The Game Hits Back at Jay-Z; Political Thinkers Respond

So we weren’t the only ones who noticed Jay-Z’s freestyle last weekend (since identified as the intro to Blueprint 3): Predictably, the Game has responded negatively to Jay’s brief mention of past tiffs (“I’m talking about despair, I’m talking about shame / I ain’t talking about gossip, I ain’t talking about Game�). “I’m So Wavy,� released over the weekend, has some not-so-nice, not-so-clever things to say about Hova, mostly knocking his relatively advanced age and his vague resemblance to a camel, with a brief aside to cast aspersions on the moral character of Kanye’s lady, Amber Rose. All the good stuff comes after the music cuts out, when Game goes on a quasi-rhymed rant. A few choice nuggets, presented without context: “Blueprint 3 gon’ sell more cigarettes than it do records … now I know why the taxes went up on tobacco�; “What you fucking with ‘Ye for? ‘Love Lockdown’ my shit�; “You and Dame used to be tighter than giraffe pussy and shit.�

And despite all that, the best part of the resurrected beef is how it’s already reverberated around political blogs, sparked by Foreign Policy writer Marc Lynch’s “Jay-Z vs the Game: Lessons for the American Primacy Debate … a story about the nature of hegemony and the debate over the exercise of American power.� Yes, this is a thing that’s happening.