Good morning boys and girls. I’m your substitute teacher. My name is Mr. Buckworth. The topic for today is what you would like to be when you grow up. You, over there in the jeans shirt, what do you want to be when you grow up?
I would like to be a police officer.
All right. That’s a pretty good profession. You, over there in that black shirt. What do you want to be when you grow up?
I would like to be a fireman.
All right. That’s a pretty good profession too. Hey, you in the back with those French braids. What’s your name?
My name is Snoop.
All right Snoop. Wha’chu want to be when you grow up?
I want to be a muthafuckin’ hustler! You betta’ ax somebody!
The other day, me and the gang went to watch a movie at the mall. The pickings were rather thin, so we settled for The Garfield Movie, a harmless caper of a film. Entertaining in parts, predictable in others, but all in all, not a bad way to spend an afternoon with some popcorn and oversugared drinks. But what jumped out at me, towards the end of the movie, was a cartoon dog with a very familiar voice. Of course, the dog was a stray in a dog pound, and there is no stray dog as famous as the original – Calvin Broadus. Snoop Doggy Dogg himself. Adjacent associate of Tha Dogg Pound Gangstaz, along with Kurupt and Daz Dillinger. Part of the founding generation of West Coast gangsta rap. The greatest purveyor of G-funk, under the tutelage of Dr. Dre. Doggystyle. Serial Killa. Tha Shiznit. The man who was killed in Murder was the Case (‘You’s a dead muthafucka now’) but made a pact with the devil for eternal life in exchange for his soul.
But here he was. The disembodied voice of a cartoon dog in a children’s movie. How? How did Snoop Doggy Dogg, the menacing gangster straight out of Long Beach City, turn into a cuddly voice actor, ready to be turned into a children’s plush toy?
I'm back to the motherfuckin' county jail
Six months on my chest, now it's time to bail
Hmm, I get's released on a hot sunny day
My nigga D.O.C. and my homey Dr. Dre
Scooped in a coupe, Snoop, we got news
Your girl was trickin' while you was draped in your county blues
I ain't been out a second
And already gotta do some muthafuckin' chin checkin'
Move up the block as we groove down the block
See, my girl's house, Dre, pass the Glock
Kick in the do', I look on the flo'
It's my little cousin Daz and he's fuckin' my hoe, yo (bitches ain't shit)
I uncocked my shit, I'm heart-broke but I'm still loc'ed
Man, fuck a bitch
To understand this seeming transformation, and to understand that of other gangsta rappers turned enterpreneurs – the billionaire Dr. Dre, the now-disgraced Sean ‘Puff Daddy’ Combs, Jay-Z and the rest, one has to go back to the beginning of the explosion of hip hop on the global scene.
Roll back thirty years, and you will understand why gangsta rap was such a feared genre. Many of the pioneers of gangsta rap were part of the gang scene of the inner cities of black America. Two of the members of the seminal group N.W.A. (Niggaz Wit Attitudes), Eazy-E and MC Ren, were members of the Compton Kelly Park Crips. Warren G was a member of the Rollin’ 20s Crips. B-Real and Sen Dog of Cypress Hill were members of the 89th Street Family Bloods. Mack 10, the Queen Street Bloods.
The late 1980s and early 1990s were an unsettled time in black America. The federal government itself, under Ronald Reagan, had declared war on black communities. Under the guise of fighting the drug trade, the governnment seemingly criminalised entire neighbourhoods and communities. The spectacular profits that could be made from crack cocaine, especially with the government’s crackdown, led to an increase in gang violence in the fight for the lurcative trade.
This was the life that gangsta rap chronicled. It was seditious music, full of explicit words and expressions. It shunned respectability and revelled in its shock value. It was irresistible.
