Snoop

Still at Friday's party. Me and Justina were manning the music. I picked "Drop It Like It's Hot." "I know it's not respectable, but I really like Snoop Dogg," I explained.

"Well, he did sell out. Just a little."

There it was. I suddenly understood how Snoop became such a joke. And that - his selling out - is precisely would make me, and others like me, adore him to pieces. Snoop is at once a living artifact and a parodic commentary on today's hip hop culture. I don't know how much people have noticed this, but hip hop lately has become a HIGHLY stylized thing. Hos and booty, cars and bling, gold teeth, hot clubs. Essentially, gangstas from the ghetto living it up, kind of like 50 Cent's (none too subtle) "get rich or die trying." Hundreds and hundreds of songs and videos have ridden on the strenghth of the booty-n-bling concept alone. Some have criticized hip hop for promoting an empty message - I can even sympathize with this, because I've gone clubbing enough times to realize that it's a totally meaningless experience - but then I consider: has the lifestyle of any pop movement ever been anything other than shallow? No. For the Beach Boys it was surfing and cars. For Phil Spector it was young love and parental prohibitions. And both took their cues from Chuck Berry, who pretty much did what pop music was going to do for all time afterwards - which incidentally, isn't much by way of content.

Snoop, like these old great pop artists, stylizes his lifestyle and presents it with sympathy and humor. But unlike them (and most other successful artists) he does it with such absolute completion and tremendous kitsch, so as to raise it to the level of out-and-out comedy. Snoop does not mask the fact that one of the founding priciples of hip hop is making money (whether that $$$ comes from Chrysler or some hole-in-the wall auto shop in L.A. that happens to buy some radio commercials); and that essentially, this is an upwardly-mobile aspiration. Someone like Eminem is not as explicit about this ambitiousness; his "fuck you, I hate mainstream America." makes you think that he does not, in fact, want to find his success through our mainstream graces.

Snoop, on the other hand, always makes it clear that his wealth is intimately ingrained with the ghetto program. One of my favorite moments is from his MTV Cribs episode. Showing us his freezer and pantry he says, "We keep it real gangsta in here. Lego my Ego, some popsicles, Ding-dongs..." Whereas Eminem's trailer park life is firmly in his past, Snoop's low-cost/low-nutrition, commercialized food is still found in his post-wealthy/trendy kitchen.

And thus, it's uproarious to see Snoop in all his money-making sell-out shenanigans, perhaps because we know that he's not even thinking about changing himself at heart. He brings his special character into all his works - namely, that of the shameless pimp. 50 tries to do a similar thing, but his project is totally devoid of humor or taste. If you dissect it, his "get rich or die trying," becomes nothing more than a triviality. All there is left in the message - without Snoop's humor or Tupac's pathos - is hos and money; so what? All the human elements have been erased.