The Documentary is released

Why it matters

The Documentary came out January 18, 2005, on Aftermath/Interscope. It is Game's debut album. The Compton-raised Jayceon Taylor had been signed to Dr. Dre and 50 Cent's G-Unit/Aftermath arrangement after a mixtape run. Dre executive-produced. The album was, at its core, a 50 Cent-style West Coast project: street-narrative MCing over heavy Dre and Hi-Tek and Eminem production. The album sold 586,000 copies in its first week and went five-times platinum within the next two years. "How We Do," "Hate It or Love It" (the 50 Cent-featuring single that became Game's signature hit), "Dreams," "Westside Story." The Documentary is the album that briefly revived West Coast commercial rap in the post-Dre-Snoop-Cube vacuum of the early 2000s. Game and 50 famously fell out before the album was a year old; the rest of Game's career was spent trying to consolidate the position The Documentary opened up for him. He has been working at it for two decades. You should hear The Documentary because nothing in his catalog after has equaled what it accomplished commercially. The first one was the big one.