Snoop Dogg - The Godfather of Long Beach

But to be completely honest, I don’t like Snoop’s new album. And it has nothing to do with the fact that I’m not working on it, because I’m just like everyone else: either I like it or I don’t. The first time I heard the single, I was getting into it, but then I really started getting into the production and listening to how it sounded, you know? After that, I start breaking the songs down. There’s really nothing being said there that hasn’t been said 50 times before.

The audience also reacts with less enthusiasm, though that doesn't stop the rapper from enjoying sales of almost half a million copies in the first week, and more than four times that in total. But this time the hype is less justified, and Doggfather doesn't achieve the classic status unanimously granted to the debut. If anything, its main legacy is confirming, in practice, that Snoop Dogg can rhyme like a true great, with his laid-back style, even without the support — material or even just moral — of Dr. Dre. Then again, the producer had seen it coming on Death Row, and Snoop Dogg too realizes that the contract he signed with Suge Knight has him chained down: every one of his tracks belongs to the label. A bitter conflict ensues, the rapper puts together a dedication track called “Fuck Death Row” and eventually leaves to join No Limit. With the move, he also repositions himself stylistically, flirting with the pop and rock world. Enter now at Lollapalooza in 1997, drawing an alternative crowd curious and open to crossover. Thus begins a new phase of his career.

The No Limit trilogy

Da Game Is To Be Sold, Not To Be Told (1998) is a settling-in album, softer but still funk and gangsta, surrounded by new rappers from the No Limit stable. The thoroughly relaxed “Snoop World” defines the sound of this period, with a slow, hypnotic flow varied by bursts of speed and guest spots. Here the featuring comes directly from the label boss himself, Master P. The results often move away from the typical west-coast sound of the early days, with the aggressive “Woof!” (featuring Fiend and Mystikal) leaning toward dirty-south, but even when it explicitly looks back, as in “Gin And Juice II”, “Hoes, Money & Clout” and “Still A G Thang”, everything sounds different, less explosive, slower and more narcoleptic. There's also room for sensual softness like “D.O.G.’s Get Lonely 2” (featuring Jon B), which looks toward the sensual r’n’b of the turn of the century.
The fact that “Tru Tank Doggs” (featuring Mystikal) stands out more for the guest’s possessed delivery, and that the same happens with the verses of other guests, suggests, however, that something still isn’t quite working as it should.
The album still goes double platinum at home, confirming the rapper's commercial success. Critics greet it lukewarmly, partly due to the by-now familiar wordiness, but by this point it's an ever less relevant criticism, given a string of multi-million-selling records.

No Limit Top Dogg (1999) sees Dr. Dre return to production as well, reviving the collaboration that had so captivated listeners. It's the main novelty on a fourth album that otherwise keeps playing it safe, as on “Snoopafella”, “Just Dippin'” (with Dr. Dre and Jewell) and “Bitch Please” (featuring Xzibit and Nate Dogg, with the return of Dr. Dre's chirping synths).
At the center, of course, is the owner's unmistakable rap, amid a blend of west-coast sounds, still a few southern-rap touches and some curious arrangement choices, like the western guitar Dr. Dre picked for “Buck' Em” (feat. Sticky Fingaz) and the softness and sensuality that return on “Trust Me” and “Somethin Bout Yo Bidness” (featuring Raphael Saadiq), almost soul tracks.
Closing out a hefty 21-track lineup is a dedication to his mother, “I Love My Mommy”, not exactly an adequate response for the critics who point the finger at the monotony of the lyrics and the clichés gangsta that have lingered since the debut. Although it's the most acclaimed of the No Limit albums, it doesn't reach the top of the Billboard chart, stolen by Ricky Martin's debut. Commercial results dip but, with a bit of effort, this album too will sell over two million copies.

In 1999 Snoop Dogg also returns as lead rapper on Dr. Dre's outstanding second album, “2001”, standing out in particular on the hit “Still D.R.E.”, a huge success in the UK and an instant classic of gangsta rap.

