Snoop Dogg: “More people feel they know me than like my music.” Photo / Getty Images
He is the gangsta rapper who broke the mould — now 52, he’s friends with Martha Stewart, makes educational cartoons and has changed his tune on the man running for President.
Snoop Dogg is still not over the end of Game of Thrones. “He [Jon Snow] killed the Queen, cuz. I’m mad,” he growls. The finale was years ago but he remains bothered. “Oh, I couldn’t stand it!” he bellows, with bewilderment and fury, echoing the thoughts of millions.
Still, Snoop has always been the most relatable rapper — a friendly face of gangsta rap, who leapt to fame in the 1990s but never took himself too seriously. At the start he was literally called Snoop Doggy Dogg. Doggystyle, his 11-million-selling debut album, helped to take hip-hop global. It had a cartoon front cover and a fun breakout hit, Gin and Juice.
Such lightness is why, 30 years later, the food delivery giant Just Eat picked Snoop to front its advertisements. “Just Eat!” he sings to me, but what other rapper could be chosen to flog a family-friendly service? Snoop is the homely homie — the man christened Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr who, as hip-hop marks its 50th anniversary, busies himself with a wholesome sports film called, of course, The Underdoggs.
“Be honest,” he begins, in his slow and considered drawl. “More people feel they know Snoop Dogg than like my music.” He shrugs, a man at perpetual ease. “But I break the fourth wall — that was the difference between me and everybody else. I understood that it’s the people who make you the champion, so I wanted to shake hands and kiss the babies — be reachable. I’ve never been a star in the sky, I’ve been a star in your eye.”
This is not, I suggest, how braggadocious rap icons usually speak. He smiles. “When I was at my peak, I never thought, ‘I’m bigger than God!’ I never wanted to be loud and obnoxious. I couldn’t believe how big I was and my records may have said, ‘I’m the shit!’ but that was out of shock rather than cockiness. I didn’t know how to handle success, so I’ve always stayed grounded, no matter how high I got.”
He takes a toke on a sizeable joint. He is settled in a dark studio in Los Angeles, the Compound — a sprawling complex just up the coast from Long Beach, where Snoop was born in 1971. His mother, Beverly, gave him the nickname Snoopy because of a likeness to the cartoon dog. His father, Vernell, left when Snoop was three months old. The walls of the Compound are lined with photo highlights. “This is where we got to meet President Obama!” Snoop says.
He also met Donald Trump, on a televised Comedy Central roast in 2011, a chance for the invited celebrities to take apart the host of The Apprentice, as Trump was then. Snoop made a prescient gag about the possibility of Trump running for president and displacing the Obamas: “Why not? It wouldn’t be the first time you’d pushed a black family out of their home.”
Snoop laughs. “Donald Trump?” he bellows. “He ain’t done nothing wrong to me. He has done only great things for me. He pardoned Michael Harris.” Harris, the co-founder of Snoop’s first label, Death Row, was in prison for drug offences. “So I have nothing but love and respect for Donald Trump.” I mention a post from 2012 in which Snoop weighed up reasons to vote for Barack Obama above Mitt Romney. Should we expect similar for Biden v Trump this year? “I may have to,” Snoop says, nodding. “Because there are mixed views on that, so I want to see what the people say …”
It is from the Compound that Snoop runs his one-man brand, with the help of his wife, Shante. Music is really just a side hustle now. The Underdoggs was Snoop’s idea. In 2005 he set up the Snoop Youth Football League to help children in “gang-riddled communities” stay out of trouble — the programme has guided members to become doctors, police chiefs and even NFL professionals. These are the stories that inspired the film.
But The Underdoggs is a comedy, not a drama. Snoop still has the self-awareness to know that serious does not sell. The rapper plays Jaycen Jennings, a washed-up NFL star who takes on a struggling team — photos shown in the closing credits show the real Snoop coaching American football. How did those kids in real life react to this superstar putting them through training drills? “If one kid said, ‘Hey, I’ve seen you on MTV!’ I’d make him do ten push-ups,” he says, grinning. “They learnt.”
Could Snoop do a Ted Lasso and come to England to coach our football? “I like that,” he says. Who does he support? “Everyone!” A diplomat, then? “Exactly.”
