You know him as the multi-platinum selling gangsta rapper. What you don't know is that Calvin Broadus has coached his son's football team to the junior Super Bowl, is aiming to be the 'Black Tom Cruise' and wants you to buy his deluxe barbecue - The Snoop Degrill. Erik Hedegaard reveals how Snoop Dogg learned new tricks
At 32,000ft, tucked away in the back of a private Gulfstream jet, on his way from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to shoot a Cribs segment for MTV, with Little Johnny Taylor singing about 'trouble ahead' on the CD player, Snoop Dogg and a couple of his pals are nearly lost to sight in all the pot smoke. There's nothing too unusual about this, Snoop Dogg being a well known and highly dedicated pot smoker. And yet, not all that long ago he'd said he was giving up the stuff. He'd said, 'I get high on life now.' He'd said, 'I had to do it... I was getting careless and reckless.' He'd said lots of things about his new, clean lifestyle. But he really does love his pot, need his pot, crave his pot, and his pot-free existence lasted for all of about four months.
'I felt beautiful, but at times my mind just needs to tone it down a little,' he says now, a little sheepishly. 'Anyway, before, I used to smoke maybe a quarter-pound a day. Now it's more or less like two ounces a day. It's drastically dropped off. It's more controlled. It's more, you know, casual.'
And so there he is, in the back of the jet - all you can hear mid-cabin are shouts of 'motherfucker' this, 'nigga' that - a guy for whom two ounces of dope a day is a casual amount. It is true, however, that he probably does need some way to tone his mind down, because he is one hyper-energetic hip-hop entrepreneur.
He's got a new album, R&G (Rhythm & Gangsta): The Masterpiece, and its first single, 'Drop It Like It's Hot', a collaboration with Pharrell Williams, hit the Number One position on the US pop charts. He's got deals in the works or completed with shoe companies, cell-phone companies, barbecue-grill companies, clothing companies, satellite-radio companies, action-figure toy companies and movie studios, and has hired the Firm, a Los Angeles powerhouse career-management company, to help him sort it all out.
Plus, he's got his wife, Shante, on his mind. Last May, citing irreconcilable differences, he filed for divorce. Now he's not so sure he did the right thing. In fact, he's pretty sure he messed up big time and is taking steps to correct the situation. Plus, for the past year, he's been coaching a local Pop Warner football team - the Rowland Heights Raiders, with his 10-year-old son Corde playing quarterback - and they're in the regional play-offs and on their way to a Super Bowl victory. He's totally into it. 'For Snoop, this is hut-hut-hike season,' says his friend and cohort, Bigg Slice, 32, who spends much of his time customising cars for Snoop and is responsible for his tricked-out version of the Cadillac DeVille, the Snoop DeVille. 'If it's not hut-hut-hike, forget about it.'
All that being the case, after he does his Cribs thing in Vegas and re-boards the Gulfstream for the ride home, it's little wonder that the first thing he does is lay himself down. No more dope today. Instead, he curls his legs up, shuts his eyes and is soon fast asleep, hands folded in the prayer position under his cheek, looking very much like a perfect little all-tuckered-out hip-hop angel.
At the age of 33, after more than 10 years at the top of the rap-pack heap, what the former Calvin Broadus seems to want more than anything is to make it in the movies, to become 'the black Tom Cruise', as he likes to put it. So far, he's been in about 15 flicks, most recently Starsky & Hutch and Soul Plane, and has just finished shooting an indie called The Tenants, co-starring Dylan McDermott, in which Snoop plays a militant black writer. It's a dramatic role and, for the first time since his small but effective part as a wheelchair-bound crack dealer in Training Day, calls for him to be someone other than himself - slitty-eyed, laid-back and honey-voiced - or some variation of himself. This, Snoop thinks, is a good thing. 'It's a stretch, and so far from what I normally play that it'll probably get me critically acclaimed as an actor.'
Being the foremost proponent of gangsta rap, and of the pimp lifestyle, and of dead cops (at least in song), etc, has not always made him an easy sell to Hollywood executives, though he thinks they now view him mainly as 'a bad guy gone good'.
'They don't know what to expect,' he says, 'until they see that I'm just a regular ol' guy like they are. I mean, I don't walk around gangsta all day, slapping people up and being a vicious criminal. No. That's only when it's called for. Same with the pimp image. That's a dream of mine I had as a kid, to be a pimp, living like a pimp. I've lived that dream out and had fun doing it. But I don't think I should play with it no more.'
Apparently, a lot of the old Snoop image is being shoved aside. That highly lucrative side business in soft-core porn - as the host of Girls Gone Wild: Doggy Style - is no more. 'I made that stuff more fun to watch,' he says. 'But my wife don't like it. That's why I'm not going to fuck with it any more.'
He sighs and then talks a little more about Shante, his wife of nearly seven years: 'I know I said I wanted a divorce, but that ain't what I really wanted. That's the devil working. My thing was, I was so demanding and not willing to listen. That's why it was all bad, because of the simple fact that I'm Snoop Dogg and in a powerful position and sometimes that shit gets to my head. I just got to come back to being, you know, Calvin, and realising what matters most to me: my wife and my kids. That's what I'm trying to do right now. Put that back together again.' He shakes his head and a while later says, 'Success is crazy, man.'