His time with No Limit, however, is naturally coming to an end. Meanwhile Dead Man Walkin (2000) and Death Row: Snoop Doggy Dogg At His Best (2001) are the compilations Death Row puts together to close the Snoop Dogg chapter: disowned by the rapper, they are little more than a curiosity for collectors. Enter now also the gangsta-rap project Tha Eastsidaz, a trio with Tray Deee and Goldie Loc that releases two albums: “Tha Eastsidaz” (2000) and “Duces 'n Trayz: The Old Fashioned Way” (2001), before a 12-year prison sentence handed down to Tray Deee brings the experience to a close.
In 2001 Snoop Dogg also writes two film scores, an activity he began in 1994 with the cult mid-length film  “Murder Was The Case”: one for Ernest Dickerson's horror film “Bones”, in which he stars; the other for the comedy “The Wash”, alongside Dr. Dre and other rappers.

More substantial is The Last Meal (2000), the album that ideally bridges this period with the next one, starting with its production team: on one side the assurance of a Dr. Dre who's become active again, on the other Timbaland representing a new, more southern and poppier, way of making rap. The fact that it's him, rather than the former NWA man, who puts together “Snoop Dogg (What's My Name Part II)” is almost a symbolic act. So in the packed track list we find both “Hennessey N Buddah” (feat. Kokane), a late-period g-funk classic, and the crowd-pleasing r’n’b of “True Lies” (again with Kokane), the southern frenzy of “Back Up Off Me” (featuring Master P and Magic) and the booming bass of “Go Away”, three glimpses of a more danceable, catchy and pop future.
Timbaland delivers one of his trademark tracks, driven by a hypnotic beat with a roaring guitar backing up the many voices, titled “Set It Off” (featuring MC Ren, The Lady of Rage, Ice Cube, Nate Dogg and Kurupt): it's a great example of his ability to merge ’90s hip-hop with the crossover sound of the early 2000s, an approach also echoed by “Bring It On” (featuring Suga Free and Kokane), produced instead by Jelly Roll.
This fifth album also does very well commercially, eventually reaching an enviable total of 2 million copies sold worldwide. The gangster image shows all the limits of repetition, and even the news of Dre's return as a collaborator no longer comes as a surprise, but the new, more crossover, danceable directions are a valuable preview of what's to as.
The Last Meal is above all the last chance to hear Snoop Dogg before his rebranding as a stylish, harmless pimp, quite different from the gangster of his early days.

The image change and the transition toward pop

This transformation is fully completed with Paid Tha Cost To Be Da Boss (2002), with which the American rapper breaks into the international mainstream. Released on his own label, Doggystyle, but backed by Capitol, it's a battering ram aimed at the charts, and it succeeds, first of all, by choosing the right collaborators. Producer E-Swift launches Snoopy into the future with the robotic synths of “Da Bo$$ Would Like To See You”, but then it's Jelly Roll with “Stoplight” who updates g-funk into a frantic style more in line with early-2000s production flash: it's a party with radio interludes, rising scales, scattered percussion thrown in.
The most important collaboration, however, is the one with The Neptunes and Pharrell Williams, the former a production team crucial to hip-hop blended with rock and r’n’b, the latter the singer and face of the duo: together they write “From Tha Chuuuch To Da Palace”, a funk-rock track built like an obsessive gangsta cut, and above all “Beautiful” (with Charlie Wilson), a featherweight, summery, vaguely Latin pop-rap tune that becomes the first Snoop Dogg track to count as a hit even in Italy.
Even the r’n’b moments get a new, sophisticated, silky makeover, as with “I Believe In You” (featuring LaToiya Williams). Also helping access to the pop imagination is a guest spot from Jay-Z on “Lollipop”, paired with Nate Dogg to drive a dance built around a pan flute.

With every rough edge and conflict smoothed away, Snoop Dogg is reborn as a charming ladies' man, perfectly repositioned as a radio- and chart-friendly rapper. Gone are the days of criminal trials, relentless misogyny, gunshots used as punctuation in his tracks, and a dancefloor-ready cut like “Hourglass” (featuring Kokane and Goldie Loc) makes that plain.
Commercial results dip somewhat, around a total of a million and a half copies, but the future path is set.