He really is a rarity, a rapper who puts out fires rather than starting them. He has always been like this. Speaking about Doggystyle, released in 1993, Snoop said at the time: “I’m going to try to eliminate gang violence.” If that felt off-kilter, his follow-up record’s best track was Doggyland — a tender cry for a safer, better world. He looks thrilled when I mention Doggyland. “It was a wake-up,” he says of the song. “I wanted to write about what life could be like if there was no violence, disease or killing. But nobody liked it because they were so used to rap being, ‘F* that! Shoot a n***! Bitch you ain’t shit, blah blah.’ It was like seeing Robert De Niro in Meet the Parents. You were used to him killing people.”
This was the mid-1990s, when the white suburbs had latched on to rap’s tales of black trouble. Doggyland and its lyric of “Stop, the life you save may be your own” was the opposite of how the media, labels and rap stars such as the Notorious BIG and Ice-T wanted to sell the music.
He fixes me with a stare. “Sex. Violence. Murder,” he rasps. “They were the keys to selling rap in the 1990s. So when I, in the heat of the violent rap era, said, ‘I’m a part of that movement but I want to push peace, positivity and love,’ the industry said, ‘Get him out before everyone else starts doing that shit!’
“But what they fail to realise is that I was fighting a murder case at the time,” Snoop continues. In 1993 he was charged with the murder of Philip Woldemariam, only to be acquitted in 1996 after his lawyers claimed that Snoop’s bodyguard was the shooter, and in self-defence. “I don’t want to get into that, but that’s what I was dealing with and I’d had a baby, so I was able to see life and I didn’t want to see death … I come from gang bangers and there is shit you don’t do if you want to survive. That was my time to speak out. I didn’t give a f*** about sales.”
As if to prove this, in 2013, during a short-lived reggae stint, Snoop released the song No Guns Allowed — “I was tired of seeing kids get killed” — and, two years later, started his football league. Essentially he made his name with gangsta rap before leaving it behind. Nothing says that more than a long friendship with America’s home economics sweetheart, Martha Stewart, struck up soon after she was released from prison on fraud charges — think Liam Gallagher chilling with Mary Berry. Snoop and Stewart met in 2008, when he made mashed potatoes on her cookery show, and they now run multiple businesses together.
“It’s growth,” Snoops says of the unlikely friendship. “If I stayed in the old mindset, I’d not be attractive enough for Martha to have a conversation with. Now we’ve learnt so much from each other.” Snoop’s love of cannabis even persuaded Stewart to get into the CBD (cannabis oil) game, selling upmarket gummies flavoured with kumquat and blood orange. The man is a doer, quite the opposite of his decades-long image as, well, a bit of a stoner.
He even makes an educational cartoon for preschool kids. “Look,” he says, exasperated. “I’ve been a grandfather for nine years but I was hanging out with them thinking, ‘Why are y’all watching f***ing CoComelon [a singalong TV show for toddlers] for hours? I’m talking to you! I thought, I should make a show like that so I can get their attention.”
Snoop is 52 now, and has been in the spotlight for 30 years. Does he have a plan for retirement? “You brought up the R-word — we don’t like that,” he says, grimacing. “But I know what you mean. It’s being set up, but there are things that I have to do before, because you want your legacy to grow even when you’re not here.”
We end on Starsky & Hutch. And why not? His role in Ben Stiller’s remake is how some know him best. David Soul, who died this month, was in the 2004 movie too and Snoop remembers him fondly. “We had a good time,” he says. “We were smoking.” He means drugs.
Of greater significance to Snoop on that set, though, was the revered black actor Fred Williamson. He told the thirtysomething Snoop about three rules he had followed when making blaxploitation movies in the 1970s: win all your fights, always get the girls and, most important, stay alive. For Snoop, these rules became lessons for life to stop people taking advantage of him. “These three things let people know that we’re the heroes.”
Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr, aka Snoop Dogg, isn’t the only star to change their name.
Sting
Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner got his stage name thanks to his habit of wearing a black and yellow jumper while performing with the band the Phoenix Jazzmen.
The Edge
In some tellings, the U2 frontman, Bono, nicknamed David Howell Evans “the Edge” due to the angular shape of his skull.
P!NK
Alecia Beth Moore Hart said her stage name started as “a mean thing at first; some kids at camp pulled my pants down and I blushed, and they were, like, ‘She’s pink!’ "
Iggy Pop
In school James Newell Osterberg Jr was in a band called the Iguanas, which led to Iggy. “Pop” was inspired by a friend — Jim Popp.
Lady Gaga
Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta’s music producer said she reminded him of the Queen song Radio Ga Ga.
The Underdoggs is on Prime Video
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London
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