Snoop Dogg on the set of his Da Game of Life short film in Los Angeles in July 1998.
IN 1993, THE CHAOS ENVELOPING AMERICA ARRIVED IN NEW, DISTINCTIVE WAYS.
In New York, a van parked beneath the North Tower of the World Trade Center exploded, killing six people and injuring more than one thousand others. A fifty-one-day standoff between the government and the Branch Davidians, led by David Koresh, ended with the death of six Davidians and four Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agents during a raid on the group’s Waco, Texas, compound. A subsequent fire on the grounds killed an additional seventy-six people. Rodney King, the unarmed black motorist whose beating was captured on video and broadcast around the world, testified at the federal trial of the four Los Angeles police officers accused of violating his civil rights. Officers Stacey Koon and Laurence Powell were each sentenced to thirty months in prison for violating King’s civil rights.
When William “Bill” Jefferson Clinton was sworn in as president, the world appeared ready for change. The start of Clinton’s presidency ended the twelve-year Ronald Reagan–George H. W. Bush era, which was defined, in part, by an explosion of inner-city drugs, violence, and incarceration. In an attempt to appeal to a new and diverse section of the American public, Clinton famously played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show in the run-up to his election. Thus, Clinton was able to play up being younger and more in touch with the people than the stiff, paternal vibes of Reagan and Bush. He was even labeled by some as “the first black president.” When he took office, Clinton was deemed more affable than his predecessors, which endeared him to a younger demographic, one that wanted change.
TIMELINE OF RAP
1993
Key Rap Releases
1. Snoop Doggy Dogg’s Doggystyle album
2. Wu-Tang Clan’s Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) album
3. Cypress Hill’s “Insane in the Brain” single
US President
Bill Clinton
Something Else
Oslo Peace Accords were signed.
The rap world was also going through a major change in 1993 thanks to Dr. Dre’s genre-shifting The Chronic. It replaced menacing gangster rap with a more relaxed, inviting incarnation of the genre, making it more palatable for a bigger audience.
Yet as dramatic as Dr. Dre’s The Chronic was sonically for gangster rap, it also delivered a number of other landmark achievements. It showed that, in less than a decade, Dr. Dre could move from one record company to another and make each one dramatically more successful than the one before it. He had done so with World Class Wreckin’ Cru in the mideighties, with Ruthless Records in the late eighties and early nineties, and with his own Death Row Records in 1992.
With The Chronic, Dr. Dre was now a better-selling artist than Eazy-E, N.W.A, and Ice Cube, more than doubling the sales of any artist he’d ever produced. The rapper-producer was now a bona fide star in his own right.
Yet The Chronic was also remarkable for the way in which Dr. Dre shared the spotlight. The Compton musical visionary introduced a wave of new artists and featured them on several songs each. Though the idea of featuring affiliated acts wasn’t new to rap. In fact, there were two main ways rappers were featured on one another’s songs prior to The Chronic.
The first way was for an artist to feature other members of their crews on songs with them. This type of collaboration gained steam in 1987 and 1988. Dana Dane and his producer, Hurby “Luv Bug” Azor, engaged in tag-team rhyming on “We Wanna Party,” a cut from the Brooklyn rapper’s gold-certified 1987 album, Dana Dane with Fame. Another early example was Marley Marl’s landmark 1988 single “The Symphony,” which featured Masta Ace, Craig G, Kool G Rap, and Big Daddy Kane, members of his Juice Crew stable of artists. “The Symphony” stands in rap lore as the first “posse cut” and is widely revered as the best by many rap scholars.
On the gangster rap side of things, in 1988 Eazy-E featured fellow N.W.A member MC Ren on “2 Hard Mutha’s” on his Eazy-Duz-It LP, while N.W.A featured the D.O.C. on “Parental Discretion Iz Advised,” a Straight Outta Compton cut. Dr. Dre and Yella produced both of these songs. Fellow Compton rap artist King Tee featured raps from his producer, DJ Pooh, on several cuts from his 1988 album, Act a Fool.