Having switched labels once again, landing at Geffen and Star Trak, Snoop Dogg continues with R&G (Rhythm & Gangsta): The Masterpiece (2004; such modesty!), driven by a new single with Pharrell Williams and produced by The Neptunes. “Drop It Like It's Hot” is his first super-hit, his first number one at home on the Billboard singles chart and a success in Europe and Australia too. The company behind the charts also named the song the most famous rap single of the decade.
A production masterpiece made of tongue clicks, minimal arrangement, shimmering synth chords and a danceable beat, “Drop It Like It's Hot” is also the perfect sonic backdrop to reaffirm Snoop Dogg's exceptional delivery, which has aged remarkably well.
The other massive worldwide hit single, “Signs” (featuring Justin Timberlake and Charlie Wilson), isn't quite as charismatic, but still sticks in your head with its smooth chorus and festive horns.
The album simply refines the ideas of its predecessor, and the fact that Star Trak is essentially an offshoot of the Neptunes means the album works very well as a pop-rap product and much less so when it tries to return to gangsta territory, or at least closer to the streets.
The commercial result is nonetheless better than Paid Tha Cost To Be Da Boss, climbing back up to around two million copies.

The time is ripe for a new compilation, this time covering the No Limit period: Snoopified – The Best Of Snoop Dogg is the 2005 greatest hits and a decent way to sum up part of his career.
He'll release more than ten other compilations by 2010, in various formats and with different aims, including the inevitable (?) Christmas album. Not content with such abundance, starting in 2003 he'll also launch a series of nine mixtapes, Welcome To Tha Chuuch, later joined by the That's My Work series (2012 – 2014) and many other mixtapes released mostly through Doggystyle.
There's also room for the trio 213, with Nate Dogg and Warren G, responsible for the sole album “The Hard Way” (2004). Snoop Dogg's appearances multiply: in a Korn video and as a guest of Ice Cube, on a Coolio single but also on numerous Dogg Pound tracks.

Tha Blue Carpet Treatment (2006) marks a return to his solo career and a compromise between g-funk sounds and more recent pop-rap ones. “That's That Shit” (featuring R. Kelly) and “Candy” (featuring E-40, MC Eiht, Goldie Loc, Daz Dillinger and Kurupt) are two different but complementary singles: first a catchy, pop-leaning hook, then another pop-rap nursery rhyme with a creative, minimal arrangement. Representing the gangsta side are productions from the revived Dr. Dre such as “Boss' Life” (featuring Akon), which also lends itself to the more radio-friendly “Round Here”, which samples Dido and sounds like a lesser, newer “Stan”.
The compromise doesn't help the singles much, though, as this time they fail to break into the mainstream. Whether due to the record industry's crisis or a certain creative fatigue, for the first time Snoop Dogg doesn't reach a million copies sold at home. So ends another phase of his career, the shift from pure rapper to pop-rapper fit for a wider audience. After all, gangsta-rap has by now fallen out of fashion and, as a movement, has essentially exhausted its creative force.

Katy Perry, Rastafarianism, the lion and Snoopzilla

With eight albums now behind him, and numerous commercial hits alongside at least one work that stands as a genuine genre classic, Snoop Dogg enters a phase of fatigue. While earlier albums saw a significant stylistic shift that also led to some international hits, the following Ego Trippin' (2008) and Malice N Wonderland (2009) are at best good enough to keep his music and his persona alive.
Far from innovative, they serve to portray the gangster-pimp as a grown man too, heading toward his forties. That's what a self-referential album like Ego Trippin' does, even venturing into Johnny Cash-style country on "My Medicine", while also updating his love of funk by singing the platinum single "Sexual Eruption" through auto-tune. He reaffirms this with Malice N Wonderland, unusually short for his typically long-winded habits: 54 minutes in which numerous guests and producers help the man himself sound still current, even with trap injections (for instance, "That's Tha Homie"). The best moment is perhaps "Gangsta Luv" (feat. The-Dream), if only for its festive spirit. Together, the albums fail to reach a million copies at home, where he was once a sales champion.

