Chapter 1Long Beach, 1971

Foreword

I built my name writing about the East Coast. Wu-Tang, Nas, the Marley Marl records — the whole cold-weather canon of men who rhymed like they were trying to keep warm. For twenty years that was my beat and my faith both. I could tell you where a snare sat on a DJ Premier record and why it mattered. I could argue the boroughs against each other until the bar closed. So when I told people I was writing a book about Snoop Dogg, more than one of them looked at me the way you look at a priest who has wandered into the wrong church. He was West Coast. He was sunshine and low-riders and a drawl that fell a half-second behind the beat. He was, they meant, not my subject.

That was exactly why I wanted him.

Because the thing I had spent two decades trying to explain about hip-hop — that it was never only music, that it was a set of instructions for surviving a particular kind of American place — is written more plainly across Snoop's life than across almost anyone I had studied on my own side of the country. Here was a man who sold crack on a Long Beach corner, who stood trial for murder in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom, and who then, by some alchemy the country has never fully accounted for, became the person your grandmother waves at on the television. I did not understand how one person held both of those facts at once. I wanted to. That is the only honest reason to spend three years inside another person's life.

The three years were not what I expected. I had assumed I would be writing about music, and I was, but I kept finding myself somewhere else: in the arithmetic of a single mother's kitchen in a flat city, in the transcripts of a murder trial, in the strange second life of a man who kept being told his moment had passed and kept declining to agree. I read the court record. I read the liner notes and the lawsuits. I listened again to the records I thought I knew and discovered I had been hearing them wrong — hearing the California ease and missing the discipline underneath it, the half-second of restraint that was the whole art. West Coast partisans had been telling me this for years. It took writing a book for me to believe them.

What I found, in the end, was not a redemption story, because redemption stories need a villain to redeem, and Snoop was never that simple. What I found was a man who made himself the exact opposite of the father who left him, who took a voice inherited from a Vietnam veteran he barely knew and turned it into the water an entire culture now swims in. A man who was present — for his sons, for two thousand kids on a youth football field, for a genre that kept trying to bury itself and kept finding him standing at the graveside, still rapping.

This book is my attempt to follow that voice from the flat city where it started to the stadium where it arrived. I came to it a skeptic and a partisan of the other coast. I leave it something closer to a witness. That is what the good subjects do to you. They make you set your loyalties down and look.

— Jamal Whitestone, Brooklyn

Chapter 1 · Long Beach, 1971

The city is flat. That is the first thing to understand about Long Beach, the first fact that shapes everything that follows. It is flat the way a table is flat, flat the way a drum is flat, flat the way the Pacific is flat when there is no wind. The land runs from the ocean inland without rising, without hills, without anything that might break a sightline or hide a thing from view. You can stand on one corner of Long Beach and see a long way. You can hear a car coming from blocks off. In the summer, when the heat sits on the asphalt and the palm trees throw narrow shadows, the whole city seems to hum at one low frequency, a frequency you can feel in the soles of your feet before you hear it in your ears.

On October 20, 1971, at a hospital on the east side of this flat city, a woman named Beverly Tate gave birth to a boy. She named him Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. The Jr. was for his stepfather, Calvin Broadus Sr., who gave the boy his first name and his last name and whose relationship to the household would not last. His biological father he would never know in any settled way: a man named Vernell Varnado, a Vietnam veteran and a singer, who had drifted out of the boy's life when he was three months old and who would reappear only at irregular intervals, never really being in it. By the time the boy was old enough to know what a father was supposed to be, his own had become a theoretical proposition. He had uncles. He had an older brother. He had a mother who worked and prayed and kept a roof up by force of will. He did not have a father in the sense the word implies.

