Off the Charts: Snoop Dogg

Paid the cost to be the sellout

By Newt Briggs

Anyone who witnessed the shameful spectacle that was MTV's "Iced-Out" New Year's Eve countdown saw what might best be described as the decline and fall of Snoop Dogg. Actually, the decline had been some time in the making--the product of an excess of bong hits and cameo appearances in Vince Vaughan comedies--but the fall came when Green Day stretched out the bridge to "Longview" and invited Snoop onto the stage. It was the perfect opportunity for the self-proclaimed Doggfather to display his skills on the mic, but all he could muster was the lame call and response: "Everybody say, `Snoop Dogg.' Everybody say, `Yeah.' Everybody say, `Green Day.' Everybody say, `Yeah.'" This uninspired revelry continued for several uncomfortable minutes until Snoop slumped out of the spotlight and retired to the moist orbit of Fat Joe and his half-empty bottle of Cristal. Bow-wow-wow-yippy-yo-yippy-yack.

Perhaps this wouldn't have been so disturbing if Snoop Dogg and his Death Row Records cohorts hadn't been responsible for the hip hop renaissance that began with Dr. Dre's 1992 masterwork The Chronic. Reclaiming the genre from the likes of Will Smith, Kriss Kross and Tag Team, Snoop helped restore rap as the voice of the people--a primal scream of urban discontent that took shape in the '80s under Public Enemy and KRS-One's Boogie Down Productions. Granted, Snoop's civil disobedience prized gangster cool over revolutionary bluster, but it succeeded in reinforcing the point that hip hop was as dangerous as it was danceable, as potentially revolutionary as it was overtly risque.

Yet Snoop's appearance on MTV was emblematic of hip hop's slip into cultural irrelevance. His goofy song-and-dance was not an anomaly; it was the result of an all-encompassing effort to sterilize and commodify even the most anti-authoritarian African-American culture. Snoop could have been the voice of black angst; instead, he became a walking advertisement for Seagram's gin and Philly blunts. Nowadays, it's not difficult to imagine that 50 Cent will one day have a Fox sitcom on which he plays a reformed gangster struggling with three smart-mouthed kids in a suburban community. For lack of a better title, let's call it "O.D.: Original Daddy."

Think it won't happen? It already has.

Ice Cube: Never mind that Ice Cube was one of the founding members of the West Coast rap trio that produced "To Kill a Hooker," "One Less Bitch" and "Fuck tha Police." Even when he broke out as a solo artist, Cube had vitriol to spare, spitting rhymes like, "Let 'em see a nigga invasion/ Point blank for the Caucasian" ("AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted"). This anti-establishment rancor earned him a starring role in John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood, in which he played--surprise!--a pistol-packing South Central baddie. Since then, it's been a slow but steady ascension to mainstream respectability: Friday, Anaconda, Three Kings, Barbershop and, now, Are We There Yet?--a PG-rated road-trip comedy that features Cube as a smooth-talking player trying to snatch some booty from a hapless divorcee. Way to represent, dawg!

Ice-T: Is it me or didn't Ice-T once declare that he wanted to be a "muthafuckin' cop killer"? Maybe that was just ghetto slang for a police investigator, which is what he currently plays on "Law and Order: SVU." According to the NBC website, Ice-T "continues to reinvent himself by applying his considerable talent to almost every imaginable entertainment medium. Always ahead of the curve, Ice-T is largely credited with inventing `gangsta rap' and he has created some of the best portraits of ghetto life and gangsters as well as some of the best social commentary hip-hop has ever produced. Outspoken, intelligent and controversial, Ice-T has seen both sides of the `Law' and he brings an authentic voice to his current role on `Law & Order: SVU.'"

The Black Eyed Peas: Here are two things most people don't know about everybody's favorite No Doubt cover band: 1. The Peas' nauseatingly ubiquitous hit "Let's Get It Started" was originally cut as "Let's Get Retarded" but was re-recorded to make it more marketable to global entities like the NBA. 2. The Peas' originally signed with Eazy E's Ruthless Records under the gangster rap title Atban Klann. That, my friends, is what we call keeping it real.