During this period his biggest hit is the one with Katy Perry, "California Gurls" (2010): eight times platinum, one of the pop singles of the decade. It's not that collaborations are new to Snoop Dogg — he's racked up dozens of them since the Nineties — but it's clear that from the start of the new millennium these yield successes comparable to, or even far greater than, his own singles. 2006 is the turning point in this respect: "Buttons" (with girl group Pussycat Dolls) and "I Wanna Love You" (with r'n'b star Akon) are big hits that court a mainstream audience. But the chart-topping single with Katy Perry is the biggest commercial success he's ever part of, a moment of exposure unprecedented in international pop and one that will never be repeated, despite other collaborations and the occasional further chart entry.

Doggumentary (2011), initially conceived as a direct sequel to Doggystyle, doesn't have a tenth of the impact that album had on the scene; it fails to excite the public and leaves critics cold. As verbose as ever, it's an eleventh album with nothing new to offer, enlisting an army of collaborators (including Kanye West, Gorillaz and John Legend) to liven up the man's classic rap by updating it with new sounds, as on the club-banger "Boom". Snoop Dogg also plays at reviving the g-funk of old, even at the cost of name-dropping Funkadelic and Parliament left and right, to the point that Bootsy Collins himself shows up right at the opening.
Among the few truly curious items worth mentioning is "Wet", a dancefloor anthem written specifically for Prince William, Duke of Cambridge: it's a jarring clash between the triviality of the lyrics and composition on one side and the sanitized world of the English Royals on the other.

Late 2011 also brings the collaborative soundtrack with Wiz Khalifa, Mac & Devin Go To High School, famous above all for the melancholic sweetness of "Young, Wild & Free" (featuring Bruno Mars), six-times platinum at home and a huge worldwide hit. The rest of the soundtrack, on the other hand, leans toward more conventional modern gangsta-rap, weed-themed throughout.

As if that weren't enough, in this period of artistic fatigue Snoop Dogg first releases electronic music collected in the deejay-compilation "Loose Joints", under the name Dj Snoopadelic, and then opts for an album paired with a documentary of the same name, Reincarnated (2013), the fruit of a conversion to Rastafarianism.
It's a genuine spiritual rebirth for the former gangster, so much so that he even changes his name: no more dogs, now he's Snoop Lion. And no more, or almost no more, hip-hop, replaced here by fashionable reggae, produced mainly by Diplo and his Major Lazer. This album, full of good vibes and obviously steeped in marijuana, is enjoyable in its lightness and positivity, as in the consecutive triptych "The Good Good" (featuring Iza) – "Torn Apart" (with Rita Ora) – "Ashtrays And Heartbreaks" (feat. Miley Cyrus), but it adds nothing to reggae, pop or music in general, nor does it gift a single track worthy of joining the classics of his discography. It's simply Snoop Dogg's obsession of the moment, one of his "characters" he's playing, regardless of the sincerity and depth of the religious conversion.

This change of name and image sits oddly with the fact that, just a few months later, for the collaborative project and short self-titled album 7 Days Of Funk (2013), alongside Dâm-Funk, he goes by Snoopzilla and returns to the g-funk of his early days, still obsessing over George Clinton, Bootsy Collins and Funkadelic. Nothing we haven't heard before, but coming from someone who still knows how to do it very well.

The Comeback: Snoop Dogg and the Bible

In 2015 Snoop Dogg returns to being a solo rapper, backed by Pharrell Williams, for his thirteenth and unusually short album Bush, a late-period example of nostalgic, crowd-pleasing g-funk: it's the ideal follow-up to R&G (Rhythm & Gangsta): The Masterpiece, but perhaps it really is too late, and not even the new collaborations — including a Kendrick Lamar on a steep upward trajectory — can offset the fleeting substance of the whole, which sounds mostly like self-celebration. Daz Dillinger and Snoop team up for the fun if ephemeral disco-g-funk blend found on "Cuzznz" (2016), then for Coolaid (2017) Snoop Dogg returns to his classic sound, simply varying it with trap and pop-rap numbers, in the sprawling format we all know by now — around twenty tracks for nearly 80 minutes.

