The Year of Snoop Dogg

A couple of weeks ago, The Voice—you know, the prime-time reality singing competition, the showcase that gave us good ol’ Morgan Wallen—returned for its 26th season on NBC. I don’t follow the show, and I might not have otherwise cared to watch a second of this latest season if not for the conspicuous inclusion of Snoop Dogg, who recently joined The Voice as a coach alongside Michael Bublé, Gwen Stefani, and Reba McEntire. This isn’t the rapper’s first turn in this format; Snoop previously served as a “Mega Mentor” in Season 20 of The Voice and as a cohost, with Kelly Clarkson, of NBC’s American Song Contest, a short-lived clone of Eurovision. He’s trained for the role, certainly. Still, Snoop is a rapper, and while he isn’t the first rapper to serve as a coach on The Voice, he’s an odd choice, compared to the other coaches, to mentor a bunch of singers, no?

But then you watch Snoop for two seconds on The Voice, you witness his outsize reactions to the contestants and his infectious bonhomie with the other judges, and you realize that Snoop is, in fact, the final boss of this format. There was one audition from this adorable teen contestant, ChrisDeo from Queens, who spoke so wholesomely in her intro segment about her formative love of the piano. She sang “I Won’t Give Up” by Jason Mraz for her audition, winning over two coaches: Bublé and Snoop. You’d think, given ChrisDeo’s training and her style, that she would’ve gone with the fellow crooner in Bublé, but no, she went with the slick Crip from Long Beach—the guy with (for my money) the best verse on The Chronic.

But of course you choose Snoop, in the Year of Snoop. Of course you roll with the coach who holds so many keys to success in modern American entertainment, to the point that he’s up on that stage, coaching singers, even though he can’t sing for shit. “I’m the king of show and business,” he told the 31-year-old country singer Jake Tankersley during an episode before blessing him with a Death Row Records chain and welcoming him, as his first recruit, to Team Snoop.

Snoop has long been a lovable figure, so iconically mellow and suave, and with such a velvety voice. But he’s only recently become something bigger in popular culture, perhaps the closest thing we have to a national mascot. This past summer, NBC had Snoop galavanting in Paris for a couple of weeks as a “special correspondent” for the network’s exclusive stateside coverage of the Olympics. In this capacity, Snoop became a national mascot of sorts—a cheerleader to Jordan Chiles and Simone Biles, a sharer of Skittles with A’ja Wilson, the people’s equestrian, a savvy commentator and eminently photogenic spectator, an incomparable man of memes. There was, as there almost always is with post-rap peak Snoop, some sense of cartoonishly overzealous brand activation; da game is to be sold, and all that. Yes, NBC marketed the hell out of him, but there evidently was a massive appetite for his signature effervescence. He also functioned as some sort of feel-good pop counterprogramming to culture war skirmishes over the opening ceremony and women’s boxing.

The softening of Snoop’s image has been a decades-long project at this point. People younger than me don’t associate Snoop with Death Row or (sigh …) No Limit so much as they associate him with Pharrell and Martha Stewart. Earlier, I mentioned Snoop’s second verse on “Lil’ Ghetto Boy” with Dr. Dre. It’s a rather bleak meditation on gangbanging and its consequences from a rapper who, while always good for a party record, was a much more severe figure at the time: a rapper who was introduced to a lot of observers outside of hip-hop when he and his bodyguard, represented by Johnnie Cochran, were on trial for murder (and were both ultimately acquitted) in 1996.

But Snoop wasn’t exactly emboldened by his acquittal. He seemed determined to escape the sort of gangland drama that consumed 2Pac. Snoop once summarized his mindset at the time of his acquittal, circa Tha Doggfather, to Jemele Hill: “I wanna live, and my baby is here.” (Snoop’s first child was born in 1994.) So Snoop crept away from Death Row and then from gangsta rap altogether, into the crossover era of “Beautiful” and “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” and then further into the pristine kitchens of Martha Stewart. Snoop probably single-handedly destigmatized “selling out,” as he made it look so good.

The year when America became Team Snoop is also the year after hip-hop turned 50. That was an anniversary marked by ambivalence, cutting across the generations. On one hand, there was the understandable impulse to celebrate the unlikely ascent of a once fiercely embattled genre to commercial dominance and ubiquitous influence. Who doesn’t want to revel in a legendary come-up? Jay-Z used to rap about hustling coke up and down I-95, and now he runs the recording industry and also apparently single-handedly selects the halftime performers for the Super Bowl. Isn’t that absurd? Flavor Flav used to smoke crack, and now he’s the patron saint of women’s water polo. Isn’t that wild? On the other hand, rap, for all its commercial advancement, is one distressed pantheon. DMX died at 50, Guru at 48, Gangsta Boo at 43, Prodigy at 42—this list gets exponentially more depressing the younger I go, into the string of untimely demises that effectively eradicated a generation of emerging hip-hop superstars. Survival is its own triumph. Snoop has the stamina, despite the weed tax on his lungs, for a never-ending victory lap.

But no subculture can thrive for so long and spread so widely without transforming from something lived into something sold. Snoop has long embodied this arc, perhaps more potently than even the hip-hop billionaires Jay-Z and Dr. Dre. These guys have all gone gray and mainstream—they’re all businesses, man—but Jay and Dre have accordingly withheld their wit and muted their personas and become a lot less entertaining. Snoop, meanwhile, is shilling for novelty wines and fire pits in good humor and with a hustler’s indomitable spirit. He’s spitting daily affirmations for the kids, bro. Here he is rapping a full verse for a takeout app and not even sounding half bad. There’s something very deeply and hilariously American about all of this, which would of course explain how Snoop has come to represent America itself—a multicultural experiment in which it’s often difficult to tell where the earnest content ends and the commercials begin.