Hot Dogg

Snoop Dogg is mad. The Rowland Heights Raiders are defending their 7-0 record on a sunny Saturday afternoon in late October, but midway through the game, they’re ahead by only a touchdown. And they’re not really paying attention, which happens sometimes with 10-year-olds.

Standing on the grass of a high-school football field, in a multicultural suburb an hour east of Los Angeles, assistant coach Snoop Dogg is wearing black slippers, a football jersey and a silver hat. Before the game, he roamed the stands, bookended by security guards the size of NFL linebackers, signing autographs and posing for photos. Snoop leaves movie sets to attend football practice, even plans video shoots so they don’t conflict with games, and he insists that these kids show focus and concentration. He wants them to be players, not playas.

At six-foot-four, he’s two heads taller than many of the Raiders as he gives a halftime pep talk. “Y’all not playing right,” he snaps, his usually relaxed voice rising tensely. Challenging them, encouraging them, instructing them, he’s like a hip-hop Vince Lombardi, except that Lombardi probably never ended a halftime address by saying, “Now get yourselves some oranges or something.”

The Raiders are quarterbacked by Snoop’s son, Spanky, who already wears a size-eight shoe: He has braided hair like his dad, is tall like his dad, has long eyelashes like his dad, a calm demeanor like his dad and a huge diamond earring like his dad. In the second half, Spanky leads the Raiders to four touchdowns and the team wins easily. As a surprise, Coach Snoop gives each excited Raider a three-wheel WRFF extreme bicycle. And on the sideline, he leads the team in a victory cheer: “Pimp, pimp, hooray! Pimp, pimp, hooray! Pimp, pimp, hooray!”

In addition to coaching Pee Wee Football, Snoop Dogg, 33, is a rapper, a film actor and the host of a TV show (Doggy Fizzle Televizzle, formerly on MTV) and a home video (Girls Gone Wild: Doggy Style). No matter the setting though, he portrays the same central quality: “laid-back,” as he drawled calmly on “Gin and Juice,” his 1994 hit song. If an icicle could rhyme, it would sound like Snoop. “I’m a cool cat,” Snoop says during the three days Blender spends with him in California and New York, which raises the question: What kind of dogg acts more like a cat?

Where other rappers bark threats, he purrs warnings with a feline dispassion. “1-8-7 on an undercover cop,” he cooed on “Deep Cover,” the Dr. Dre–produced song that began Snoop’s career in 1992 — though he sounded so stoned, the talk of murder seemed more like a hazy daydream. In the blazing, tricky, odd new hit “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” the first single off his album R&G (Rhythm and Gangsta): The Masterpiece, he talks about dodging cops and honoring Crips. Like Ice Cube’s scowl and Eminem’s smirk, Snoop’s shrug is a trademark. But after 13 years, he comes across like an amusing TV character whose wicked past is now just an endearing quirk, not so much a pimp as an imp.

“Everybody likes to get down with Snoop Dogg,” Snoop says about himself. “They like my voice, my tone, my style. I try to give people something to smile about, something to dance to. If it’s TV, records, radio, whatever, it’s always a full-on great time with Snoop Dogg.” If pop music is a sitcom, Snoop is Uncle Gangsta, a charming rogue with a smile on his face and a blunt in his hand.

“That’s the thing about Snoop. He’s not walking around saying he’s a killer,” notes Pharrell Williams of the Neptunes, who produced “Drop It Like It’s Hot.” “He’s trying to have a good time: He smokes his weed, he drinks his wine, he hangs with his chicks, he’s not looking for any trouble. And if it’s gotta happen, it’s gotta happen.”


Snoop Dogg is dead.
He turned down a role in The Longest Yard, a big-budget Hollywood remake starring Adam Sandler, to be in The Tenants, a low–budget indie about two troubled men (Snoop and Dylan McDermott) in the early 1970s who live in the same tenement and become friends and rivals. The film is shooting in a decrepit warren of rooms at the Ambassador Hotel in L.A., where Robert Kennedy was assassinated, a huge building that’s said to be haunted. A producer on The Tenants swears he saw a ghost crossing the ramshackle lobby.

