At Lollapalooza ’97, one name on the largely lackluster lineup stands out from the rest. Sharing the stage with heavy-rockers Korn and Tool and the electronic knob-twiddlers of Orbital is the world’s most popular living gangsta rapper: Snoop Doggy Dogg.
In the rap game, it doesn’t get any more hardcore than Snoop, especially since the deaths of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., both gunned down in the last year. The man legally known as Calvin Broadus sold 5 million copies of his violently raunchy 1993 debut, “Doggystyle,” and 3 million more of 1996’s “Tha Doggfather,” both on the infamous Death Row label headed by Marion “Suge” Knight.
In between, Snoop kept it all too real, getting involved in the 1993 shooting death of a Los Angeles gang member.
So what’s a raised-in-the-‘hood chronicler of gangsta life doing playing to amphitheaters of suburban teenagers, with barely a black face in sight? Of all the tours to make your first, why Lollapalooza?
“Why not?” answers the rapper, folding his lanky 6-foot-4-inch frame — the better to dominate the Tool and Korn boys in their daily game of hoops — into a corner seat of his bus.
“It’s not a violent tour,” he says, digging into a slab of chocolate cake. “It’s not a risk. It’s a summertime thing, and it gives me a chance to service the people that buy my records.”
Snoop knows his audience. And the nose-pierced moshers — who mouth every word of such casually misogynistic, profanity-strewn jams as “Gin and Juice” and “Gz and Hustlas” during his Lolla set — are a big part of it. But there’s more to Snoop’s appearance than a desire to play ambassador to his alternative-rock fans.
As the man says, touring with Lollapalooza isn’t a “risk.” While Snoop, now 26, awaited trial — he was acquitted of first- and second-degree murder in February 1996, after a 2 1/2-year delay — he couldn’t tour because promoters couldn’t afford the high insurance required at venues willing to book him.
He was finally set to headline a hip-hop package tour this spring, but that was canceled after the March 9 shooting of the Notorious B.I.G. prompted security concerns. Snoop bought a bulletproof, armored Chevy van and, rumor had it, worried that he would meet the same fate as Tupac and Biggie.
Lollapalooza fits all of his needs: It’s a physical and financial safe haven that serves as the first step in a shrewd career realignment by the now self-managed Snoop.
In August, he says — after nervous promoters have seen that his presence onstage doesn’t automatically mean trouble — the rapper will go home to Claremont, east of L.A., and spend time with his wife of one month, Chantay Taylor, and the couple’s children, Cordell, 3 months, and Corde, 3. Then Snoop hopes to head back to the road, this time with a hip-hop lineup.
On Aug. 5, Death Row will release “Doggumentary,” an EP with a “rock-and-roll twist.” There’s a version of “Doggfather’s” “Snoop Bounce,” recorded with politically charged rockers Rage Against the Machine, and the soul-meets-hardcore-rap “Midnite Love,” featuring Raphael Saadiq of Tony Toni Tone and Dat Nigga Daz of Tha Dogg Pound.
The EP is just the beginning of Snoop’s creative flurry. He’s finishing “Doin’ Too Much,” due early next year from Death Row. And he’s working with Dr. Dre, with whom the slow-drawling Snoop made his name, on a collaboration called “Break Up to Make Up.” It will be out next summer on Death Row or Dre’s new Aftermath label.
Snoop even has roles in two movies due out next year: the action-comedy “I-95,” scripted by Reginald and Warrington Hudlin, and a stoner flick called “Half-Baked.” Taken with his new status as a family man — he’s shown in the current issue of The Source cradling Cordell — and his audience outreach (he did an America Online chat room July 12), it sounds as if Snoop is cooking himself a fresh image, just as Death Row (under investigation by the FBI, the DEA and the IRS) appears to be in its death throes.
“It’s not the image (that’s changed). It’s me as a person,” says Snoop.
“People don’t understand: I’m not Batman, I don’t go into the closet and say, `It’s time to be Snoop Doggy Dogg.’ I live what I live, I am what I am.”
From his trial to his sons’ births to the loss of his friend Shakur (“I miss him a real lot,” he says, “everywhere I go”), to his marriage, Snoop has been through his share of changes. And with one mentor, Dr. Dre, leaving Death Row, and the other, Knight, serving nine years on a probation violation, Snoop has had maturity forced upon him.
“The reason that I don’t ever want to hear a kid say he wants to be like me,” Snoop says, “is that being like me has a lot of negativity to do with it. I went through a whole lot of negative (things) that I could have avoided and I didn’t. I don’t apologize for it, but . . . why would I want an innocent kid to go through the negative side of life, when they could jump straight to positivity by . . . being themselves and not try to pattern themselves around me?”
Snoop’s encounters with negativity began in his midteens in his native Long Beach, Calif. Snoop gets his trademark speech from his parents, who hail from Mississippi. But he was raised entirely by his mother. “I don’t ever remember them spending a night together,” he says of his parents. “That’s why I’ll be there for my kids.”
When he was 15, he started “doing cocaine, selling cocaine, selling weed. Robbing. Doing whatever the homeboys were doing. Easily influenced, misled individuals doing what we thought was cool.”
What lured him away from gang-banging? “It wasn’t getting shot at,” he says, laughing. “Because that started, and we kept doing it. No, it was probably the second, third time I went to the county jail. The next time I knew I could go to the pen.”
In 1992, Snoop hooked up with Dre through the producer’s brother, Warren G. After he worked with Snoop on “Deep Cover,” about the killing of a cop, Dre put the rapper on nearly every cut of “The Chronic,” which sold 3 million copies.
The anticipation for Snoop’s “Doggystyle” — the first debut album ever to enter the Billboard charts at No. 1 — was increased by publicity surrounding the shooting of Phillip Woldermariam, who died from a bullet fired by Snoop’s bodyguard from a Jeep that Snoop was driving. (The bodyguard was also subsequently acquitted.)
Since the trial, Snoop says, he has kept out of trouble.
“I haven’t had no bad press since I beat my case. So (forget) all the nasty, negative (stuff) that goes on around me. . . . That’s not me. Since I’ve been out of jail on probation (on an earlier charge), I haven’t had one conflict with the law. No bad press, no nothing.”
But don’t expect Snoop’s new perspective to translate into tamer lyrics. To those who object to his graphic portrayals, he agitatedly cites Quentin Tarantino, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. “When they do violent movies, they shoot up 30 or 40 people. That’s their profession. Well, this is my profession. I don’t strap nobody in and tell them, `Go to the record store, buy my music . . . and love it.’ “