The other way rappers collaborated with other acts was to feature artists outside of their immediate circles on their material. This type of collaboration became popular in 1988 and 1989. Too $hort featured Rappin’ 4-Tay and Danger Zone on “Don’t Fight the Feelin’,” a song from his double-platinum album Life Is… Too $hort. Another early example arrived in 1989 when Big Daddy Kane featured Nice & Smooth on his “Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy,” which appeared on his gold It’s a Big Daddy Thing LP. A year later, Public Enemy featured Ice Cube and Big Daddy Kane on “Burn Hollywood Burn,” a single from their platinum Fear of a Black Planet album.
But these types of songs were still the exception rather than the rule, even though they were becoming increasingly popular by the time Dr. Dre released The Chronic in 1992. True, DJ Quik had taken things a step further by featuring protégés AMG and 2nd II None on a couple of songs each on his 1991 Quik Is the Name, but those were album cuts.
Then Dr. Dre changed the way rap albums are put together and artists are promoted. Dr. Dre put Snoop Dogg on more than half of The Chronic’s songs and, more importantly, on his singles, the biggest, most promoted songs on The Chronic, as well as the pre–The Chronic Dr. Dre single “Deep Cover.” By default, Snoop Dogg had a massive built-in audience. He had, indeed, become the hottest rapper in the world without having released an album of his own.
Creatively, Snoop Dogg felt free as he worked on his debut album. “I had no concerns of what I was supposed to be,” Snoop Dogg said. “It was carefree. I was back in the studio making some more music. This time, it’s my record. Same energy. Same everything. I don’t have an on/off switch, or a medium. I’ve got a ‘Go.’ My shit is just go, and that’s what it was. That’s why the transformation was so easy to go from The Chronic to my record. You never heard the same rhymes, the same styles. You never heard that, because I was an MC. I was lyrical, so when you load up, I’m ready to go. It wasn’t like I was like, ‘Oh. I’ve got to make this record better than The Chronic.’ That expectation wasn’t on my shoulders because I didn’t give a fuck.”
NATE DOGG: R&G (RHYTHM & GANGSTER)
Nate Dogg played a minimal role on Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, crooning on the outro of “Deeez Nuuuts.” The Long Beach singer also appeared on only one Doggystyle song, “Aint No Fun (If The Homies Cant Have None),” but that track became an underground favorite and set up Nate Dogg’s career. He sang like a gangster rapper and was one of the most prolific and in-demand singers in rap history. He released several solo albums and appeared on dozens of songs with everyone from Warren G and Dr. Dre to Eminem and Fabolous.
Dr. Dre (left) and Snoop Dogg created music in the early 1990s in a way Snoop likens to martial arts training.
As the most prominent collaborator on Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, Snoop Dogg got to work with a wide range of artists, including Daz Dillinger, Kurupt, Nate Dogg, RBX, and the Lady of Rage. Here, Snoop Dogg likens their recording sessions to martial-arts training.
“Having all those artists on all those records, it was like a karate movie,” Snoop Dogg said. “Imagine Bruce Lee, Chow Yun-fat, Jet Li, Jim Kelly, Ong-Bak, Bolo [Yeung], and [the] Five Fingers of Death, all these badass karate motherfuckas all in one motion picture fighting to get on one song. There’s only three, sometimes four, verses on a song, and I just named about eight muthafuckas, so when you’ve got that kind of sorcery going down, steel sharpening steel and the best swinging and with no egos and no attitudes, you’re in a battle.
“I come from battle rap, so I wanted the best muthafuckas around me, and when I was able to bring Kurupt, bring RBX, that was me bringing muthafuckas that was better than me or who were pushing me to a level where I had to be better than them. It forced us all to give our all when Dre was giving us the best music in the world to complement that with the best lyrics, the best flow, the best everything.
“[Dr. Dre’s The Chronic single] ‘Let Me Ride,’ for example, RBX wrote the first verse. Snoop Dogg wrote the second verse. RBX and Snoop wrote the third verse together. But you wouldn’t know that if I didn’t tell you that. That’s because me and RBX, we’re cousins. We battled our whole life, and I could never beat him. But when we’re battling on this song, whose verse is the dopest? It don’t matter. Dre won a Grammy for it, so we both win. Despite me never winning a Grammy with seventeen nominations [as of the writing of this book], that moment right there solidifies that my karate is black-belt material.”