Vernell Varnado was not an abstraction. He was a man with a history. He had served in Vietnam, one of the disproportionate number of Black American men who had been drafted in the middle years of the war, sent overseas to fight for a country that would not let them eat at the same lunch counters as white men, and returned to a country that had no idea what to do with them. He was also a singer. He had a voice. He could carry a melody. These two facts, the Vietnam service and the voice, would pass themselves through Beverly Tate and down into the child she was carrying in the fall of 1971. The voice was the gift. The absence was the price. Varnado left when Snoop was three months old. He would reappear in the boy's life at irregular intervals over the years, sometimes with a presence and sometimes without, but he was never a consistent fact the way a father is supposed to be a consistent fact. He was something closer to a rumor about himself.

Beverly dealt with the absence the way Black women in that situation in that era dealt with the absence, which was by not being defined by it. She found Calvin Broadus Sr., married him, gave the boy his first name and his last name and a stepfather who was for a while present, and then, when that too ended, she continued without. She was the center of gravity in that house. She pulled everything toward her: the boys, the bills, the church obligations, the day-to-day arithmetic of survival. She did it without making a show of how hard it was. The hardness was simply part of the weather, something you dressed for and went out into, not something you complained about.

What he had instead was Long Beach, and Long Beach was a particular place in a particular moment. In 1971, the city was still pretending to be a navy town. The Long Beach Naval Shipyard was still open, still employing tens of thousands of men to build and repair the ships that would carry the Cold War around the Pacific. Downtown had department stores. The Queen Mary had just been tied up at Pier J and turned into a hotel and a tourist attraction, an enormous ocean liner beached like a whale that somebody decided to make into a museum. There was a Disneyland feel to parts of the city, a pretense of suburban American completeness. But the pretense was thin. Underneath it, the old harbor economy was already dying. The jobs were going. The white families with the money were beginning the long drift out toward Orange County and the Inland Empire, leaving behind the neighborhoods they had built in the 1940s and 1950s for the people who could not afford to leave.

The east side of Long Beach, where Calvin Broadus Jr. would grow up, was one of those neighborhoods. It had the bones of a good working-class place. Small stucco houses with lawns in front. Streets named after states and trees. An elementary school within walking distance. A park with a baseball diamond. The infrastructure of the postwar American dream, built at the scale of a family that earned one steady income and needed a place to sleep. By 1971, the dream was turning into something else. The shipyard jobs were becoming retail jobs, and the retail jobs were becoming no jobs at all. The fathers who had held the neighborhood together were becoming absent fathers, and the absent fathers were becoming the fathers who had never been there in the first place. The crack cocaine epidemic was a decade away, but the conditions for it were already laid. The gangs that would define the east side in the 1980s (the Crips, the Bloods, the Rollin' 20s, the Insanes) were in their early forms, just starting to divide the streets into colored territories.

Beverly Tate raised her son in this. She was from McComb, Mississippi, originally, and she had come to California as a young woman in the great Black migration that had filled Los Angeles and the Bay Area and the flat cities of the southern coast. She brought with her the things a Mississippi woman brought to California in those years: the church, the food, the suspicion of white institutions, the knowledge that nothing comes easy, the refusal to act as if anything should. She sang in the choir. She worked. When Calvin Broadus Sr. left, she took in another husband for a while and then did without. She had three sons in the house and a set of rules and a Bible and not very much money, and she made it work the way Black mothers in Black neighborhoods in the 1970s made it work, which is to say without making a sound about the effort it took.

McComb, Mississippi, the town Beverly came from, is a small city in Pike County, in the southwestern corner of the state, a place that had been shaped and then reshaped by the cotton economy, by the civil rights movement, and by the subsequent collapse of the agriculture that had defined its social order. Beverly was part of the second great migration, the one that ran from the late 1940s through the 1970s and moved millions of Black Southerners out of states like Mississippi and Alabama and into the industrial cities of the North and West. California was the destination of choice for Mississippians moving west: the climate was better, the defense industries were hiring, and the Long Beach and Los Angeles areas had already developed substantial Black communities that could receive newcomers and help them find jobs and housing. Beverly came to California carrying Mississippi with her, not just the church and the cooking but the hard knowledge that the world outside your community was not designed for your success, that the institutions that were supposed to serve you often did not, and that the way you survived was by building what you needed yourself and protecting it.

