When you tell people you’re going to interview the rapper Snoop Dogg, they gleefully start adding “izzles” and “shizzles” to the end of their words, because that’s how he talks, the king of the comedy suffix. And then, when you do join Snoopizzle on his European tour and he turns up three hours late to the hotel in Amsterdizzle, and leaves the lift having a blazing row on his mobile phizzle about “how ain’t nobody gonna f***ing tizzle me I can’t smoke in the hotel room when they ain’t even in the same country and why we even staying in a nine-star when we coulda stayed in a two-star and smoked in the bizzle dizzle . . .” It’s something of a revelation — he even shizzles while he’s swearing!
The career of the man born 38 years ago as Calvin Broadus has swung between comedy and criminality, between prison and superstardom. So, after he has finished barking into his phone and I’m worried that he’s going to bark at me too, he turns round, gentle as a lamb, and announces softly: “I am ready when you are.”
He is gangly and slender, as tall as his bouncers are wide. We share a sofa but he doesn’t face me, his sunglasses and hat still on, a joint cupped between his fingers as he talks about his new album, Malice N Wonderland, purposefully grinding ash into the hotel table. “When the record starts off you can tell I’m rapping with a lot of bad energy in my heart. So that’s the first half, that’s Malice,” he says slowly. “By the time I get midway through the record it tones down and takes on a different direction, and by the end I find myself in Wonderland. And you know, that’s for the ladies. I been calling women ‘bitches’ and ‘hos’ my whole career and I didn’t make songs for them. So I took time to give them that love and respect on this record.”
Can this be true? Does this tenth album, which Snoop says completes his “saga”, signal a revolution in consciousness for rap’s baddest superstar? “Well I don’t feel no regret, ‘cause there are still hos and bitches out there. But at the same time I do recognise the real woman, the real one that tends to be under-appreciated.” Really? “I want,” he adds, “to uplift her.”
Snoop was a Crip gangster while still at high school in the south Los Angeles ghetto and subsequently jailed for drugs and firearms offences. After his release, his musical talent was discovered by the rap producer Dr Dre and his debut album, Doggystyle, was released in 1993 on Death Row Records. It went quadruple platinum with hits including What’s My Name and Gin & Juice, and Snoop became a luminary of the G-funk and gangsta rap genres. Along the way he also worked as a pimp and a pornographer, and he is currently banned from Britain after his entourage caused a scuffle at Heathrow in 2006: seven policemen were wounded. As CVs go, it’s not looking great for a career in the Civil Service.
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But then I find out why he turned up late to the interview — he had stayed up all night playing video games, and then he had to get his hair done and have a McDonald’s, because his wife makes him eat salads at home. When I ask him about growing up in the hood in Long Beach, he says that his family was so poor that he had to “sell papers, sell candy, go door to door, cut grass. I washed cars, carried groceries home for old ladies. I even held lemonade sales.” Old ladies? Lemonade? Was this hood located somewhere near Twickenham?
And yet, and yet, Snoop just oozes cool. You can’t not love him and believe me I’ve tried. I gave him a two-star album review once, even though the record, R&G (Rhythm & Gangsta): The Masterpiece, from 2004, was brilliant and contained the influential hit single Drop it Like it’s Hot. What left me fuming was another track, Can U Control Yo Hoe, in which he said “You got to put that bitch in her place/ Even if it’s slapping her in her face.” Still, I was secretly relieved when the album was a hit, because the music was just so good. His voice is like no other rapper’s — it flows like honey, melodious to a fault. And the man is droll — he thought he would become a stand-up comic before he got into hip-hop. He tells me he directed a porno movie because he was sick of bad ones that went: “Knock knock on the door: ‘Hi, I’m Bob, I’m a plumber, I heard your sink was broken.’ And she’s all: ‘Yeah, it is broken, you wanna come plumb me up?’ Heh heh heh.”
