

I partake in all things Snoop Dogg.' And I go, 'Well, it's Snoop Lion now,' and I went to my car and I had some weed, so I said, 'There ya go, you go enjoy that.' And he looked at it and said, 'I knew I smelled that Snoop on you.' And I was like, 'You guys have to share that.' '' And then the one guy goes, 'I smell that Snoop Dogg on you. And then I said, 'Let me take a picture of you guys,' because I wanted people to see that we were doing a good deed.

Or the time, much more recently, when he gave weed to a homeless man: "These guys were asking me for food the other day, so I bought them lunch. He opened the door, and niggas jump back and sit down real fast." Or the time on Dre's first tour, when Snoop was just a newbie, and he and the other newbies listened through a door to the tour bus's sleeping cabin while the boss boned a groupie: "We was at the doors shouting shit. And there was a nigga in the club, and he told security, 'Nigga, you don't know who that is?' Security said, 'No.' They said, 'Nigga, that's the nigga who's singing on that song right there!' Yeah. "And motherfucking 'Deep Cover' "-Snoop's first hit-"was playing louder than a motherfucker in there: boom, boom, boom. Like the time in 1992 when he was marooned outside a hot downtown L.A. Like most rappers, Snoop is a master raconteur, the world's mellowest loudmouth, and many of the questions I ask him over lunch spark long and fantastic stories about wild nights back in the day. Instead of writing songs about smoking weed and killing people, the newer, more mature Snoop is all about smoking weed and then smoking, like, more weed. The Snoop Lion thing is about exploring a more positive sound, one he never could have attempted when he was hanging around gang members and in and out of jail on minor drug-related sentences back in the early 1990s. "Murder Was the Case" was recorded afterward and came out in 1994.) He was charged with murder in August 1993 after his bodyguard shot a man named Phillip Woldermarian both men were later acquitted.

But when that song came out, I had a real murder case." (As it happens, Snoop's life-imitates-rap time line is a bit fuzzy. And I don't want to dwell on it long, but I wrote a song called 'Murder Was the Case,' and I never had a murder case in my life.

I'll say it to my friends: Write songs about being shot at and then the shit happens. "If I focus on death," he tells me, "it's going to come closer than what it's supposed to be. In recent years, Snoop has come to believe that his old music was a self-fulfilling prophecy, an ill omen. as opposed to_ Fuck that-I'll shoot you on sight_." You put the guns away, and your music becomes Hey, I'm with my kid and I'm living now. As you become a man, you start having kids and living. "You always think 21 is your number in the hood, you know? Twenty-one. Snoop is now 41 years old, and when I ask him if he ever imagined he'd live this long, his answer comes fast. Dre's protégé and became a pivotal figure in the Death Row/Bad Boy hip-hop battles of the 1990s. Because while there are certain things about the man born Calvin Broadus that will never change-his love for smoking up, his mellow flow-he's clearly not the kid he was twenty years ago, when he rose to prominence out of Long Beach, California, as Dr.
#THE GOOD GOOD SNOOP LION MOVIE#
The album and the movie are part of what Snoop is calling a spiritual rebirth. _That smells like weed! I wonder where the weed is. It's a smell that always stops you in your tracks and gets you searching for its point of origin. It's the scent of industry here, like chocolate factories in Hershey, Pennsylvania, or paper mills in inland Maine. Weed is in the air everywhere you go around here, wafting from the head shops and Russian dispensaries with their neon green crosses alight in the front windows. I'm waiting for Snoop outside Baby Blues BBQ in West Hollywood, and it's the perfect place to wait for Snoop, because this small stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard is a hot spot for California's kinda-legal medicinal-pot industry. You're gonna want weed, even if you don't like weed, even if you've never tried weed, because this is a story about the artist formerly known as Snoop Dogg, and this is the effect he has on people. You're gonna want to feel your tongue glide across the edge of a blunt wrapper, savor that tiny bit of rug burn you get on your thumb when you try to get your cheap lighter to spark. Because by the end of this little story, you're gonna want to see it, smell it, feel the soft crunch of a bud the size of a pear crumbling between your fingers.
