The highlight of this year’s Paris Olympics was a 53-year-old rapper from Long Beach.
Snoop Dogg — out on assignment as an NBC commentator — carried the Olympic torch through the suburb of Saint-Denis. He spiced up a badminton match between the United States and China — “As you see, it don’t stop ’til the casket drop.” He grooved with gymnasts Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles and donned dressage boots with his pal Martha Stewart.
“I was just trying to embody all of the things as a kid that I remembered about the Olympics,” Snoop said, in an interview in his trailer on the set of “The Voice” in December. “Respecting what it takes to become a professional on that level. Trying to bring my Snoop Dogg flavor to the table.”
Fans may have assumed this was Snoop’s new milieu. A gently-graying singing-competition judge on “The Voice.” Long Beach’s Olympics ambassadeur.
But Snoop Dogg the MC, the laconic voice who defined West Coast gangsta rap in the ’90s, never left us. On Friday, he’ll release “Missionary,” a much-anticipated spiritual successor to his 1993 debut “Doggystyle,” and a decades-in-the-making reunion with producer and mogul Dr. Dre.
The album’s existence is historic, a reminder of how singular these two are in a studio. But after Kendrick Lamar’s “GNX” rallied the world south of the 10 Freeway, “Missionary” says something important about how West Coast rap matures gracefully.
“Dre’s hungry, just like I’m hungry,” Snoop said. “He knows what he wants sonically and what I want vocally. I don’t want to rap like a 19-year-old. The perspective I’m speaking from is a grown-ass man that survived. I’ll never lose that spirit of a young MC, but I have to make a record for who I am.”
In 1993, Snoop’s debut “Doggystyle” shocked the world.
“This is his very first album, but at this point Snoop Doggy Dogg may be the most famous rapper in the world,” The Times’ Jonathan Gold wrote then. The LP’s tales of lascivious sex and brash violence were bolstered by exquisite G-funk musicianship: “No rapper has ever occupied a beat the way Snoop does, sliding around corners, lounging on the syncopations.” Dre’s production “takes hip-hop to another level … Organic yet relentless, the air alive with sleigh bells, sighs, countermelodies.”
A whole lot has happened in West Coast hip-hop in the interim: the bicoastal gang rivalry that claimed the lives of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. Snoop’s acquittal for murder in 1996. Death Row Records dissolving in acrimony. Dre discovering Eminem and 50 Cent. Snoop playing the Kennedy Center and investing in weed, tech, food and cocktails. Dre selling his headphone company Beats Electronics to Apple to become hip-hop’s first billionaire.
Today, Snoop cuts much the same figure as he did in the ’90s — tall and lean, with cascading braids and a warm, quippy demeanor peppered with his distinct slang. He’s earned 11 top 10 albums and hit singles like the inimitable Pharrell Williams jam “Drop It Like It’s Hot.”
But he admits that “the young demographic don’t know the old Snoop Dogg. They don’t know the rapper,” he laughed.
“They only know that I have to cater to all of my audiences, the Martha Stewart audience. I had to make my own version of CoComelon, Doggyland, because I was tired of my grandkids not paying attention to me. I have to be a classy adult around them. But now I get to go back to my gangsta crowd and be gangsta again.”
Neither Snoop nor Dre expected that it would take them 31 years to make another full album together as rapper and producer respectively. But anyone who saw them headlining Coachella in 2012 could tell you they never lost that alchemy.
“Missionary” harks back to their crowning achievement together — the title gives it away. It’s coming out on Snoop’s old label Death Row Records, which Snoop bought back the rights to in 2022. The guests traverse Dre’s vast catalog, with cameos from Eminem and 50 Cent, and big samples and cameos from Sting, Jelly Roll and the late Tom Petty.
“It’s like Michael Jordan finding Phil Jackson again,” Snoop said. “Dre was figuring ‘Look, let me put you back in a musical position like you need to be in. Star-power-wise, you’re there, but people forgot you made music because you do so much. Let me put you back in the perspective where music is your foreground.’”
“No one produces me better than Dr. Dre,” Snoop continued. “But I had to go back and become a student and be humbled and take direction.”
Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg perform during halftime at the Super Bowl in Inglewood in 2022.
(Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times)
Lyrically, the album is firmly in the present, an LP fondly looking back on a ferocious youth from several lifetimes later. Two generationally important artists with nothing to prove but plenty left to accomplish.
“This is a passion project of mine,” Dre said in a rare interview with The Times. “I’ve been dying to get back in the studio with my brother Snoop for years. Snoop has never went anywhere, but to be honest with you, I wished he would sit down and just focus on something. So I think that my approach was to show the growth and where we’ve come over the last 30 years. The lyrics can’t get too far away from the streets, but we also have to show a level of maturity over the years.”