Two Latino kids are writing graffiti in the hallways to give the set a more authentic tenement look. “What smells bad?” McDermott coughs, an oversized pair of plastic eyeglasses exaggerating his sad eyes. In this morning’s climactic scene, there’s some violence with a hatchet and a .38. “It’s like you’re getting punched in the stomach,” a special-effects guy counsels Snoop between takes. “But with an axe.”

Snoop is covered in blood, motionless on the floor. Is he thinking about death, summoning thespian emotions of fear and dread? No, he’s napping. Call it the cool-as-a-catnap.

His biggest film roles have been in the comedies Starsky & Hutch and Soul Plane, a farce about an all-black airline, which Spike Lee denounced as “coonery and buffoonery.” “When he does Starsky & Hutch or Soul Plane, it’s just Snoop being Snoop,” observes Tenants director Danny Green, a handsome 32-year-old in a leather jacket. In The Tenants, Snoop is disguised by an Afro wig, a goatee and gold teeth. “People are gonna be surprised by what he does in this movie,” McDermott says. “He’s not the pimp in this movie.”

LL Cool J had originally planned to costar with McDermott, who suggested Snoop after LL had to back out. Green agreed to cast Snoop as an ex-convict who’s writing a history of the black power movement. Snoop’s presence onscreen, says Green, “is about menace. His eyes say to you, this is not a guy you want to fuck with. It’s like, he’s charismatic, he’s cool, but if you fuck with him, things could go bad really quickly.” Let’s take this as foreshadowing.

Snoop’s camp says he made Soul Plane mostly as a favor to the director and now wants to establish himself as a more serious actor. “I just didn’t have the roles to show you how real I could get,” Snoop says, sitting in his trailer and holding a twiggy-looking blunt. “I had roles where it seemed like I wasn’t serious, ’cause those roles were so natural. Now I wanna play roles that are unexpected, like Denzel in The Manchurian Candidate, roles they wrote for a white guy.” He pauses. “You got a lighter?”

As a tape of his son’s game plays on the TV, Snoop lights up. He does not pass the blunt, much to the relief of Blender. He’s due back on the set in 15 minutes. Will the director use special effects to hide the red in Snoop’s eyes?

“I don’t want to, man,” Green shrugs later. “If he works better in a certain state, why would I fuck with it?”

During one scene, the two lead characters get high together, and though the actors used herbal cigarettes, McDermott was nervous. “I was concerned that he was gonna break out his stash, because then the day would be shot. I don’t think I can handle his load,” he confesses.

Two years ago, Snoop declared that he’d given up his beloved indo so that he could “better myself” and “see things clearer.” It was as though Pam Anderson had given up cleavage. When Blender asks why he’s smoking again, Snoop gets annoyed. It’s a surprising reaction since he’s written more weed songs than the Grateful Dead and even made a cameo as a pothead in Dave Chappelle’s stoner comedy, Half-Baked.

“I don’t like talking about weed. That shouldn’t be the focus. It’s my choice to stop and go back when I want to. But the issue is, is his music good, is he in some great movies? How you do it, Snoop Dogg? How you stay looking so fly after so many years?”

Maybe it’s the weed that keeps him looking so fly. But behind the red in his eyes, Blender can glimpse the menace Danny Green recognizes. “Just by seeing his face, you know what he’s been through, you know all his personal history,” Green says.


Calvin Cordozar Broadus was born in Long Beach, California, a suburb 25 miles south of downtown L.A., and raised by his mother, Beverly Broadus, who gave him the nickname “Snoopy” for his long, canine face. His father, Vernell Varnado, a postal worker, wasn’t around (though that doesn’t stop Dad from selling old Snoop posters and $15 “Poppa Snoop” T-shirts online). “My mother did it on her own,” Snoop explains. “My mom was meaner than a motherfucker to me. The fear people have for a father, I had for my mother. Still do.”