Slightly more concise, Neva Left (2017) is equally irrelevant to his career or to hip-hop in general. Not content with that, he also adds two new EPs, Make America Crip Again (2017) and 220 (2018), following his first release in this format, Stoner's Ep (2012): these are completist-only items.
By now it's all on autopilot, then a new twist arrives with Snoop Dogg Presents Bible Of Love (2018), a colossal 134-minute gospel album (!) that shakes up a career otherwise in a comatose state: it's certainly strange to listen to these 32 tracks, but it also demands great patience and a certain suspension of disbelief to accept this irresistible religious urge.

I Wanna Thank Me (2019) would seem like a career closer, a synthesis of the many versions of his hip-hop, and it's released amid little general interest, but From Tha Streets 2 Tha Suites (2021) extends his discography further, even if with just half an hour of music.BODR (the acronym stands for "Bacc On Death Row") (2022) returns to the historic label of his early days and to that sound built on good vibes, groove and hedonism. Packed with guests on the mic and fueled by the creativity of a handful of producers, the album also serves as fuel for that year's Super Bowl halftime show performance, alongside Dr. Dre, Eminem, 50 Cent, Mary J. Blige and Kendrick Lamar. If the rhymes on a track like "Doggystylin" now sound well-worn, this spin on the nostalgia carousel still wins over older ears still smitten with the sound of yesteryear. Of course, when Nas shows up on "Conflicted" it's obvious which of the two has aged better.
The same surprise can't be extended to Iz It A Crime? (2025), split between numerous Dr. Dre- and Pharrell-style beats ("Unsung Heroes", "Can't Wait", "Keep It Moving", "What's Hattnin?", "West Up"), yet another demonstration of his trademark laid-back rap, with plenty of uninspired moments, including a few where he flaunts a wisdom that's frankly hard to buy.

For the entire period following 2013, the overall impression holds that little has been added to the American artist's career as a whole: not a hit, not an album that will be remembered in years to as, not a single idea that will be passed down to posterity, even just among hip-hop diehards.
It's a great many tracks and projects, often disjointed, that mainly serve to keep Snoop Dogg surviving within a hip-hop landscape that has drifted decisively, and perhaps permanently, away from how Calvin Cordozar Broadus Junior understood it at the start. The ideal American heir to Slick Rick, crossed with N.W.A. and 2Pac, has nonetheless weathered the inevitable end of the golden era better than many of his peers, while also building a popular persona recognizable even outside the musical context it sprang from.
In 2018 Snoop Dogg, along with a handful of fellow pranksters, also became the holder of a Guinness World Record for the world's largest "Paradise" cocktail: 550 liters of gin, apricot brandy and orange juice combined. It's a way of reminding everyone that he has remained, against all odds, the relaxed, perpetually stoned party animal of the Nineties, with no intention whatsoever of giving up his "gin and juice".
He still made headlines during the 2024 Paris Olympics, as an eccentric commentator for NBC and Peacock, and then, more simply, as a musician at the closing ceremony, teamed up once again with lifelong friend Dr. Dre. It's with the latter that he went back to partying that same year on Missionary, a minor but still respectable follow-up to his debut. Just a few tracks in, it's clear the two can still whip up effective party music, steeped in colorful hedonism and able to balance g-funk roots with livelier, bass-driven beats, pop and rock contamination, and Latin touches. They're both in their fifties but manage to hold their own without ever becoming ridiculous, which is more than one could have hoped for going in, especially in light of Snoop Dogg's recent albums. The short film accompanying the release backs this up too, 12 minutes of action that doesn't skimp on self-deprecating humor. If Dre and Snoop are throwing a party, in short, it's still a party worth attending. Though, if forced to pick a favorite position, the classic doggystyle is decidedly the way to go.