Beverly made the house feel like something worth defending. She cooked every night. In a neighborhood where the economics were getting worse by the year and the future was looking narrower, what she controlled completely was the kitchen, and the kitchen was where the family gathered, and the kitchen smelled of what she had brought from Mississippi: her grandmother's way with greens, the spiced heat of her red beans, sweet cornbread that her sons would remember for the rest of their lives. The cooking was not a small thing. It was a claim against the world. It was evidence that the people in this house ate well, that the people in this house were cared for, that whatever was happening outside on the flat streets could not get inside and reduce them to the bare minimum. Beverly cooked and the boys ate and the eating was an act of faith: you were fed, you were here, you were going to be all right. This would show up, forty years later, in a cookbook with Snoop's face on the cover. The material was the same. The kitchen was always the kitchen.

The east side of Long Beach where she raised her sons ran from the area around Poly High down toward the harbor, bounded roughly by Atlantic Avenue on the west and the Los Angeles River on the east. Atlantic Avenue was the commercial spine of the neighborhood: barbershops, liquor stores, churches, beauty supply shops, fast food restaurants, the occasional record store. The streets that crossed Atlantic were named after states (Iowa, Nebraska, Idaho), as if the neighborhood's founders had been playing a geography game while laying out the grid. The houses were small and close together. The yards were small. The sidewalks were cracked in places from tree roots. In summer the neighborhood smelled of cut grass and car exhaust and the ozone smell of hot asphalt in the sun. In winter it barely got cold enough to notice. The weather was the one thing about Long Beach that was better than anywhere else, and everybody there knew it, and the knowledge was both a genuine comfort and a mild compensation for everything else the neighborhood lacked.

The nickname came early. Calvin was a skinny kid. Tall for his age, with long limbs and a long face and big ears and eyes that seemed always half-closed even when he was awake. His mother watched him lope around the living room one afternoon and said he looked like Snoopy, the beagle from the Peanuts comic strip, and the name stuck. Snoopy, then Snoop. By the time he was old enough to write his name on a school paper he was writing Snoop, and by the time he was old enough to understand what a name meant he understood that his was a gift from his mother and a description of how he moved through the world. He moved like a dog. Not the frantic way dogs move when they're excited, but the slow way dogs move when they're old and comfortable and the day is warm. Loose. Unhurried. Attentive without appearing to be.

The house on the east side was full of music. Beverly played gospel records. Her brothers played soul records. The radio in the kitchen was always on, tuned to the AM station that played R&B and the early years of what would become funk. Marvin Gaye. The Temptations. The Isley Brothers. Earth, Wind & Fire. Stevie Wonder's long run of masterpieces (Talking Book, Innervisions, Songs in the Key of Life) was happening in real time, and Snoop would remember hearing Stevie Wonder in the house before he remembered much else. His mother sang along. His uncles sang along. He sang along, in a small high voice, a voice that had not yet dropped into the instrument the world knows, still just a little boy's voice in 1975 and 1976 and 1977 trying to follow the melody of a Smokey Robinson song.

What gospel taught him first was not theology. It was phrasing. The way a gospel singer lays back on the phrase, lets the band move forward, and then completes the line in a rush that lands exactly on the bar. The way the voice slides from one note to the next instead of jumping. The way a song can repeat a single phrase six, seven, eight times and build meaning by accumulation rather than by statement. He absorbed all of this without knowing he was absorbing it. He learned to feel time the way Black American music teaches you to feel time: as something that has a give in it, a looseness, a flexibility, a place where you can fit your voice if you know how to listen.

By the time he was six or seven he was singing in church. The Golgotha Trinity Baptist Church in Long Beach took the children of its congregation and put them up front during the service, and Snoop Broadus stood up front and sang. He was not the best singer. That was not the point. The point was that he learned what it felt like to have people listen to him. He learned what a room does when one voice leads it. He learned that you can make grown people clap and cry and say the word Amen out loud, and that the way you do it is by being honest about what the song is asking for and not flinching. None of this was a career at that age. It was a Sunday.

