No Description Given :: Game and the Player

Have you ever heard of paper towns? I’m not talking about the movie — I’m talking about the actual practice of putting fictional places on a map to trip up people who copy it wholesale without bothering to see if every town actually exists. A similar phenomenon created the lost media video game known as Yeah Yeah Beebiss I, a fake NES game added to a mail order catalogue to see if other stores would sell the non-existent game (and presumably have to refund anyone who ordered it). Humorously the infamy of the game resulted in an unofficial sequel that actually DID get a release. To make a long story short I always thought “Game and the Player” by No Description Given was just such a copyright trap. Who would actually name their rap group that? That’s the kind of error you get when you forget to fill in a field on a computer form. No. I was dead wrong. This group is 100% real.

Their only single (that I or anyone else knows of) was “Blowin’ Up” off the album “Game and the Player.” Given the 12″ mentions a record label in Miami, Florida you might think that’s where they are from, but it appears that Brian Ayres (Game) and Richard Shelton (Player) are actually from Washington, D.C. Now I admire the chutzpah of independently getting this single out and actually pulling together the resources to follow it with a full album, not an easy task in the pre-digital distribution year of 1994. And sure enough if you listen to the song “What’s Reality” their origins become clear. “A D.C. kid coming up, a street wise young buck, a hood so don’t press your luck.”

So here’s the biggest problem with this group being real. Aside from a VERY brief bio on Discogs, no information exists about them anywhere. In fact there’s so little about Ayres and Shelton out there I’m risking the real danger of this review becoming a top search result. I don’t want you to get the mistaken impression that I’m an authority on No Description Given — far from it. I’m just as puzzled as you are to discover that “Game and the Player” exists. The fact there’s a full upload of it online means at least one person owns a copy of it. I would hazard a guess they are from the DMV themselves because this album screams LOCAL GROUP in a way many releases don’t.

The things I can tell you for certain are as follows: Player produced 7 of 11 tracks on their album, three were done by the team of Brian Overton & Khalid Keene, and one lone tracks was by Game himself. Songs like “Ya Dayz Are Go Done” are as generically early-to-mid 1990’s as rap gets. It’s aggressively NOT BAD, with a hard driving percussion and someone doing their best impression of reggae patois throughout. It’s like a “Dolly My Baby” remix without Christopher Wallace. It also features the requisite number of “we’re too hard for that pop rap shit” callouts dissing MC Hammer and unfortunate “packing more explosives than the World Trade Center” punchlines on “Down Fall.”

To be fair to NDG they had no way of knowing that September 11th would happen, and they’re certainly not the only ones who threw that line into a song. Both the aforementioned Notorious B.I.G. and Jeru the Damaja had similar quips in “Juicy” and “Come Clean” around the same time. The one song here that I think jumps off the page in any way is “Any Day.” It starts out like it’s going to be a smooth Black Moon style jazz rap then takes a much more eerie turn as a voice drop says “ohhhhhhh” or “whoa” in the background. There’s nothing to write home about lyrically with punchlines like “I catch more wreck than a drunken driver” but they’re not aggressively wack either. It’s absolutely par for 1994 with a musical backdrop that’s above average.

It’s hard to be hard on “Game and the Player” because I can sense that everybody involved WAS trying hard. The fundamentals are solid, the vocals and music are well mixed, the flows are smooth. Even in 1994 the rap game was incredibly crowded though and a tiny Washington, D.C. rap group with a name that almost literally made them unidentifiable wasn’t going to break through. I’m not sure I could come up with a better name. All I’ve got is even stupider ideas like “Washington’s Most Dangerous” and that might make people think they’re from Seattle or Tacoma. Shelton and Ayres had everything going against them. They weren’t from a piping hot rap scene (even in ’94 D.C. was better known for go-go) and they weren’t on a major label that could push them to radio deejays and budget a music video. They had no chance. I would be sad about it but in truth they are mid. “Game and the Player” is a fine listen but there’s very little chance it will stick with you after listening.