The Long Game

Doggystyle arrived in November 1993, and by then the argument was already settled. The verses Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. cut in 1992, on Deep Cover and on The Chronic, had put him on every major rap critic's year-end list before he had released a solo record of his own. Dr. Dre had found him rapping over an instrumental that Warren G handed across. Two years before that, the three of them, Broadus, Warren G and his cousin Nate Dogg, had recorded together as the trio 213.

1993 carried the other thing too. He was charged with first-degree murder over the August killing of Philip Woldemariam, and he had not yet turned twenty-three. The acquittal came in February 1996. He had grown up in Long Beach, California, the second of three sons of a single mother, Beverly Tate, who called him Snoopy because he looked like the Peanuts character; he was born there on October 20, 1971.

Jamal Whitestone's biography traces the arc through the Long Beach childhood and the Rollin 20s Crip set membership, the Death Row years and the 1993 Doggystyle and the 1996 Tha Doggfather, the No Limit signing with Master P in 1998, the commercial recovery of No Limit Top Dogg, Tha Last Meal and Paid Tha Cost to Be Da Boss across 1999 to 2001, the Pharrell collaboration Drop It Like It's Hot in 2004, the eight-month run of Snoop Dogg's Father Hood, Martha & Snoop's Potluck Dinner Party with Martha Stewart, the FaZe Clan board seat in 2022, the NBC pre-game host role at the 2024 Paris Olympics, and the long years at the Inglewood family compound.

Two careers sit inside one life. The first belongs to a Long Beach Crip teenager whose Death Row debut remade what mainstream American popular music sounded like. The second has run thirty years, and it made him one of the most ubiquitous American celebrities of the 2020s.