What it was, in retrospect, was a rehearsal. The church taught him several things that school did not teach and the streets did not teach. It taught him that performance was permission. When you stood up to sing, the congregation gave you something it did not give people sitting down, which was its full attention, and that the full attention was a gift and also a responsibility. You could not waste that attention. You owed it something. You owed it your whole voice, your whole presence, your whole intention. If you held back, if you sang at half-capacity, if you got self-conscious and pulled away from the song, the attention would go elsewhere and the connection would break. You had to commit. You had to trust the song and trust your own voice enough to give everything. He was a child. He did not formulate it this way. But he felt it, in the way that a child feels things before he has the words for them, in the warmth of a room that was paying attention to him and giving back. The Golgotha Trinity Baptist Church in Long Beach was the first room that had ever paid attention to Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. It would not be the last.

On the weekdays, though, the neighborhood was pulling in another direction. Snoop had two brothers: Jerry, older, and Bing, younger. The three boys ran together, and when they did not run together Snoop ran with the boys on his block, and the boys on his block in the late 1970s and early 1980s were not being raised the way boys in white Long Beach were being raised. They were being raised to be ready for something. The something was never named, but it had a color, and the color, on the east side, was blue. Blue was the Crips. The Rollin' 20s Crips, in particular. The set whose territory included the streets where Snoop lived and played and walked to school. You did not have to join a gang to be in the orbit of one. You had to be a boy, and you had to live there. The rest would happen on its own.

He was not yet in that orbit. He was still a child. But he could feel the weight of it coming, the way a kid can feel a thunderstorm coming in the pressure of the air. His mother felt it too. She did what mothers did. She sent him to church. She kept him home at night when she could. She watched who came to the door. She raised her voice at him when she needed to and she never raised a hand when she did not. She was doing her part. But she was one woman, and Long Beach was a whole city, and the odds were what the odds were.

There was one more thing in the house, and it mattered. There was a tape deck. There were cassettes. And there was a radio that could pick up the Los Angeles stations, including the ones that in the late 1970s were starting to play something new from New York, something that had a name nobody on the west coast used yet except to shake their heads at. Rap. Hip-hop. In 1979 a record called "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugarhill Gang came on the radio and kids on Snoop's block sat around the stoop and listened to it and tried to memorize every word. It was four minutes (no, it was fifteen minutes) of a man talking in rhyme over a disco beat, and it was the funniest and most exciting thing any of them had ever heard. Snoop was seven years old. He memorized every word. When a grown-up in the house came in and laughed at him for rapping, he rapped louder.

He did not know yet that this was his life's work. He did not know anything yet. He was seven. But the flat city was humming at its low frequency, and the voices on the record were new, and his own voice was still a child's voice, and somewhere in the distance, not far away at all, in fact just a few miles up the 710 freeway, a young man named Andre Young was starting to figure out how to be a DJ. The components of the future were already in the room. Nobody had named them yet. That would take another ten years. But they were there, and the boy with the long loping walk and the nickname from the Peanuts strip was paying attention without knowing he was paying attention, which is the only way a child ever pays attention to anything that will matter later.

In the summer, when school was out, he would sit on the steps of the house with his brothers and the radio would play and the heat would settle in on the concrete and the city would hum its one low note. Cars would pass. Men would walk by. The old women of the block would sit on their own steps three houses down and fan themselves with church programs. From somewhere a few blocks over you could sometimes hear a siren, and sometimes you could hear music coming out of a passing car, and sometimes you could hear nothing at all except the distant sound of the freeway and the closer sound of a sprinkler hitting a lawn. This was his childhood. It would not last much longer. But while it lasted it was everything, and the boy was paying attention, and the flat city was teaching him how to listen.