Permission to gripe for a moment?
My usually enjoyable early morning date with rap-up.com was somewhat soured when I stumbled upon the latest offering from Snoop Dogg: he of the alarming Katy Perry/Jessica Mauboy/Pussycat Dolls features. Rap-Up gives us a sample of some of the lyrical delights brought forth by the self-declared ex-pimp of Long Beach:
“My life is like a movie/ I was thuggin’ in the Beach when I lit my first doobie/ In the same city when I got my first piece of coochie/ Where I sold my first dime and I held my first Uzi.”
Snoop, how can I put this delicately? When I read these lyrics I honestly forgot that it was 2011. Don’t get me wrong, there’s very little more disturbing in this world than the sight of one of hip hop’s bonafide legends dressed in a three-piece gummy bear suit, prancing his gangly ass around in lollipop land. You should be making killer rap records, not playing second fiddle to pop princesses. But songs about how you were raised in the hood? Open your eyes! Squint through that retro kush smoke fogging your vision! Gangsta rap, when it was good, was ridiculously so. And you will never hear me utter a word against the game-changing greatness that was Doggystyle (not to mention The Chronic, Original Gangster, Straight Outta Compton…). But hip hop is not just revolutionary, it is evolutionary. The gangster thing is so tired, particularly when packaged more as an act of self-reassurance on the part of now comfortably mainstream Snoop than as a genuine articulation of inner-city life. If rap is the CNN of the people then “Raised in da Hood” makes painfully evident just how far Snoop’s mansion sits from the street.
We all know where you came from, Snoop. It’s time to tell us where you’re going.
