Had Snoop Dogg pretended to take a toke from the Olympic torch he helped carry to open the 2024 games, few people would have been surprised.
But the now cannabis entrepreneur and elder statesman of hip-hop is in his respectable era – he’s a little older, a little wiser and a whole lot more lovable.
The 52-year-old rapper’s transformation – from superstar on trial for murder in the 1990s to Martha Stewart bestie on “grandpa’s duties” at the Olympics – has been so slow and shrewd that it’s very natural to ask: How did we get here?
P. Frank Williams covered Snopp Dogg’s murder trial for the Los Angeles Times and co-wrote the book “Chosen by Fate: My Life Inside Death Row Records” with the musician’s co-defendant McKinley Lee Jr.
Williams told CNN the answer is actually quite simple.
“He worked hard and loves what he does,” said Williams, who most recently directed Hulu’s “Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told” documentary. “Snoop has this likability and charm that you can’t buy.”
Not to mention an arc that’s a testament to the power of reinvention.
Tough start in Long Beach
Born Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. in Long Beach, California, Snoop Dogg earned the family nickname “Snoop” because of his resemblance to the Peanuts character.
He came up during a time when gang violence and crack were devastating inner city neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Despite being a star athlete in high school, Snoop fell into that life, selling drugs and getting into trouble as a teen.
“I was always scared. That’s why I believe I survived because you have to have either fear or respect. And I didn’t understand respect, so I feared everything,” Snoop Dogg told Howard Stern in 2021. “A lot of times I got shot at; a lot of times I had a gun in my possession and could have shot back but I was too scared to shoot back because I was so concerned for my life. It’s either fight or flight and most of time when you’re out there, it’s flight.”
That “gangsta” persona would follow him when he first found fame in 1992 as the guest rapper on producer and NWA member Dr. Dre’s debut solo single “Deep Cover,” for the movie of the same title.
Snoop Dogg holds the torch as part of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games Torch Relay, on the day of the opening ceremony, in Saint-Denis, outside Paris, on July 26, 2024. Stephane de Sakutin/AFP/Getty Images
Famed O.J. Simpson defense attorney Johnnie Cochran represented Snoop Dogg and Lee Jr. when the case went to trial in 1996 and resulted in an acquital.
That same year, Snoop Dogg released his second studio album, “Tha Doggfather,” which featured a softer version of the rapper, which he has since said his record label was not happy about.
It was so noticeably different from his debut album that years later people were still talking about how it felt more restrained and less hardcore than his debut.
“What Snoop tries to do throughout ‘Doggfather’ is exhibit the sort of maturation that was probably taking place in his life: he was 25 now, a father, had successfully navigated a terrifying legal gauntlet, had adjusted enough to the money and fame and constant paranoia,” Paul Thompson wrote for Fader in 2019. “But instead of making a hard break into a new, constructed persona –– or, instead of flitting between familiar fare and songs that were radically different –– he mostly just dials his old style down to 80 percent.”
At the time, Snoop Dogg has said, Death Row Records was not happy about his pivot.
“They wanted me to keep it gangsta,” he told Jemele Hill in 2019 during an episode of her “Unbothered” podcast. “They wanted me to, like, remain gangsta and still be, you know, f**king s**t up, but I just went through a murder case and I couldn’t.”
He said, “My heart and my spirit wasn’t in the place” to continue to embody his former persona. So, he rejected his label’s advice to go that direction.
He told Hill he’s been determined to be authentic and that meant growing as his life has changed because, “Me being me is all I know how to do.”
“As you grow older and you learn how to be a man, you have a family, things that you living for than that becomes the scope,” he said. “And I’ve never been afraid to position my life and say that I have a family now.”
SOURCE: CNN.COM