He was attending Lafayette Elementary in Long Beach, an undistinguished city school, when he got accepted into Cleveland Elementary, “one of those schools for the gifted. I went for a year and a half, then I got kicked out for showing my little weenie to some girl,” he says with a rueful laugh. “That was it. Back to the ’hood schools.”

He grew up hearing ’70s R&B — Johnnie Taylor, the O’Jays, the Dramatics, Bobby Womack — and just as he left elementary school, the earliest rap songs hit the West Coast. Snoop began rapping “about shoes and cars and all this stupid shit I didn’t have.” He modeled himself on the basketball cool of Magic Johnson and the autobiographical tales of rebel comedian Richard Pryor (“He just didn’t give a fuck. He said what he wanted, whenever, wherever”), hung around with the Crips, the gang that dominated Long Beach, and continued to get suspended from school for “cussing, fighting, ditching, everything.”

He was earning $80 a week at a job and saw that friends were making 20 times as much selling drugs, so he did, too. After an arrest for cocaine, he went to jail for a year, which he told Blender last year “was great.”

When he got out, he started to rap more seriously, and his best friend, Warren G, introduced him to his half-brother, Dr. Dre, the canny producer of N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton, the landmark West Coast rap album.

Snoop didn’t sound like anyone else. Both his parents came from Mississippi, and his casual cadence was a menacing twist on deep South hospitality. “I just haven’t lived there to get the full Southern drawl. But it’s in me,” Snoop says.

His first song, “Deep Cover,” was a hit. Dre’s no fool; when he made his 1992 solo album, The Chronic, he elevated Snoop to costar, and together, the two spread gangsta rap into every high school and mall. With its references to G’s, blunts and bitches, its death threats, bloody morality and I-gotta-get-mine mantra, The Chronic is the dictionary of gangsta. “We took that gang-bang violence in us and projected that violence into music instead,” Snoop explained a few years ago.

Their music was evil, insinuating and wildly popular. Snoop and Dre seemed inseparable, Lennon and McCartney in a low rider. “Snoop is going to be the biggest thing to black people since the straightening comb,” Dre declared. Dre’s label, Death Row Records, was overseen by Suge Knight, an imposing former football player who, it’s alleged, once hung Vanilla Ice upside down from a hotel terrace to extract a percentage of the rapper’s publishing money.

While Dre was producing Snoop’s first solo album, Snoop and his bodyguard were charged with murder in the shooting of an Ethiopian immigrant who, cops charged, had scrapped with one of Snoop’s friends. When Doggystyle came out three months after the indictment, the added publicity helped make it the first rap record to debut at number 1. (In 1996, Snoop and the bodyguard were acquitted of the murder charge.)

Then it fell apart. Dre believed Knight was cheating him, and left the label. Snoop made another album, Tha Doggfather, without Dre, who dissed his former partner with a bored sniff: “There’s really nothing that was said on there that hasn’t been said 50 times before.”

One Christmas, Knight gave Snoop a $12,000 diamond ring. But Snoop also began to feel that Knight was keeping more of the money than he deserved, and in 1998, while Knight was in jail for a parole violation, the rapper left Death Row for Master P.’s No Limit Records. Knight reacted by denouncing Snoop as an “imposter” and a “fake.” These days, Snoop carefully avoids saying anything public about Knight.

Crip philosophy puts a higher value on male friendships than on female relationships. Snoop, who’d grown up without a father, had found two strong, smart mentors, Dre and Knight, and both were gone from his life. As his career expanded into other fields, his music wandered into repetition; instead of sounding cool, he often sounded bored.

Some rap fans think that redundancy disqualifies him as a great MC. “He’s a talented MC,” argues Pharrell Williams. “But he’s more than just an MC, because he knows what he wants to look like, he understands what his videos should be. He’s a great entertainer.”

