You know Young Maylay from Grove Street. He’s the laidback South Angelino who gave hardened neighborhood hustler Carl “CJ” Johnson his voice and a huge chunk of his disposition in Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. If you were a gamer back in 2004, chances are you and Maylay have spent a lot of time together.
Dropping players into a fictionalized version of early ’90s Los Angeles—recognizable to those who viewed the city through the pop culture prism of hood movies and Compton's Most Wanted records—San Andreas was more than just a carjacker’s fever dream. The plot was laced with SoCal-specific issues like the crack epidemic, gang violence, the Rampart scandal, and the riots. The soundtrack had more bounce than a Roger Troutman-fueled lowrider.
But video games had never been in Christopher Bellard’s master plan. The previous installment in the GTA series, Vice City, had been fronted by Ray Liotta, the steely actor synonymous with movies like Goodfellas. Maylay, in contrast, was another gangsta rapper riding through L.A.’s concrete boulevards, throwing Ws in the air and chasing the ghost of Tupac. From a young age, he gravitated towards hip-hop because it was relatable.
“I was always a fan of N.W.A., Ice Cube, Eazy-E—all that,” Maylay says now. “But when King T had a record called Act a Fool, where [on the cover] he came out in a Cadillac on Daytons—he’s got on a khaki suit with a 12-gauge shotgun. These are the dudes I can look out the window and see. These are the dudes when I walk up the street, that’s what they dress like.”
As a teenager in the ’90s, Maylay forged friendships with King T and producer DJ Pooh, guys from the same streets who never gets enough credit for what they did for the West Coast. When Pooh would go into the studio with the likes of Snoop Dogg and Big Tray Deee, Maylay—then still a novice—would sit in the corner, quietly studying the process and plotting his own path. But life has a funny way of snatching away best-laid plans. Especially when you align yourself with a magnate whose skill set stretches across more industries than Howard Hughes.
Pooh scored a gig with Rockstar to serve as writer and co-producer on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the latest installment in a gaming series accused of corrupting more young minds than Miley Cyrus and Marilyn Manson combined. In a meeting with executives that touched on casting, Pooh called up Maylay and put him on speakerphone. Shooting the breeze without telling his protégé that anyone else was listening, Maylay had no idea he was being sized up for the project. “I wanted everything to be natural,” Pooh explained to him later. “I didn’t want you to put too much on it or be too laidback, I wanted you to be Maylay.”
Despite no prior acting experience, the emcee secured the part after several rounds of auditions, and was jettisoned to New York City to begin recording extensive amounts of voiceover. But even he hadn’t realized fully what he was getting himself into: “The script for the game was thicker than the Bible.” It was a workload to stretch even the patience of a VIEWS fan. Session after session, Maylay had to grunt, scream, and hiss to fully equip CJ with the sounds required for gameplay. Plus, dialogue needed to be recorded several times over to cover all bases. (If CJ gains too much weight in the game, for example, his voice changes.) “Some voice actors come in and they’ll record for four hours [a day], maybe,” he says. “I was in there maybe 10 to 12 hours.”
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas became the best-selling PlayStation 2 game of all time. Back home in L.A., a plan formed in Maylay’s mind. For years, he’d been sitting on a clutch of tracks, mostly classic west coast rap songs on top of middle-era Dr. Dre-style beats. Eager to parlay the success of the game into a music career, Maylay packaged his first release as San Andreas: The Original Mixtape in 2005. The cover played on the series’ familiar artwork. CJ dialoguewas sampled throughout. The intro even saw him rap over the game’s theme music in full character. “I was like ‘why not’ for the simple fact that this game was where the majority of people knew me from,” he says now. “I’ll probably never sell as many records as they sold video games.”
Maylay dropped San Andreas: The Original Mixtape independently. He oversaw everything— from sourcing the beats to mailing out the completed CDs—because despite the game’s success, he was still a new artist with few resources. The tape was well received by rap bloggers, but by the time his second tape, The Real Coast Guard, came out in 2008, he was ready to step out of the GTA universe. He’d hooked up with DJ Crazy Toones and Westside Connection rapper WC on the former’s It’s A CT Experience, and the pair came on board to help take some of the creative weight.
Maylay’s artistry also grew. The CJ gimmick was out, and the songs came more fully realized. The Real Coast Guard saw him deploy more complex cadences over “What’s The Difference”-style horns. The record may not have launched him to that next level of stardom, but it was the statement Maylay wanted to make. “I was able to really kick back and be an artist,” he says. “Because before it was just business. When I did The Real Coast Guard CD, it became fun. WC and Crazy Toones helped me out a lot like that.”
It’s now over a decade since the release of San Andreas, and its themes seem more relevant than ever. Ferguson, Cleveland, New York, Minneapolis, Baton Rouge, and Tulsa have once again underlined the dangers of being born black in America. Maylay, a man who came up a stone’s throw from the L.A. Riots and raised on a solid diet of NWA, shakes his head when considering how little has changed.
“What messes me up about the whole thing is that [police] keep using the same excuse and it works. ‘He was reaching for a gun’, or, ‘He was reaching for his waist band’, or, ‘He grabbed my gun’. They say that shit every time. Nobody is stupid enough unless you’re really crazy to grab a policeman’s gun.”
Since the release of The Real Coast Guard, Maylay hasn’t stood still. His iPhone contacts now boast recurrent collaborator Ice Cube as well as DJ Premier, whom Maylay worked with on the legendary New York beatmaker’s 2010 compilation, Get Used To Us. Maylay’s next solo project, Hogg Tied & Duct Taped, has been teased for years, as the tracklist shifts under constant revision from its particular creator. A release date has yet to be announced, but there are some certainties: WC and DJ Crazy Toones will remain key creatives, and Maylay will stay independent. He wants to only look straight ahead, not back to his pixelated past. As even he concedes, “There’s not one video of mine on YouTube that doesn’t have somebody saying something about CJ.”
Does that make Young Maylay feel pride or frustration?
“A little bit of both,” he admits. “That game was so long ago, but at the same time I can’t be mad that more people know of me for being CJ than from being Maylay. The whole thing is they know me, period. I don’t see myself as CJ from Grand Theft Auto. But at the same time, I was involved with that game and there’s lot of people who love that game who now are fans of my music—people who wouldn’t even listen to rap.”