- #WHY DID SNOOP DOGG CHANGE HIS NAME TO SNOOP LION TV#
- #WHY DID SNOOP DOGG CHANGE HIS NAME TO SNOOP LION FREE#
But we move like a machine." He speaks slowly, sensually. Though to call it a spliff is an insult really – it's a professionally rolled cigar of pure ganja. Sometimes he will tour as Snoop Dogg, sometimes as Snoop Lion, sometimes as a bit of both. If I don't make another rap record for the next year or two or three, or however long it takes, it don't bother me because I'm trying to make music that feels good."īut, typical Snoop, he makes no bones about the fact that Lion is just an extension of the Dogg brand. "Finally I'm able to say I'm comfortable with doing what I do. He couldn't do it any more, he says, for the simple reason that it would be dishonest to – this hasn't been his life for a long time. And I did it 21 years straight, faithfully, till I couldn't do it any more." Speaking for the lost generation – the gangstas, the drug dealers. "I branded Snoop Dogg to be what he is, and it's too late to change the brand." What is that brand? "Gangsta. What brought about the change? "I wanted to make songs about the life I'm living now as a father and as a 41-year-old man, as opposed to always talking about my childhood and my upbringing."Ĭouldn't he have done that as a rapper? "I don't think it could have worked through rap because of my branding." Like many rappers, Snoop is a good businessman. The metamorphosis into Snoop Lion seems pretty radical. In 2006, Rolling Stone magazine featured him on its cover under the headline " America's most lovable pimp". Yet there is something endearing about Snoop – after all, Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr originally got his nickname because he looked like Snoopy and he still bears a passing resemblance. As a young man he was in and out of prison for drug dealing in 1993 he was charged with accessory to murder, though he was eventually cleared a decade ago he combined his successful recording career with pimping (until it put too much stress on his marriage) and in 2006 he was barred from entering the UK after he and his entourage went tonto at Heathrow airport. Twenty years on, he is still successful when many of his contemporaries are dead.
#WHY DID SNOOP DOGG CHANGE HIS NAME TO SNOOP LION FREE#
He worships the free market, having endorsed everything from Pepsi Max to Norton Anti-Virus Software, and is now worth an estimated $110m. Only Snoop could dare to write Ain't No Fun (If The Homies Can't Have None), which critics have described as a paean to gang rape, as a love song "for the ladies". Despite the bleak violence he portrayed, there was an innocence to his world – the video to one of his early hits, Gin & Juice, showed partying kids panicking as the parents arrive back early. He wrote about pimping and dealing on the streets of underclass black America, yet the white middle classes adored him (even the upper classes: Princes William and Harry are fans). His raps were X-rated, yet the kids loved him. He emerged in 1993 with the hugely successful album Doggystyle, and set the pattern for 20 years of guns, gangsters and misogyny. But then Snoop Doggy Dogg, as he was first known, was never afraid of embracing his contradictions.
Snoop Lion still has a fair bit of the Dogg in him. "Who is that? Is that Rachel from BET ? Well, whoever she is, she fine as a motherfucker. "When you allow evolution to happen, that's when it becomes the greatest thing it could possibly be." He's still staring at the screen and comes to a sudden stop. It's from the heart and soul." He talks about how he has changed as a man, a husband, a father of three. Snoop has just made a documentary that charts his path from gun-toting gangsta-rapper to the peace-and-love Rastafarian who claims to have been reincarnated (the name of both the film and his new album). No sooner has he sat down than he is up and dancing.
#WHY DID SNOOP DOGG CHANGE HIS NAME TO SNOOP LION TV#
He shakes hands, asks one of his homies why there is no oil in his ganja pipe, flicks on the huge flatscreen TV in front of us and starts watching a bit of Snoop history. He slopes in, long and loping, in a white T-shirt, dark jeans and jacket, trainers and shades, blingtastic lion medallion hanging down his chest, patchy Rasta beard, and surprisingly beautiful.
On the walls are huge Snoop posters, to the left is the Snoop television studio, where two near-naked women are chatting, and to my right is an old-fashioned video with a stack of Snoop VHSs lined up alongside it.
We meet in his management office in Los Angeles, an enormous warehouse dedicated to all things Snoop.
0 kommentar(er)