Snoop Doggy Dogg had been discovered by Dr. Dre in 1992, and featured in all but three tracks of the seminal record The Chronic. Snoop was a lanky, former church pianist who had begun falling afoul of the law in his late teens. Whether Snoop was a gang member is often disputed (with claims that he was a Rollin’ 20s Crip), but he was certainly headed in the wrong direction in a dangerous neighbourhood. He was pushed into rap by older Crips in jail, and Warren G brought him to his half-brother Dre’s studio. Snoop’s was a fresh voice, fusing the hardcore material with a laid-back style. Zack O’Malley Greenburg, the best chronicler of the corporatisation of hip hop, especially in 3 Kings: Diddy, Dr. Dre, Jay-Z and Hip Hop’s Multibillion Dollar Rise, describes Snoop’s rap delivery as ‘lackadaisical yet intense, the hip hop equivalent of a karate master practising drunken fist martial arts’.
The Dre who produced and starred in The Chronic was a violent, intimidating figure. While he was neither a Crip nor a Blood, Dre had enough street cred to provide the soundtrack to the 1990s gang wars, both in his solo career and earlier as part of N.W.A.. Dre especially had a penchant for violence against women. He beat up journalist Dee Barnes because she reportedly asked him a question he did not like in an interview. He was especially violent to his paramours – constantly battering Lisa Johnson, who bore him three children, beating up Tairrie B at a party, as well as Michel’le, another of his baby mamas, and who has never forgiven him.
His business partner was Suge Knight, a hulking behemoth and NFL player-turned-enforcer who had broken a man’s jaw in a pistol whipping, and who had forced Eazy-E to sign for Death Row Records by standing over him with a baseball bat. Some years later, Suge was driving the BMW in which Tupac was gunned down (the story is that Suge’s crew, which included Tupac, had beat up a Crip (Suge was an M.O.B. Piru Blood, as was Tupac), who then returned the favour by killing ‘Pac).
Early 1990s rap celebrated the gangster life because this was the background of many of their stars. Just as the most authentic hip hop in Kenya came out of the alleyways and byways of Dandora and Kariobangi, South Central Los Angeles (Compton, Inglewood, Watts and East L.A.) and Long Beach (the LBC, and which my friend Muks calls home), produced the most iconic sound in hip hop. Gang and state violence was not just the background sound in the best albums of the era, but was in turn fed back into the themes and lyrics of the tracks.
I got my finger on the trigger, some niggas wonder why
But livin' in the city, it's do-or-die
Niggas start to loot and police start to shoot
Lock us down at seven o'clock, barricade us like Beirut
Mi don't show no love 'cause it's us against dem
Dem never ever love mi 'cause it's sport to break dem
And kill, at my own risk, if I may
To lay, to spray with my AK and put 'em to rest
How many niggas are ready to loot?
Yeah, so what you wanna do? What you wanna do?
I said how many niggas are ready to loot?
Got myself an Uzi and my brother a nine
You see when niggas get together they get mad 'cause they can't fade us
Like my niggas from South Central, Los Angeles
They found that they couldn't handle us
Bloods, Crips on the same squad
With the Ese's helpin', nigga, it's time to rob and mob
(And break the white man off somthin' lovely, biddy-bye-bye
I don't love them so them can't love me)
Yo, straight puttin' down gettin' my scoot on
It's jumpin' off in Compton so I gots to get my loot on
And come up on me some furniture or somethin'Got a VCR in the back of my car
That I ganked from the Slauson Swap Meet
And motherfuckers better not try to stop me'
Cause they will see that I can't be stopped'
Cause I'ma cock my Glock and pop 'til they all drop
The track The Day the Niggaz Took Over was an ode to the Los Angeles riots from six months earlier, when the whole world was shocked by the orgy of violence related to the Rodney King acquittals.
It became an exceptionally violent time in hip hop. Much of it seemed to centre around Puff Daddy and Suge Knight, former friends who had become increasingly adversarial. They goaded each other, with the rivalry-turned-enmity centering around their biggest stars – Tupac and Biggie. ‘Pac got shot five times in the lobby of Puff’s Quad Studios in 1995; Biggie released Who Shot Ya a few weeks afterwards. Greenburg writes that Biggie and Pac ‘were beginning to play the roles of the characters they’d created for themselves in an increasingly aggressive script…[Tupac] seemed to be transforming into the violent, misogynistic protagonist present in many of his songs’.
