SNOOP DOGG

Da Game Is To Be Sold, Not To Be Told (No Limit)

WITH HIS former label Death Row a heap of smoking rubble, his record sales in ruins, and his mentor Suge Knight doing ten to twelve in the big house, Snoop Doggy Dogg has gone for as much of a chameleonic reinvention as somebody like him is capable of.

Enter, stage left, a new svengali (the imaginatively-named Percy “Master P” Miller), a new label (No Limit Records) and a new name (Snoop Dogg), a transformation which provides the crucial impetus behind Da Game Is To Be Sold, Not To Be Told. Although they’re unknown over here, the Louisiana-based No Limit Records stable are in the process of taking over the US rap world, usurping the Wu-Tang mob and mopping up the mess left behind by Death Row.

Despite having a title that most of us won’t reach the end of without hailing a cab, Da Game . . . represents something of a rebirth for the man who is arguably rap’s last remaining rock star (if you know what I mean). Musically, it’s a huge improvement on Tha Doggfather, it rolls and slides like a coiled panther, like a cobra smeared in slick oil.

‘Show Me Love’, remorselessly slow andmethodical, makes brilliant use of a one-note piano riff where someone like Puff Daddy would have either wheeled in the string section or used that Marvin Gaye sample again, while ‘Pay For P . . .’ updates Barry White’s bloated, glistening blueprint in quicksilver style. Another outstanding moment is ‘Slow Down’, basically a cover of Loose Ends’ 1984 hit set to a hip-hop backing.

There are still plenty of nauseating elements present in Da Game . . . such as Snoop’s contemptuous, Loadsamoney-like attitude to the black poor (‘Hoes, Money & Clout’) and his seemingly unquenchable sexism (‘Gin & Juice II’, ‘DOGs Get Lonely 2’, ‘Hustle & Ball’). And that’s before he succumbs to the melancholia-mania which has ruined many a rap record in the past, on ‘See Ya When I Get There’. It’s not a cover of Coolio’s atrocity from last year, but it’s nearly as bad, which is saying something: all screeching synths and condolence card sentiments while, in the background, a Tupac-alike rants charmlessly about “all my niggas”.

For once, though, the good bits outweight the useless bits on a Dogg record. Snoop is a sleazeball, and deep down, he knows it. That’s why he has made his third album the oiliest, slimiest, sleaziest, most effulgent, most oleaginous piece of work that he could manage. And, for frighteningly long stretches, it works.

Jonathan O’Brien