But the run-up to the album was clouded with uncertainty regarding Snoop Dogg’s life and career. On August 25, 1993, Snoop Dogg was allegedly driving a Jeep in the Palms section on the West Side of Los Angeles. The people in the Jeep purportedly got into a heated exchange with Philip Woldemariam, a gang member. After originally leaving the scene, the Jeep later returned. A passenger in the Jeep then shot Woldemariam, and the twenty-five-year-old died soon thereafter.
Snoop Dogg turned himself in to police on September 4, a day after he presented the winner of the rhythm-and-blues category of the MTV Video Music Awards. Snoop Dogg and his passengers told police that Woldemariam approached their vehicle brandishing a firearm, which led one of Snoop Dogg’s passengers, who told police that he was the rapper’s bodyguard, to fire several shots at Woldemariam. According to Detective David Straky, other witnesses said Woldemariam did not have a gun. David Kenner, Snoop Dogg’s attorney, said that Woldemariam had been threatening the rapper for three months prior to the shooting.
“This shooting was the result of self-defense following a series of assaults and threats against Snoop,” Kenner said.
Snoop Dogg was released on bail on September 4 under charges of first- and second-degree murder. He was eventually found not guilty.
DAVID KENNER
David Kenner was longtime legal counsel to Suge Knight and Death Row Records, representing both for several years and for several high-profile cases. The criminal defense attorney handled Snoop Dogg’s murder case and became Death Row’s main lawyer in 1994. Among the other cases he handled was a 1996 conflict of interest case for Knight. The label executive signed the teenage daughter of prosecutor Lawrence M. Longo to a Death Row Records recording contract while Longo was supervising Knight’s probation.
A crack addict who was also smoking sherm, Darryl “Joe Cool” Daniel was encouraged by his cousin Snoop Dogg to get off drugs. Snoop Dogg wanted his cousin to be sober, and he also said he had an assignment for Joe Cool. He wanted him to draw the cover art for his Doggystyle album. After discussing Dr. Dre’s concept for the cover with Snoop Dogg, Joe Cool delivered the now iconic artwork.
Joe Cool remembers Snoop Dogg discussing the cover during an interview on The Arsenio Hall Show. “Arsenio said, ‘Who drew this?’” Joe Cool said. “And Snoop said, ‘My cousin Joe Cool did that.’ When he said that, I almost passed out. I was there with him when he did the interview. I was there with him. I’m like, ‘Oh wow.’ Everybody was clapping and shit. ‘Woo woo,’ all that, like damn. They clapping ’cause I drew this shit. He said, ‘My cousin drew that, you know, my cousin Darryl “Joe Cool.”’ I’m like, ‘Wow. He said my name to Arsenio.’”
Legal problems notwithstanding, Snoop Dogg was riding high on the success of The Chronic. He established himself as a solo star with the October 1993 release of “Who Am I (What’s My Name)?” The single was as much a coronation of Snoop Dogg as the new face of rap in general and gangster rap specifically as it was a celebration of Snoop Dogg himself. The song’s hook featured a chorus of people singing “Snoop Doggy Dogg” similar in tone and feel to George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog,” which “Who Am I (What’s My Name)?” sampled. So although the Long Beach, California, rapper started off his first verse talking about how he was selling cocaine, how he was willing to put money in on buying weed with his friends, and why he wasn’t hesitant to shoot someone, the song’s up-tempo, funky vibe made it all sound deliberately fun and celebratory.
Like “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang” and “Let Me Ride” before it, “Who Am I (What’s My Name)?” was a new chapter in gangster rap. It was feel-good gangster rap starring Snoop Dogg. Even though the sound and feel of the music played a major role in how the music was received, Snoop Dogg’s voice, delivery, and demeanor also played a huge part in his popularity.
Schoolly D, Ice-T, and the members of N.W.A were often brash and aggressive, typically rapping with what sounded like a snarl. By contrast, Snoop Dogg delivered his rhymes in a calm, laid-back, and comforting manner chock-full of charisma and with only a smidgeon of menace. It was as if a friend had pulled you to the side to have a private conservation. “Snoop brought the smooth gangster style to the game,” longtime collaborator Warren G said.
With “Who Am I (What’s My Name)?” taking the music world by storm and Snoop Dogg facing murder charges, there was significant buzz for his November 1993 release, Doggystyle.
“Snoop Dogg is an amazing artist, and his album is by far the most anticipated rap album in years,” said Jon Shecter, then-editor of the Source magazine, the leading rap magazine at the time. According to Shecter, Snoop Dogg being charged with murder would “only make the record blow up even bigger because it will generate even more curiosity among those who have never heard of him.”
