CNN
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If Snoop Dogg had pretended to smoke the Olympic torch he helped carry to open the 2024 Games, few people would have been surprised.
But the cannabis entrepreneur now and the elder statesman of hip-hop is in his respectable era – he’s a little older, a little wiser, and a lot more adorable.
The 52-year-old rapper’s transformation from superstar on trial for murder in the 1990s to Martha Stewart’s best friend in “Grandpa’s Duties” at the Olympics has been so slow and artful that it’s only natural to wonder: How did we get here?
P. Frank Williams covered the Snopp Dogg murder trial for the Los Angeles Times and co-wrote the book “Chosen by Fate: My Life Inside Death Row Records” with The musician’s co-defendant, McKinley Lee Jr.
Williams told CNN the answer is actually quite simple.
“He’s worked hard and he loves what he does,” said Williams, who recently directed the documentary “Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told” for Hulu. “Snoop has a charm and a likability that you can’t buy.”
Not to mention a bow that speaks to the power of reinvention.
Born Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. in Long Beach, California, Snoop Dogg earned the family nickname “Snoop” due to his resemblance to the Peanuts character.
He grew up in an era when gang violence and crack cocaine were rampant in the inner city of Los Angeles. Although he was a star athlete in high school, Snoop fell into that life, selling drugs and getting into trouble as a teenager.
“I was always afraid. That’s why I think I survived, because you have to be afraid or you have to respect. And I didn’t understand respect, so I was afraid of everything,” Snoop Dogg told Howard Stern in 2021. “A lot of times I was shot at; a lot of times I had a gun in my hand and I could have shot back, but I was too afraid to shoot back because I was so worried about my life. It’s either fight or flight, and most of the time when you’re out there, it’s flight.”
This “gangster” persona would follow him when he rose to fame in 1992 as a guest rapper on producer and NWA member Dr. Dre’s first solo single, “Deep Cover,” for the film of the same name.
Raymond Boyd/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg and rapper/producer Dr. Dre pose for photos backstage at the Regal Theater in Chicago in January 1993. (Photo by Raymond Boyd/Getty Images)
This led him to work with Dre on his now iconic album ‘The Chronic’.
Snoop Dogg’s debut album, “Doggystyle,” followed. It was a critical and commercial success, establishing him as the lead artist for Death Row Records and one of the rappers most associated with West Coast rap.
But at this point, problems were beginning to arise.
A trial and try something different
The rapper and his bodyguard Lee Jr. were charged with the 1993 murder of 20-year-old Philip Woldermariam, whom Lee Jr. admitted to shooting but claimed self-defense.
Woldemariam’s death came shortly before the release of Snoop Dogg’s debut album and brought much attention to one of the singles, “Murder Was the Case,” which Snoop Dogg later said had been written a year prior and was highly prophetic.
“My peers, we were writing about death. You see, I wrote this song ‘Murder Was the Case’ where I was like, ‘I came when my baby was about to have my baby,’” he told Audible’s “Words + Music” last year. “(His then-girlfriend, now wife Shante Broadus) wasn’t even pregnant, and I hadn’t even heard about the murder case yet.”
Dani Abramowicz/FilmMagic/Getty Images
Snoop Dogg at the Snoop Dogg Concert at the Sydney Entertainment Centre – April 8, 2006 at the Entertainment Centre in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. (Photo by Dani Abramowicz/FilmMagic)
OJ Simpson’s famed defense attorney Johnnie Cochran represented Snoop Dogg and Lee Jr. when the case went to trial in 1996 and resulted in an acquittal.
The same year, Snoop Dogg released his second studio album, “Tha Doggfather”, which featured a softer version of the song. rapper, which he said did not please his record company.
It was so different from his first album that years later people were still talking about how it sounded more restrained and less hardcore than his debut.
“What Snoop is trying to do throughout Doggfather is show the kind of maturation that was probably happening in his life: He was 25 now, a father, had made it through a terrible legal journey, had adjusted enough to money and fame and constant paranoia,” Paul Thompson wrote for Fader in 2019. “But instead of breaking through into a constructed new persona—or, instead of flitting between familiar songs and radically different ones—he’s essentially stripping down his old style to 80 percent.”
At the time, Snoop Dogg said that Death Row Records was not happy with his change.
“They wanted me to stay gangster,” he told Jemele Hill in 2019 during an episode of her podcast “Unbothered.” “They wanted me to stay gangster and still be, you know, an asshole, but I had just been through a murder case and I couldn’t.”
He said, “My heart and mind were not ready” to continue playing his old character, so he rejected his label’s advice to follow that path.
He told Hill that he was determined to be authentic and that meant growing as his life changed, because “being myself is all I know how to do.”
“As you grow up and you learn to be a man, you have a family, things that you live for, that become your purpose,” he said. “And I’ve never been afraid to position my life and say I have a family now.”
Married to his high school sweetheart Shante Broadus since 1997, Snoop Dogg and his wife are parents to sons Corde, 29, Cordell, 27, and Julian, 26, and daughter Cori, 25, as well as a dozen grandchildren.
Earlier this year, he told Jennifer Hudson on her daytime talk show that his grandchildren call him “Papa Snoop.”
Having a growing family also meant he had to increase his salary, and he certainly did.
His portfolio now includes everything from his own wine line with 19 Crimes to his Snoop Loopz cereal brand and, of course, a line of cannabis products.
Along the way, he also managed to indulge his passion for sports and entertainment with his youth soccer league and acting gigs.
Along the way, he received help from his friends, including the doyenne of home economics, Martha Stewart.
The unlikely couple even had their own reality show, “Martha & Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party,” which launched in 2016 and aired for two seasons.
The rapper has done all this while managing to maintain his large footprint in the music industry with major current groups, including K-Pop superstars BTS, recruiting him for collaborations.
Yet nothing is more telling of Snoop Dogg’s place as a national treasure than his selection to be one of the Olympic torchbearers at this year’s Games, which will be held in Paris.
There was Snoop Dogg, who not only ran with the torch, but also brought joy by helping to conduct interviews for NBC (which broadcasts the games), offering insightful and hilarious commentary on the competitions and being complimentary of the athletes.
Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
Rapper Snoop Dogg cheers on Team USA during qualifying for women’s gymnastics at the 2024 Olympics in Paris, France, on Sunday.
There was a precedent in 2021: He and his friend Kevin Hart hosted “Olympic Highlights with Kevin Hart and Snoop Dogg” for NBC’s Peacock streamer, during which they conducted interviews and offered hilarious commentary during competitions.
This year, Snoop Dogg spoke to NBC about what it meant to him to carry the torch during the Opening Ceremony relay.
“I felt like Muhammad Ali. It was amazing, it was great,” he said. “I discovered that when you hold the torch, you are a messenger of peace, so I felt really good.”
Williams, who as a journalist has covered Snoop Dogg for years, shared what he thinks other stars can learn from Snoop’s arc as a celebrity.
“Trust your talent and be yourself,” he told CNN. “People love Snoop because of his authenticity! He’s the same on stage and backstage.”
Whore.