His star power is evident on R&G in guest spots by Pharrell, Nelly, Lil Jon, 50 Cent and Justin Timberlake. It’s Snoop’s best and most consistent record since Doggystyle, and it offers the secondary pleasure of hearing Timberlake croon, “Don’t fuck with me,” like a white boy in a dark alley. Snoop even sings on a few songs. “There are a lot of songs the ladies are gonna love. I wanted to show my women fans that they’re special to me,” he says, which must explain lines like “a nigga wanna hump you” and “You got to put that bitch in her place/Even if you’re slapping her in her face.”

As an MC, Snoop has consistently been an emissary between black and white cultures. Consider his popularization of “izzle” talk: “fo’ shizzle my nizzle.” As Snoop says, the device first appeared publicly on the 1981 rap hit “Double Dutch Bus,” by Frankie Smith. But Snoop spread it outside the ghetto. “It finally reached the white community, and they havin’ fun with it. But the black community is through with it, and we don’t know what to do with it.

“That’s what I’m tripping off. Motherfuckers waiting on me to come up with something, when I don’t even sit around and wait for me to come up with something. Tell ’em to give me Webster’s Dictionary money and I’ll put some lingo slingo together.”

There are some things Snoop won’t do for money, including a film role where “I was a pimp, and I was pimping some fags. I was like, ‘Pimping fags? You gonna have the gay community mad at me. I don’t get down like that.’ I had to pass on that project.”

But for Snoop, many topics lead immediately to the question of payout. He won’t bring Doggy Fizzle Televizzle back to MTV, he says, because they didn’t bring a wheelbarrow. “I gotta get the big Dave Chappelle $30-million deal. I set the pace, and then somebody else gets the big deal. Damn, why Dogg didn’t get the deal when he was doing this shit first?

“I used to be the ambitious little puppy — you could put anything in my bowl, and I’d eat it. Now I’m like, fuck that. I don’t eat dog food, I eat steaks. And I like chips with my steaks. Not potato chips — money.”

Snoop Dogg is angry again.
At 3 A.M., he took a private charter flight from Los Angeles to New York, where he’ll be a surprise guest at Jay-Z’s Madison Square Garden concert. He’s in his hotel suite a few hours before the show, “tired as a motherfucker,” he says, sitting next to wife Shante and getting his hair braided. There are Armani shopping bags on the table, and his suite smells like a dime bag.

When Blender asks about his murder trial, which Snoop once said “helped me develop as a man,” his voice turns to daggers. “As far as you bringing it up, that’s rather fucked up, considering this is so far behind me. I really don’t let people ask me questions like that,” he says, with a glare that suggests we can suck his diznick.

To paraphrase Danny Green, things have gone bad really quickly. We apologize for making him angry. “I’m not angry,” he replies, in a tone that sure sounds angry. “If I was, you’d be out of this motherfucking room right now.”

Snoop would prefer that the interview focus on the “older, wiser, more mature Snoop Dogg”: father of three, football coach, porn host — oops, let’s skip that last one. Since the murder trial, he’s learned to “take better steps. A life was lost. I can’t fix it, I can’t change it, I can just try to better myself and do things to prevent that from happening again.”

Tonight, Snoop’s appearance comes three hours into Jay-Z’s gala concert. It’s only three nights since R. Kelly walked offstage at Madison Square Garden, claiming he saw a gun in the audience, and ending his tour with Jay-Z. The rapper has filled R.’s slot with some two dozen R&B and hip-hop friends, including Mary J. Blige, P. Diddy and Fabolous.

A few performers, including Jay and Busta Rhymes, make fun of the absent Kelly. Snoop doesn’t mention Kelly; too relaxed and confident to salute the crowd, he doesn’t talk at all. He just steps onstage, cloaked in a dark hoodie, to the wildest applause of any guest. Here, in a rap enclave where antiheroes are heroes and careers last as long as a loaf of bread.

The show ends close to midnight, and when the all-star collection of rappers take their bows and walk off, they do it to the tune of “Drop It Like It’s Hot.” It’s a salute to Snoop — for having the hottest song in the land, for being the rare rapper to sustain a hot career across a dozen years, for voyaging from the ghetto into the mainstream, then coming back home.