As the West Coast (the rappers and producers based in southern California) were reaching creative heights that have not been replicated since, the industry out East (centred around New York) was also on a tear. The two coasts were mirror images of each other. Dr. Dre, Snoop Doggy Dogg and Tupac on the West Coast; Puff Daddy, the Notorious B.I.G. (Biggy Smallz) and Nas on the East. N.W.A. and the Wu-Tang Clan. Tha Dogg Pound and Mobb Deep. Illmatic and 2Pacalypse Now. The rivalry between West and East was deep and heartfelt. The East Coast had invented rap music and hip hop (DJ Kool Herc. Grandmaster Flash. Afrika Bambaataa. Kurtis Blow. The Sugarhill Gang. Jam Master Jay. Run DMC. Salt-N-Pepa. De La Soul. LL Cool J. Public Enemy. A Tribe Called Quest), but West Coast gangsta rap and G-funk was in the ascendancy.
Location and identity became an integral part of the music.
Out on bail, fresh out of jail, California dreaming
Soon as I step on the scene, I'm hearing hoochies screaming
Fiending for money and alcohol
The life of a Westside player where cowards die and the strong ball
Only in Cali where we riot not rally to live and die
In L.A. we wearing Chucks not Ballys (yeah, that's right)
Dressed in Locs and Khaki suits, and ride is what we do
Flossing, but have caution: we collide with other crews
Famous because we throw grams
Worldwide, let them recognize from Long Beach to Rosecrans
Bumping and grinding like a slow jam, it's Westside
So you know the row won't bow down to no man
Say what you say, but give me that bomb beat from Dre
Let me serenade the streets of L.A
From Oakland to Sac-town, the Bay Area and back down
Cali is where they put their mack down
Give me love!
California knows how to party
California knows how to party (Yes, they do)
In the city of L.A
In the city of good ol' Watts
In the city, the city of Compton
We keep it rockin'
At the same time, money was beginning to flood into hip hop. Dr. Dre had received a $750,000 advance for The Chronic (which incidentally went on to sell three million copies in its first year). Russell Simmons sold half of Def Jam Records to PolyGram for $33 million. The black American lifestyle, especially that of the gritty inner cities, was being packaged into a product that millions were buying into. It helped that it was so profane – instead of being a turn-off, that very obscenity was its draw. The subject matter – gang wars, violence, even casual misogyny – was the attraction. Gangsta rap took despised professions and made them not only cool, but also desirable. To be a gangster (gangsta) or a pimp was to be a cool cat. As a matter of fact, the warning label placed on album covers, ostensibly to alert parents about the blasphemous material contained inside, became itself part of gangsta rap iconography.
The albums were bought in the millions, but primarily by middle class white youngsters who were thrilled by the proximity to danger, but at a far enough remove that the personal risk was minimal. And it was not just an American phenomenon.
I was a teenager at the time, and matatus that played gangsta rap were an instant attraction. It helped that they were the most colourful, with the coolest crew, and they never seemed to be subject to the same boring route rules as the others. They never had to wait in town – as soon as they arrived and disgorged their passengers (not all of them, mind, as there seemed to be some passengers who occupied permanent slots in the matatus), they would be full again, and off to South ‘B’ and Kangemi and Buru Buru, with us bumping our heads to Snoop and ‘Pac and Biggie. This was our only opportunity to do so, in the era before personal music players. Even cassette tapes (chrome TDK 90 indicated that you were in the elite) could be owned, but rarely played on the family stereo system. Pity on you if you were Christian Union-adjacent, as some of us were. The music was irresistible, but the lyrics were profane in the original sense of the word, blaspheming everything that one thought holy. We would rap along but edit out the curse words, creating our own radio edits in our heads. We absorbed the culture in full. Mainlined Karl Kani, the LA Raiders gear popularised by N.W.A., the baggy clothes and the mannerisms. Better yet if you had relatives in the United States that could send you the original stuff, and especially the music as it came out. To this day, Big Poppa will forever take me back to that night at the Carnivore where, after having been frozen outside for half the night (I was seventeen years old – I did not have an ID card yet), we were finally let in at two in the morning, to find that track playing at the Simba Saloon. The prettiest,most unattainable girls you ever saw. The best sound system I had ever heard. Drinks we could never afford. Waiting until dawn for the first mathrees because taxis were out of reach. Biggie was the soundtrack.
