Pimp action

“I had to tell the record label leave me alone,” says Snoop Dogg, zipping down a desolate highway in a dark-blue Porsche Carrera, rolling a blunt with both hands as he steers with his knees. “I don’t wanna do no records, I don’t wanna do no movies, I don’t wanna do sh*t but football. Until I win this Super Bowl, the buck stops here.” The Steelers’ burgeoning prospects for the title is, as far as Snoop Dogg’s management is concerned, extremely bad for business. “My people always say it’s a loss, because when I’m in football mode I don’t go out and make money, but when I’m into these kids, it ain’t about makin’ money, it’s about makin’ they dreams come true.”

 

It’s not the Pittsburgh Steelers he’s talking about. Snoop is head coach of the Pomona Steelers, part of the Snoop Youth Football League, a cherub-faced gang of 9- and 10-year-olds that includes his middle child, Cordell, and Nate Dogg’s son Nigel. The league, now in its second season, has ten teams and 2,000 players, and Snoop is at every Steelers game and nearly every practice. He huddles with the boys after each play, and as they rumble in from all parts of the field, few of them taller than 5ft, their spindly legs hiding behind thigh pads, they all yell at him at once.

 

He can come across as cute and harmless enough to, say, pose in a Santa Claus suit, but he’s still got the gangsta in him – twice this autumn he was arrested at California airports for possession of an illegal 21-inch collapsible baton, weed and a gun. (Snoop denies the charges.) Where most thugs-turned-rappers have a hard time ever losing their air of menace, Snoop is loved in suburbia, where they may not pick up his coded gangsta messages. In ’92, when Ice-T was being attacked by politicians for “Cop Killer”, Snoop wasn’t attacked for rhyming about a 1-8-7 on an undercover cop, because most of the country didn’t realise the numbers were L.A. slang for murder. “I was slick about it,” he says. “I was like, I ain’t goin’ say, ‘F**k the police’, I’m-a say 1-8-7 on a motherf**in’ cop so nobody in the white world knew what I was sayin’. But every real nigga in the hood knew exactly what I was sayin’.” 

 

Snoop’s career began at Dre’s side in 1992, as he spat incendiary verses on the classic “Deep Cover”, but Snoop was a star before he met Dre. “It’s like I was a star in my own right,” he says. “I just didn’t have no cameras, no money. Whether it was for my rappin’, my baggin’ on a nigga, my persona getting at bitches, bein’ a gangster, hanging with the Insanes, bangin’ 20 Crip, I was always known no matter where I was.”

 

Snoop wasn’t supposed to be the star of 1992’s The Chronic. It was Dr Dre’s album. But Snoop was so charismatic and his style was so fresh (both in the hip-hop sense and the dictionary meaning), he became an instant national celebrity. In 1993, his first solo album, Doggystyle, debuted at Number One and sold more than five million copies, and Snoop became the face of Death Row Records, then the most infamous label in the industry. It was helmed by Suge Knight, a muscled mountain of machismo who was the most feared man in the record business, whispered to have bullied other rivals by dangling them upside down off balconies. That same year, Snoop was charged with homicide in the shooting death of a gangbanger. After a well-publicised trial he was found not guilty, but Death Row soon fell apart. 

 

Snoop says his wife, Shante Broadus, at first tolerated his pimping. “She went along with it ’cause she know and understand that was an infatuation of mine, a childhood dream, to be a pimp. Look at her daddy,” he says, pointing to the oversize picture of his father-in-law in a red suit beside Snoop and Puff, saying without saying it that her dad’s pimping enabled Snoop’s. “She wasn’t accepting; she was just lookin’ the other way ’cause I never did it in her face…” But, pimping soon contributed to the dissolution of his marriage. “She’d act like it didn’t happen,” he says, “but she knew it was happenin’ ’cause the pimps would come over, get dressed, and then go to the Players Balls.”

 

Snoop also has more to say on the mike. He’s working on a new group that will satisfy some of his pimpish urges. “A group called the Nine Inch Dicks,” he says. “We basically a male-chauvinist group, and all we do is R&B songs with a twist. I had a song called ‘Bitch, I’m Gone, I’m Through With You.’ I got another: ‘Can You Control Your Ho?’ The name of the record is Coming Soon, and you can believe me, we coming soon.

 

For the full version of rhis article, see NOX06.