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Music

We Now Have Hard Proof the Game Can't Keep People's Names Out of His Mouth

A scholar went through the Game's entire discography and made charts to count how many times he name-drops Dr. Dre, 2Pac, 50 Cent and many, many other rappers.
L: Jeffrey Mayer/WireImage
C: Araya Diaz/Getty Images for BET
R: Tibrina Hobson/Getty Images

For many years, the Game's habit of name-dropping has been an enduring punchline, with Tyler, the Creator even making a jab at Game about it on his own song, no less. While it's a fun game (…look, there are no other words) to run a tally of how many times Jayceon talks about other rappers every time a new album of his comes out, very few have gone through the effort of combing through his entire recorded work to determine precisely how many times he does so… until today.

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One of the Game's more noteworthy collages of rappers past. Shouts to Kanye for replicating the glossy "Gold Digger" aesthetic for every video in this era.

Via a site called Ben's Big Blog, an enterprising individual (presumably named Ben) used a whole bunch of collected data to tell us what we already knew—the Game talks about other people more than he does himself. Before you doubt the findings, consider that Ben listened to every single Game album, catalogued every single name-drop, then created a whole bunch of charts and tables to break down the numbers behind the shout-outs. You will never experience as deep a dive into the Game's work as this.

The big numbers first: according to Ben's Big Blog, a total of 1,788 name-drops are strewn across the Game's eight studio albums, averaging out to 13.7 names per song and 223.5 names per album. Understandably, Dr. Dre is apparently the most mentioned artist in Game's work by far, with 161 drops total, followed by the Game himself at 87 and 2Pac at 61. The blog points out that "it wasn't until 'Young N****s' on his most recent studio album, 1992 (released in 2016) that he placed a song with no name-drops on a studio album," which is a beautiful coming-of-age story no matter how you look at it. We all rise past our heroes one day.

Things get wilder when more detailed charts appear, specifically made to count "Dr. Dre mentions per album," comparing the Game's name-drops versus those made by his guests, and whether or not he was this name-happy on his early mixtapes. Spoilers: he was. Ben's Big Blog reports that "the track 'Cali Boyz' off his 2004 mixtape had a total of 87 name-drops, with none repeated." Damn. Alas, the numbers do no service to the frankly incredible diagrams and charts, so take a gander at them here.

Phil is on Twitter.