Consumers showed just how much they wanted Doggystyle. The Dr. Dre–produced album made history by being the first debut album to enter the Billboard charts at No. 1. Despite never having released an album, Snoop Dogg had the bestselling album in music the first week Doggystyle arrived in stores.
Doggystyle also earned another far more dubious distinction. It was the first time that an artist had been indicted for murder while he had the No. 1 album in the country. Snoop Dogg’s popularity and his legal status led Newsweek to put him on the cover of its November 29, 1993, issue with the headline: “when is rap 2 violent?”
Even as Doggystyle dominated the album charts and the pop-culture consciousness, “Who Am I (What’s My Name)?” was also enjoying tremendous success. The Dr. Dre–produced song hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Rap Songs chart and No. 8 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart the week of January 1, 1994, meaning it was the eighth most popular song that week in any genre of music, not just rap.
Growing up in Long Beach, California, Snoop Dogg studied the work of the members of N.W.A, who hailed from nearby Compton. When Snoop Dogg started making his own music with N.W.A’s sonic architect Dr. Dre, he wanted to incorporate a key component of what he loved about the group’s material.
“Remember, we was fans of N.W.A,” Snoop Dogg said. “So anything we seen or heard them do, we’d always say, ‘Dre. How come we ain’t got no commercials?’ That’s when we came up with [The Chronic skit] ‘The $20 Sack Pyramid.’ Me, D.O.C., and Warren G, we was like, ‘Fuck it. Let’s come up with our own The $25,000 Pyramid,’ because that was a show that we all liked and we all knew it to be funny if we put the right shit in there.
“Then on the [The Chronic skit] ‘Deeez Nuuuts,’ we was doing that shit all the time. A nigga would call, and we’d do that. Then when it came to my record, I was into the pimpin’, so I took a scene from The Mack where a nigga said, ‘Nigga, your bitch chose me.’ It was certain shit that was fly to me that I was able to get off on my records and there was certain shit that was funny and fly to me that I was able to get off on Dre’s record.
“With [the intro to The Chronic song] ‘Lil’ Ghetto Boy,’ I had just gotten out of jail, and me and my homie [and fellow Long Beach rapper Lil] 1/2 Dead, it was like a real story to me, but it was like I was able to get this off on [Dr. Dre’s] shit and have fun, so when it was time for me to do my record, naturally [Dr. Dre] was going to give me the same energy, ’cause I had gave him all of mine.
“Adding that humor showed that we were human, that we had a funny side. We had a serious side, a hard side. Motherfuckas always say that Snoop Dogg could have been a comedian if he wouldn’t have been a rapper. That’s some of the elements we’re able to show through the music we make, that we can have fun while keeping it gangster.”
As “Who Am I (What’s My Name)?” was dominating the charts, Snoop Dogg released his second mammoth Doggystyle single, “Gin and Juice.” Arriving in January 1994, the song became the first smash party gangster rap single. On the cut, Snoop Dogg rapped about having a house party because his parents weren’t home, smoking weed, and sipping on gin and juice. It was the life of a gangster—sans the violence—an oasis (of sorts) amid the chaos consuming the content of virtually every other gangster rap song up to that point.
The song’s video also added some levity to the visual side of gangster rap. Prior to the party in the video, Snoop Dogg gets his hair done, navigates a fight between two girls, and attends a drive-in movie with Tha Dogg Pound rap crew. The party goes a little too well and swells to the front yard as his parents return. Off-screen, his father fires some gunshots, and people start streaming out of the house, including several topless girls.
“When you load up, I’m ready to go. It wasn’t like I was like, ‘Oh. I’ve got to make this record better than The Chronic.’ That expectation wasn’t on my shoulders because I didn’t give a fuck.”
SNOOP DOGG
Whereas most gangster rap videos that came before “Gin and Juice” showed the dark side of the hood, this clip showed an abundance of drinking, partying, sex, games, and dancing before Snoop Dogg’s parents showed up. It looked as if it could have been a house/college frat party in any corner of the country.
