me standin’ next to Pac”). It is as if proximity, not storytelling, is his measure of worth.
When he stops listing names and turns toward the present, his version of masculinity is stuck in adolescence. “Clown Emojis” is a mean‑spirited screed aimed at men who wear nail polish, carry purses, or display a “soft‑girl” aesthetic. Over a minimal beat, he sneers, “You paint your nails, you got a purse from Chanel/Nigga, you spicy as hell,” and “Niggas wearin’ skirts on Earth and call it fashion/Nigga wear a murse, you gets no love for that.” He equates femininity with weakness and fantasizes about dropping nonconforming men in Chicago or New York “jungles.” “The Assassination of Candace Owens,” which improbably begins with a sample of Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin debating the value of truth. After promising to love a woman “like my mama” and “like Kamala”, he asks, “Who really killed Charlie Kirk?” before launching into another attack on feminized men: “We live in an era where niggas twerk/We live in an era where niggas pull wallets up out they purse.” Rather than interrogating Owens’ reactionary commentary, he uses the song to double down on gender policing. These passages show a rapper who mistakes cruelty for candor and conflates masculinity with violence.
Abroad, his politics are a bullet‑point fantasy. “Head of State” asks what he would do with twenty‑four hours if he were president. He promises to make racism go away, turn food‑stamp cards into Amex accounts, wipe out student debt, and hand every homeless person a blank check. He would pardon Larry Hoover and end gang wars, ride through the city with shooters in bulletproof G‑wagons, paint the White House red, and eliminate crack and fentanyl. He proposes dropping “the Epstein files with no edits,” letting people buy houses with no credit, shipping pallets of food to Sudan and Gaza (which we salute), and defunding ICE (which we agree) in the same breath. He imagines meeting with Russia and China, being crowned “Mansa Musa, Mufasa,” casting Michael B. Jordan to play him, and handing out Hellcats to freed prisoners. Taken individually, some of these ideas are progressive fantasies; taken together, they feel like a scroll through trending topics. None of it touches his own complicity in the systems he decries. “Amerikkka’s Nightmare” returns to this dichotomy, quoting KRS‑One’s “I think very deeply” while listing grievances about music industry metrics and social media. He poses as a truth teller but rarely ventures beyond the shallow indignation of an Instagram comment section.
Mike & Keys give him comfortable backdrops. When the formula hits, as on “So Contagious,” their mix of g‑funk bass and LaToiya Williams’ warm hook conjures a little of the dusty drama the tape promises. Williams sings “So contagious when I wake up in the morning/I can feel the sun is blazing, so it make me niggas feel angry/And frustrated, so contagious/No escaping this life, it’s so contagious,” and the Game responds with run‑on rhyme schemes, weaving blood metaphors into nods to Wu‑Tang and SZA. Mozzy steals the show on “Blood Tears,” mapping his own pain and hustles while leaning into a rasp that cuts through the glossy instrumental; the Game’s verses there echo his collaborator’s intensity, if not his specificity. “Quarter Zips × Mocha” hits as it focuses on a single extended brag, comparing his longevity to Nas and André 3000 while dismissing subpar rap as more embarrassing than “bitches on Instagram selling they pussy.” The interplay with Jeremih on “Rotation” and the Paramore sample on “Livin’” shows he still understands how to contrast his rasp with melody. But these highlights are exceptions.
His political sincerity fares no better. Outside of being a polarizing title, “The Assassination of Candace Owens” tries to set up a meditation on truth and media by sampling Giovanni and Baldwin, but the verses devolve into tired cynicism. He notes that people only gain followers when rappers die, laments that funerals are quiet while gunshots are loud, then points fingers at “the media” for spreading a “cancer we live and dyin’ in.” When he finally says there is a moral (“be cautious who you believin’ in”), it feels like a disclaimer rather than a self‑reckoning. His America is violent and corrupt, yet he demands freedom for men convicted of violent crimes and mocks those challenging patriarchal norms. The only consistent principle is his own centrality.
At his birthday party, he laughed about “baby oil and some pee pee” while calling for the release of two men convicted of trafficking and racketeering. On Every Movie Needs a Trailer, he shouts out imprisoned friends and raps about freeing them homies, but never mentions women hurt by their actions. He complains about lawyers taking his house and women setting him up, while a court order describes his refusal to appear and his evasion of responsibility. He proclaims himself a truth teller and freedom fighter, but cannot see himself in the systems he critiques. The most revealing line on the mixtape isn’t about surviving Compton or being a GOAT. It’s the moment on “Amerikkka’s Nightmare” when he claims, “They send bitches I never touched to set me up, can I live?” In his version of the movie, accountability is an assassination plot, and the real villains are anyone who refuses to play along.
Slightly Below Average (★★½☆☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Blood Tears,” “So Contagious”