While his hip-hop peers Kanye West and Jay-Z are so protective of their coolness that they appear self-important, Snoop is so effortlessly cool that he can afford to be silly. He didn’t even start the shizzle slang — his catchphrase “fo shizzle my nizzle” is derived from “for sure my n*****” and has been around for some time but he did make it his own. In the video for his most recent hit, Sensual Seduction, he was dressed in ridiculous 1970s frills in front of a seriously naff smoke machine. He recently appeared on Alexa Chung’s MTV show and really got into the cookery task, ladling chocolate sauce all over her pancakes. His nickname comes from his parents because he looked like Snoopy the cartoon dog as a child (he still does), and he has released a pet accessories range for real dogs. He tells me about his plans to open a chain of Snoopermarkets, which will presumably offer money-off snoopons on his own range of Cup-a-Snoops. I’m fairly sure you could challenge this man to a bout of apple bobbing and he’d come out looking more fabulous than the Fonz.
But Snoop also wants to be taken seriously. He wants respect, and he doesn’t feel he has it. “My peers respect me but the industry don’t,” he says. “Not that I really base my career on winning awards or things of that nature, but it’s like, if I get nominated 20, 30 times and don’t win, why y’all keep nominating me? What is it? Do I have to act a complete ass and make people hate me to get to where I want to be?”
Well, what is the reason? He must have a hunch. “Yeah. It’s because I’m a nice guy. Nice guys finish last.” I raise an eyebrow at this, not that he can see me through all the smoke. “’Cause when I had the attitude of thug, gangster, no respect, that bad boy attitude, I was always coming in first. When I first started coming to London and they had a handcuff on me, those were the wonder years when I just didn’t care. Now that I’m more concerned and caring and a father and a husband — it just seems like, the nicer I get, the less respect I get.”
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Indeed, he has had a reality TV show called Father Hood where he was shown being a loving, funny dad to his two sons and a daughter, aged 15, 12 and 10, and getting bossed around by their mother, Shante, whom he has divorced but remarried onscreen. (David Beckham had a cameo in it, teaching them football.) Snoop is now worth about £60 million but wants more, “because what do rich people do, they make sure their kids’ kids’ kids got money, right? That’s what I’m trying to do. So that way they don’t have to grow up like I grew up. But it’s also about the work ethic. It’s not about not leaving it to them so that they don’t have to do anything, it’s about them knowing that they have to do something to get it.” His own dad was a Vietnam war veteran and largely absent. “Like 90 per cent of rappers I grew up without a father. And 90 per cent of us are now living as fathers to our kids. Maybe we could get some credit for that.”
Politically, he vociferously supports President Obama. “I think they put him in a f***ed-up position. I think they put him in the hole.” Surely the problem is that they put him on a pedestal? “No, they put him in the hole, just like they do with us black people, and gave him something to run with no money, no nothing. Take over Bush’s problems, all the enemies that Bush created, all the lives that Bush lost. Bush had eight years to do it and couldn’t get it right, so how do you expect Obama to get it right in eight months? And now consider that he’s black, so he’s already hated to begin with . . .”
Does Snoop feel an anti-black hatred coming to the fore, now that the public’s honeymoon with Obama is over? “It was always there, it was just a hidden hope that he could be a saviour. But black people knew that he could only do a certain amount. He’s gonna need to put the right people in place to make it work. I’m not gonna name no names but he’s got a lot of people on his team that’s designed to keep him where he’s at, not help him get ahead.” As for Snoop’s own plans to rule the world, he’s just been made creative chairman of the newly resurrected Priority Records — parent company EMI — and been given a swanky office in the famous round Capitol Records building in LA. He’s bringing back bands such as Cypress Hill and signing younger West Coast rappers too — he wants to support people from his own background. “I just feel like there’s so many talented kids right now. And if you give ‘em an opportunity you never know what you gonna find.” Something that the ever-surprising Snoop Dogg would know all about. Fo shizzle.
Malice N Wonderland is released on Monday by Priority Records/EMI