To hear the two of them back swapping tawdry bars on “Outta Da Blue” and dancing all over the jittery funk of “Pressure” is to be dropped right back into whatever weed-strafed house party made you fall in love with L.A., their two voices inseparable from SoCal’s identity. On “Gunz & Smoke,” Snoop re-stakes his claim on his beloved hometown — “Bullet holes in the palm trees, Dirty money in the laundry / 10 toes in the concrete, n— know where to find me.”
He drops some spit-take funny lines about his age on “Sticcy Situation” — “Look at daddy Warbucks / Huh, I probably had your auntie on my tour bus,” and eyes today’s rap culture with a familiar jaundice: “Times are changin’, young n— is dangerous / Rich and shameless do anything to be famous … Once upon a time the Dogg went through it all / Withdrawals and breaking laws, the streets under my paws.”
“There’s one thing about rock, country or jazz — no matter how old they get, this s— is good,” Snoop said. “It’s not based off of the past. I come from hip-hop where it was a must to be original, to be fly every time you came out and not do nothing twice. To me, it’s an opportunity to prove that I am one of the top MCs of all time, and I’m gonna milk that moment.”
On “Last Dance With Mary Jane,” they cleared a holy grail of a Tom Petty sample as the song’s backbone. Dre and Petty were connected through Interscope founder Jimmy Iovine, and Petty (a fellow cannabis fan) seemed to anticipate Dre and Snoop would use it one day.
“I have this video clip with Tom Petty saying ‘If Dre ever samples the song Mary Jane’s Last Dance, he’s going to have an instant hit on his hands,’” Dre said. “It comes along with a massive amount of trust. And you know, Snoop’s putting his entire career and his legacy and everything that he’s built in my hands. So I have to really nurture that and make sure it’s presented in the right way.”
“It’s like Michael Jordan finding Phil Jackson again,” Snoop said of working with Dr. Dre again. “Dre was figuring ‘Look, let me put you back in a musical position like you need to be in.”
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
“Missionary” comes right on the heels of Kendrick Lamar’s modern West Coast masterpiece “GNX” (“Maybe it is a cosmic coincidence, but it’s really weird that all this is happening at the same time from our circle,” Dre said). Snoop shared a stage with Dre and Lamar at the 2022 Super Bowl, but came in for a bit of a ribbing on the track “wacced out murals,” where Kendrick chided Snoop for posting a clip with his nemesis Drake’s diss track in the background.
Snoop handled it with typical good humor — “It was the edibles. west west king,” he tweeted. But Snoop acknowledged it was a changing of the guard.
“We’re family so I didn’t take it no other way but the right way,” Snoop said. “He’s the King of the West right now. There was a time where I was the King of the West, where it was my job to handle the responsibility of making sure the West was riding the right way. That’s his job right now, and he’s doing an amazing job.”
The two were first ready to showcase their reunion last year, for a Hollywood Bowl run celebrating the 30th anniversary of “Doggystyle.” They called off the dates, however, in solidarity with striking entertainment workers. “I work with these people, and I knew that me standing with them would help make Hollywood understand that we need to get these people paid,” Snoop said. “My voice is big. If Snoop Dogg is standing up, we don’t want him to be against us.”
Other markers of time have begun to sink in too. Losing Quincy Jones, a longtime friend and mentor to Snoop, was painful. “We were very close. His daughter Kidada was a good friend of ours even before she met Tupac,” Snoop said. “When I got my star on the Walk of Fame, he asked to come give a speech. I’m like, ‘How the f— did Quincy Jones come and give a speech? I ain’t done enough to be here.’”
But most harrowing were when Dre suffered three strokes and a brain aneurysm back in March, after Snoop’s daughter Cori suffered her own stroke at 24 this year. The two health crises shook Snoop, a devoted husband and family man.
“It affected me mentally, physically and spiritually,” Snoop said, briefly growing somber. “There’s only so much you can do for these situations, but you can try to be in full support of their rehabilitation. I was always there for my daughter. She’s getting stronger and better, and it makes me feel even better to know that me and Dre still have our same friendship from day one.”
“Dre’s hungry, just like I’m hungry,” Snoop said. “He knows what he wants sonically and what I want vocally. I don’t want to rap like a 19-year-old. The perspective I’m speaking from is a grown-ass — man that survived.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
Even as he revives his old gangsta mystique on “Missionary,” talking about family seems to bring something tender out in Snoop. When a Times reporter mentioned that his mom was coming out to visit L.A. for the holidays, and that she was curious to sample the wares at his Inglewood weed store SWED, Snoop’s eyes lit up.
“My mom passed recently, and anytime I hear the word ‘mom,’ and your mom is still here, she’s gonna get blessed,” Snoop said. “I may just roll one up for her so she can have one rolled by the D-O-double-G.”
He riffled through his backpack and divvied up a few nugs from his florid personal stash, a welcome gift to the West Coast.
“That’s that Death Row top of the line,” Snoop said, inhaling deeply. “Mommy, I love you.”