These days, he holes up mostly in his recording studio, nicknamed the Tabernacle, a ranch-style home plopped down in a leafy California suburb that's remarkable only because of the flavour Snoop brings to it. Cars line the sidewalk outside, with hefty security guys keeping a close eye on visitors. Inside, various Snoop Dogg personnel and hangers-on shuffle around, while in a back room Snoop blabs endlessly on his cell phone. He often sleeps here. When he does, he sometimes gets up around 7.30am, washes his face, cleans his ears, brushes his teeth, wolfs down some bacon and eggs, along with some hot cakes and waffles, and rips himself a CD to set the tenor of the day. It's mostly old-school, Curtis Mayfield, the Isley Brothers and Al Green, because, he says, 'Old-school music just puts me where I need to be.'
Where he is right now is in a tiny room filled with recording gear, smoke curling away, remembering how it used to be as a gang member, in Long Beach, California, in the years before he teamed up with Dr Dre on Dre's album The Chronic; released his first CD, 1993's Doggystyle; and found all that crazy success. In those early days, among other things, he sold crack on the street, got busted on drug charges and did a stretch in jail; but they were the good old days, and it was great to be a Crip.
'Especially the camaraderie we had as far as power goes,' he says. 'You know, the bitches, the money, the cars, the jewellery, the respect; people knowing my motherfucking name; knowing who I was, what I stood for - without a record, without TV, without none of that shit. That's a hell of a thing the gang gives you. I was just a young nigga who was on the edge.'
But after the multi-platinum-selling Doggystyle, he suddenly became the big homie himself - the biggest in the world of gangsta rap - with each of his six subsequent albums also going platinum. Throughout, he's had his troubles: he and a bodyguard went to trial on murder charges in 1996 (both were acquitted) and now he's fighting a $25m suit alleging sexual assault.
So far, he's always managed to land on his feet, to the point where he's become something of a cultural icon and trendsetter. And yet he often thinks he's still getting the short end of the stick. Take his Doggy Fizzle Televizzle show, which ran on MTV in 2003 but is no more.
'It was doing beautiful, man, getting great reviews and great ratings,' he says. 'But I felt like my fee should go up. All I asked for was, like, a million, but they wouldn't even give me a million. So I walked away.' Indeed, for playing Huggy Bear in Starsky & Hutch, he received only $500,000. 'But now, it's going to be more about, "You have to pay me what I'm worth." If I'm in a movie, and 70 million people leave the movie saying, "Wow, Snoop Dogg was great," don't you think I should get at least a million dollars?'
It often seems that the only time Snoop isn't getting high is when he's coaching football. 'Around those kids,' he says, 'I'm as straight as motherfucking six o'clock.'
One evening, he ambles on to the field at practice, coach's whistle dangling from his neck. The Rowland Raiders are entering the play-offs with a record of eight wins, no losses. But Snoop doesn't want the kids to rest on their laurels, so he keeps up a constant stream of instruction and praise. After Number 33 runs for nine yards, he hollers to him, 'Run like that every time!' Later on, back at the Tabernacle, Bigg Slice is messing around with some videos he's taken of the competing teams, which is part of Coach Snoop's strategy, scouting the opposition like the big boys do.
Snoop comes in and says, 'We got Woodcrest coming up. We seen them last night, and I'm glad, because they got a few things.' 'But not enough,' says Slice. 'Better aim for a pressure point.' Snoop thinks about this. 'Better aim for the head,' he says, chuckling. 'Fuck the chest, legs, arms. Go straight for the head. Woodcrest in trouble. They in trouble!'
In a way, Snoop is all about strategising, aiming for the head, looking toward the future and working out ways to leverage the Snoop Dogg franchise. After seeing how much money former boxer George Foreman made from the George Foreman grill, Snoop decided maybe he should do the same thing and is now in discussions for a product to be called the Snoop DeGrill. 'Why not?' he asks, reasonably enough. 'Everybody wants to be down with Snoop Dogg. I like to barbecue, and I know a lot of other people like to barbecue, so why not give them a grill that's customised in the Snoop Dogg fashion, where they can say, "Hey, I know Snoop Dogg's probably barbecuing right now, watching football!"'
As he says these things, he lights another blunt, takes a big puff, exhales through his mouth, inhales through his nose. He appears to be a little moody today. He's never been one of those rappers totally into bluster and braggadocio; he's always tempered the big talk with vulnerability. He says that more than anything, he likes to be the centre of attention, 'the life of the party, all eyes on me. When I'm not, it puts me on edge, like my fingertips get sweaty.'
He says that he's a good person '97.5 per cent of the time'. He says that he lost his virginity in 1982, when he was 11. Then he says his best-ever orgasm was probably his first one, only to retract that a second later.
'Probably my best one was the first time I made love to my wife,' he says. 'It was in this little cheap-ass hotel in North Long Beach. She made me wait a whole year. That's why I love her so much.'
And then he says that the worst thing he's ever done is what he did to his wife. 'I cheated on her,' he says softly. 'That's the worst thing you could possibly do. Lose somebody's trust who loves you.'
After that, he's silent for a moment. 'I'm 33 years old now,' he says. 'I see a lot of things differently now than I used to.
I try to do more right than wrong, and to keep God in everything I do and to keep the devils away from me. But I know by trying to stay so right, the devil is going to keep on working on me. That's going to be a curse around me all the time. But I don't think it's going to get to me. I really don't think that it is.'
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1409996,00.html
