In Southern California, in the early nineteen-nineties, hip-hop was mutating in heavy and thrilling ways. When the Long Beach rapper Snoop Dogg, then known as Snoop Doggy Dogg, released “Doggystyle,” his major-label début, in 1993, he was plainly positioned to become the next great American m.c. He had just turned twenty-two. In 2013, on the occasion of the record’s twentieth anniversary, he admitted to Vibe, “No one expected me to be good.” He came by his virtuosity honestly. “I was just a young, dusty rapper,” he said. “I didn’t know how to talk in front of cameras, I didn’t know how to articulate. I just was dope at making music.”
Snoop was a key progenitor of G-funk, a subset of gangster rap that leans heavily on funk samples, and features a slinking, almost lackadaisical vocal. In 1992, he was a guest on “Deep Cover,” Dr. Dre’s first single after the dissolution of N.W.A. It’s hard to describe his presence on the chorus: “Cause it’s one-eight-seven on the undercover cop,” he pipes up, as if offering some irrefutable explanation. His delivery is sing-songy and nearly furtive, which makes the lyric sound more like a taunt than a threat. (Per California’s penal code, a one-eight-seven is a murder.) Dr. Dre has a deep and abundant voice; when he raps, it’s like getting artfully walloped with a large, blunt instrument. Snoop’s approach is softer—steady, eternally unbothered—but no less menacing.
In the intervening decades, Snoop has built a multitudinous and unprecedented career. He invented a lexicon, mostly by adding the suffix –izzle to ordinary words, rendering them more delightful (“Is Dr. Drizzay, so lizzay and plizzay / With D-O-double-Gizzay?” he asks on “The Shiznit,” from “Doggystyle”), and indulged in flagrant, grinning marijuana use long before weed was recognized (in some places) as benign. In 2001, he wrote a pornographic film, “Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle,” which was directed by Larry Flynt. Though his early work could be dark (in 1993, while recording “Doggystyle,” he was arrested in connection with the death of Philip Woldemariam, a member of a rival gang; he was defended by Johnnie Cochran, and later acquitted), Snoop quickly revealed a joking, more impish side, as evidenced by the various television programs (“Doggy Fizzle Televizzle,” “Dogg After Dark,” and, most notably, “Snoop Dogg’s Father Hood”) he hosted or starred in throughout the aughts. Without exception, he played the genial and mischievous goof.
In 2005, he founded the Snoop Youth Football League, which is now the largest youth football organization in Southern California. The idea was to give disenfranchised or disadvantaged kids a path to something else: “We went on a mission to try to stop the violence by going to the roughest neighborhoods and grabbing these kids, coaches and ex-gang members and throwing them in the fire and saying, ‘This is what we want to do,’ ” he told Billboard. By 2010, Snoop was a mainstream mogul. He performed at the Kennedy Center, honoring the jazz pianist Herbie Hancock; he appeared in an Old Navy commercial; he narrated “Planet Earth”-style nature footage on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” (“Snakes are straight assholes”); he even hosted a VH1 show with Martha Stewart, in which they chummily prepared healthful meals for celebrity guests.
Yet he also kept making records, many of them groundbreaking. Earlier this month, he released his sixteenth solo LP, “Bible of Love.” Though Snoop was once affiliated with the Nation of Islam, and, in 2012, announced his conversion to Rastafarianism (he briefly changed his name to Snoop Lion, and released a reggae record, “Reincarnation”), “Bible of Love” is a searching gospel album. It makes sense, on a narrative level, that a man who has spent much of his life deviating and inventing would, at forty-six, become interested in expressions of redemption and forgiveness.
“Bible of Love” feels more like a début than anything else Snoop has done. “Doggystyle” was his first album by chronological measures, but Snoop was such an instinctive and studied rapper that he never sounded green or shaky. What I like about “Bible of Love” is how flummoxed Snoop appears. He produced the record with Lonny Bereal, and there are some expert jams on it (particularly “You,” featuring the gospel singer Tye Tribbett, who has also worked with Justin Timberlake, Usher, and Sting), but its wobblier moments are its most interesting. On the seven-and-a-half-minute single “Words Are Few,” which features a guest vocal by the gospel singer B. Slade (who previously performed as Tonex), Snoop mostly recuses himself to observe. The song begins with a confession: “There are times when I don’t wanna speak / Grab a pen, scratch your chin, make a beat.” Though he’s not disavowing his previous work, a kind of submission is implied; for a rapper to release a track with a chorus that goes “When my words are few” is, itself, a kind of prostration. By two minutes in, he’s offering only periodic interjections. He is stepping aside, I think, to learn.
It’s possible gospel has never been this integrated into mainstream hip-hop and pop before. Three of this decade’s most high-profile hip-hop records (Chance the Rapper’s “Coloring Book,” Kanye West’s “The Life of Pablo,” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City”) all incorporate elements of contemporary black gospel; the forty-seven-year-old gospel singer Kirk Franklin has sold many millions of records, in an era in which selling records is extraordinarily difficult. Yet “Bible of Love” doesn’t feel imitative or mercenary. Snoop is certainly a savvy performer and businessman, but his trajectory has always felt honest, a product of his time, place, and stature. That he is now looking for new ways to be grateful feels both decent and real.
