Snoop Dogg has always been a rapper who appeals to many people, a friendly face of gangsta rap, who rose to fame in the 1990s, but never took himself too seriously. In the beginning he called himself Snoop Doggy Dogg. Doggy style, his 11 million-selling debut album, helped hip-hop conquer the world. The cover featured a cartoon and featured his funny breakthrough hit, “Gin and Juice.”
That lightness is the reason why meal delivery giant Just Eat chose Snoop as the face of its advertising campaign thirty years later. „Just eat,” he sings to me; What other rapper could they have chosen for such a family-friendly service? Snoop is the homely homie: Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr., as his baptismal name is, now that hip-hop is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, released a wholesome sports film (on Prime Video), of course entitled The Underdoggs.
“Be honest,” he says in his deliberate drawl. “There are more people who feel like they know Snoop Dogg than like my music.” He shrugs, always the man at ease. “But I broke the fourth wall – that was the difference between me and everyone else. I understood that it’s the people who make you a champion, so I wanted to shake hands and kiss the babies – be approachable. I was never a star in the sky, I am the twinkle in your eye.”
“I never wanted to be loud and offensive. I didn’t know how to deal with success, so I always kept my feet on the ground, how high I was too.”
He takes a drag from a large joint. He’s in his dark Los Angeles studio, the Compound – a sprawling complex just off the coast of Long Beach, where Snoop was born in 1971. His mother, Beverly, nicknamed him Snoopy because of his resemblance to the dog from the Peanuts comic strip. His father, Vernell, left when Snoop was three months old.
From the Compound, Snoop runs his company, his one-man brand, with the help of his wife Shante. Music is really just a side issue these days. The Underdoggs was Snoop’s idea. In 2005 he founded the Snoop Youth Football League on, a sports club and league to help kids in “gang-infested communities” stay out of trouble – young participants have become doctors, police chiefs and professional American football players. Those stories were the inspiration for the film. But The Underdoggs is a comedy, not a drama. Snoop still knows that seriousness doesn’t sell. The rapper plays Jaycen Jennings, a retired National Football League star who wants to help a hopeless team turn around. Photos in the credits show the real Snoop coaching American football.
A rapper who puts out fires instead of lighting them seems to be a rarity. But he was always like that. About Doggy style, released in 1993, Snoop said at the time: “I’m going to try to eliminate gang violence.” And the best song ‘Doggyland’ on his follow-up album was a sensitive call for a better, safer world. That was the mid-1990s, when white audiences picked up rappers’ stories about the problems in the black community. The song ‘Doggyland’ with the line “Stop, the life you save may be your own” was the opposite of how the media, record labels and rap stars like Notorious BIG and Ice-T wanted to sell rap music.
“Sex. Violence. Murder,” he says in a raspy voice. “That’s what sold rap in the 1990s. So when, in the heat of the violent rap era, I said, “I’m part of that movement, but I want to promote peace, positivity, and love,” the industry said, “Get rid of him before everyone else has such shit going to do!'”
“But what they don’t realize is that I had to defend myself in a murder case at the time,” Snoop continues. In 1993, he was charged with the murder of Philip Woldemariam, but was acquitted in 1996 after his lawyers argued that it was Snoop’s bodyguard who shot in self-defense. “I don’t want to go into that, but I was dealing with that and I had had a baby, so I could see life. I didn’t want to see death… I come from the world of gun-toting street gangs, and there are things you don’t do if you want to survive. That was my time to speak out.”
For example, in 2013, during a short-lived reggae period, Snoop released the song ‘No Guns Allowed’ – “I was tired of seeing children killed” – and two years later he started his American football association. He made a name for himself as a gangsta rapper, but left that behind. Nothing makes that clearer than his long friendship with America’s lifestyle darling Martha Stewart. He made mashed potatoes on her cooking show and now they run several businesses together.
Snoop’s love for cannabis even convinced Stewart to start selling expensive cannabis oil candies called CBD gummies.
The man is a doer, the exact opposite of his decades-long image as, well, kind of stoner. He even makes an educational cartoon for preschoolers. Snoop is now 52 and has been in the spotlight for 30 years. Does he have a retirement plan? “You brought up the P-word – we don’t like that,” he says with a grimace. “There are things I still need to do, because you want your legacy to grow even when you are gone.”
This is a shortened version of an interview by ©The Times/Veenhoven Amsterdam. Translation by Paul Steenhuis