“Who here wants to smoke weed with Snoop Dogg?” asked Calvin Broadus – aka The Doggfather, patron saint of the munchies and fantasy brand ambassador for Optrex. A stupid, and potentially very expensive question.
Such is Snoop’s reputation as rap’s prime consumer of fragrant forestry that, from the O2’s enthusiastic response, it was going to take all of his military level blunt construction skills to craft a spliff large and hardy enough to get passed all the way to block 403.
The trouble with developing a chronic taste for the chronic, though, is the difficulty it causes in keeping up to speed. Snoop hasn’t been slack in the studio stakes of late – he’s released eight albums in the past decade, and a new Dr Dre collaboration Missionary is being skinned up as we speak.
But from last night’s quickfire megamix of his rap classics and notable verses, featuring just one Snoop track released since 2011, you’d imagine he just woke up from a decade-long dope doze to find that hip-hop got conscious and experimental while he was busy on any number of blunt-inspired escapades: cook books, NFT launches, delivery food ads to name a few.
He certainly hasn’t stayed alert enough to modern attitudes to realise the poor 2023 optics of wandering a stage transformed into an LA strip joint, chuffing bifters and spraying four onstage pole dancers with a modified money gun.
Leaning heavily into his seminal Nineties work with Dre and NWA’s Eazy-E – The Next Episode, Deep Cover, Boyz-n-the-Hood, Nuthin’ but a “G” Thang – the effect was to shamelessly throw back to an era of unreconstructed West Coast gangsta rap and pimp grooves, the Stevie Wonder starbursts framing the big screens only adding to the retro gleam.
His few nods to modernity involved borrowing the choruses to his guest raps on rave pop tracks like DJ Khaled’s All I Do Is Win, Jason Derulo’s Wiggle or Katy Perry’s California Gurls, plus having a bloke in a Bored Ape outfit ogling the dancers with him.
There were legendary Snoop tunes to be had – most notably Gin And Juice, Drop It Like It’s Hot and the raging rap beast Who Am I? (What’s My Name?) – an amusing black and white video interlude of Pharrell Williams singing Minnie The Moocher and an exuberant guest appearance from “my nephew” Big Narstie.
But by the midpoint Snoop was merely piggybacking on 2Pac’s California Love, Notorious B.I.G.’s Hypnotize and House Of Pain’s Jump Around for easy scores. And while announcing “I’ve got the munchies” as an excuse to screen his Just Eat advert in full and having a five-minute “smoke break” behind the DJ booth – that you could smell from the gods – might have been very on-brand, they weren’t exactly what you’d call entertainment. Another effect of too much weed: you just stop trying.