Meanwhile in America, the tension built up. From diss tracks and label malfeascance to actual violence.
Grab ya Glocks, when you see Tupac
Call the cops, when you see Tupac, uh
Who shot me, but ya punks didn't finish
Now ya bout to feel the wrath of a menace
Nigga, we hit em' up
It all came to a head in six short months. First, Tupac was shot and killed in September 1996. Shortly after, Biggie was murdered. It has never been clear whether this was a revenge killing, but the scene had been set for this explosive denouement. Rap’s brightest stars, the toast of the East and the West Coast, were both dead.
The double murders seemed to lance the boil. By the turn of the millennium, rap had veered off into bling and the shiny celebration of materialism. While gangsta rap earlier had been an ode to the nihilistic life of the crack epidemic and the gang violence and police brutality that accompanied it, alloyed to the demonisation of the welfare state and the collapse of the black middle class, this new hip hop wanted to leave all of that behind, and to celebrate the trinkets and toys of the wealthy and the nouveau riche.
It helped that rap’s moguls, including Puff, Jay-Z and Dr. Dre, were starting to make serious corporate moves. Corporate America had seen the billions swirling around hip hop culture, and wanted a piece of the action. Everyone wanted to pull a Russell Simmons. Jay-Z introduced Rocawear as part of his and Damon Dash’s Roc-a-fella Records. ‘Jay-Z had discovered what would become one of the central tenets of his business: whenever possible, own the products you rap about; otherwise, you’re just giving someone else free business’, writes Greenburg.
Dr. Dre became a mogul in every sense of the word, signing a $3 billion deal with Apple, which personally netted him almost $500 million. Dre was part of the 2022 Super Bowl half time show, bringing together Snoop, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, 50 Cent and Kendrick Lamar, and winning two Emmy Awards (and which was produced by Jay-Z’s Roc Nation.
In a complete absorption of the lesson that suburban, white America was perhaps his biggest market, Snoop Doggy Dogg teamed up with the icon of the upper class suburban life, the lifestyle guru Martha Stewart, in surprisingly entertaining collaborations that revealed a real chemistry. Snoop started appearing in endlessly meme-able internet videos, completely shorn of his youthful malevolence.
Hence Snoop’s appearance in The Garfield Movie. And it is not just his acting that has brought him fame – he is also an Olympic torch bearer and commentator. My children would be more surprised that Snoop was a gangsta rapper, than I probably would be if Lionel Richie was in a movie acting as a drug kingpin. In his early middle age, Calvin Broadus has become cuddly. The reverse transmogrification of Snoop was now complete.
But perhaps this is less surprising than it appears on the surface. There was always some playfulness and levity, even in Snoop’s earliest days. His lyrics and delivery were always suffused with a knowing wink. And later, as his influence on language began being ever more evident (fo’ shizzle my nizzle), it seemed a revelation and evolution, rather than a change in character.
Which leaves the original mystery – the thought process that inspired this essay. What kind of public persona would Tupac have today, had he lived? Would he have followed Snoop’s lead, and ended up a cartoon fish in an animated movie? Would he have found suburban bliss, as an elder statesman of hip hop? Would he have become a mogul like his mentor Dr. Dre, or Sean Combs (who has, incidentally, been recently accused of being part of the conspiracy that led to Tupac’s murder)?
I think the clue is in the evolution of his art in the months before his death. Tupac had veered off into proto-mysticism and political consciousness. His latter stage name – Makavelli (on the posthumous The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory) – spoke to a desire to plumb the depths of identity, politics, state violence and even geopolitics. This in a sense was Tupac paying homage to himself. While he had been born Lesane Parish Crooks in New York, his mother renamed him after Tupac Amaru, an Inca leader of the eighteenth century. His parents were Black Panthers, and the evolution of his art reveals a consciousness and tenderness standing as a counterpoint to his most violent work.
So the Tupac of today, in his mid-50s, would have continued on that trajectory. I think his violence would have been tempered by the end of the rap battles with the arrests and conviction of Suge Knight, and thus the removal of his malignant influence. Tupac the cartoon fish? Highly unlikely. Makavelli the elder statesman? Probable.
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