Snoop Dogg at Ericsson Stadium

Snoop Dogg

There's a fine line between anticipation and boredom, a line Snoop Dogg crossed one too many times at Saturday night's Bossn Up show.

Returning eight years after his sellout concert in 1998, the Doggfather of hip-hop's popularity must have waned between visits, as the spread out crowd barely filled two-thirds of Ericsson Stadium's Supertop.

A brief set by Savage and the Deceptikonz had the crowd amped and ready to roll at the start of the night. Unfortunately, the same couldn't be said for Snoop, who took a further hour to appear.

After a half-hour wait with no entertainment, DJ Jam and DJ Battlecat emerged to announce that Snoop was in the building, alleviating the crowd's growing apathy.

When the man himself finally arrived, he was dressed in a bizarre kaftan-come-cassock romper-style suit, suitably fitting for the hour of self-adulation that was to ensue.

Opening with his recent track Gin and Juice, Snoop soon had the audience's attention.

But that didn't last long and he soon lost their attention again when he introduced his special guest for the evening, Lady of Rage, an old friend from Snoop Dogg's Death Row Records days.

Her solo seemed neverending and alienated most of the audience - it seemed that most of them had never heard of her.

And the awkward moments didn't stop there. The concert turned into amateur night at Showgirls when Snoop invited some preselected New Zealand girls, in Stars'n'Stripes hot-pants, to grace the stage.

But it wasn't all bad.

Snoop did a commendable job of blending old favourites with new hits, including his latest Drop It Like Its Hot, and mixing the work of other artists - such as Chris Brown and 50 Cent - with his own.

He also managed to get the audience back on side with his multitude of cadence-call routines, as well as prolonged farewell to Steam's Am I Right (Nah, nah, nah, nah/Hey, hey, hey, goodbye).

But the true mark of a concert's success is the buzz of the crowd leaving the venue.

In this case, the silence spoke volumes.