Snoop Dogg was reaching a key demographic, the casual (often) white rap fan with plenty of disposable income. By 1994, rap music had been recorded for fifteen years, and some of the stigma surrounding the genre was starting to wear off. Snoop was a perfect blend of street, cool, and fun, a combination that appealed to a universal audience. He wasn’t viewed as menacing or anti-white like other gangster rappers, though his lyrics suggested he should definitely be looked at as the former. Snoop Dogg was just plain cool.
“What makes him so special is that he’s just so personable,” the D.O.C. said. “Not to mention the guy’s got swag out of this world.”
“Snoop is like your cool nephew or your cool uncle,” DJ Quik said. “He’s like the one that, if a fight started, he ain’t even gonna flinch. He’s got some Bruce Lee shit going on with him, but he’s like a pimp, too.”
Snoop Dogg was indeed more complicated than his persona made him seem, and there were other parts of himself that he wanted to share with the world. With “Doggy Dogg World,” for instance, Snoop Dogg did what Dr. Dre had done for him: showcased his friends on one of his major songs. Fellow Death Row Records artists Tha Dogg Pound (Daz and Kurupt) were featured on the tune, which also included crooning from seventies R&B group the Dramatics. The silky smooth song was a showcase for Snoop Dogg to diss both people biting his style and no-good women. For their part, Kurupt and Daz alternated between trumpeting their gangster ways, disparaging women, and indulging in chronic.
The song’s video, though, provided many young rap fans their first look at the pimp and player lifestyle previously memorialized by the blaxploitation films of the seventies and eighties. Snoop Dogg, Daz, Kurupt, and the Dramatics perform in the video at a throwback nightclub modeled to look like a seventies hotspot. The stars of the video wore flamboyant suits, flashy brimmed hats, and other seventies regalia. Snoop Dogg even adopted another alias for his “character,” billing himself in the video as Silky Slim, a player who always has five women on his arm. Kurupt doubled as Small Change Willy from Philly, while Daz was Sugafoot, and Dr. Dre was Fortieth St. Black.
The rest of the video was equally retro. Actor Antonio Fargas was cast as Huggy Bear, reprising his role as the flashy-dressed character from the popular seventies show Starsky & Hutch, while blaxploitation star Fred Williamson appeared as the Hammer, a nod to his career as a hard-hitting professional football player and to the title character of his 1972 film Hammer. Other black seventies film and television stars, including Rudy Ray Moore (Dolemite), Pam Grier (Foxy Brown), Max Julien (The Mack), and Ron O’Neal (Super Fly), also made cameos in the video.
Too $hort, Ice-T, Ice Cube, and others had rapped about pimps, players, and macks, but given Snoop Dogg’s visibility at the time the video for “Doggy Dogg World” was released, it was a watershed moment for the popularity of the pimp and player lifestyle that Snoop Dogg had grown up admiring.
“It was the beautiful women, the outfits,” Snoop Dogg said. “The way they dress, the cars, the money. It was just the whole persona and knowing you look good and when you look good, it feels good to look good. It makes you feel a little better.
“It’s a way of life and it’s a statement,” Snoop Dogg added. “When you can get fly with yourself and have some women behind you to accessorize that, make it look real good and play it out to the fullest, that’s a good feeling. A lot of us rappers came up in an era where we’ve seen it and we wanted to do it. Now that we can do it, some of us will do it.”
Beyond shifting the vibe and the look of rap in general and gangster rap specifically, with Doggystyle Snoop Dogg made something popular that was once taboo. Prior to Doggystyle, in rap, “biting”—or using someone else’s material, style, or lyrics—was among the worst things a rapper could do. A rapper was supposed to strive to be original, different, and distinctive at all times.
However, Snoop Dogg became all those things when he went against the grain and covered Doug E. Fresh and MC Ricky D’s landmark 1985 single “La Di Da Di.” For Doggystyle’s “Lodi Dodi,” Snoop Dogg slightly reworked the original tale and applied it to himself, updating the cologne from Polo to Cool Water and the shoes from Bally to Chucks, among other things.
Snoop Dogg knew covering a song might be criticized by the rap community and others, so he addressed any doubters in the song’s intro and referred to MC Ricky D as Slick Rick, the moniker the rapper used after recording “La Di Da Di.”
Gotta say what’s up to my nigga Slick Rick / For those that don’t like it, eat a dick / But for those who with me, sing that shit
Unlike other rappers, who were seemingly obsessed with all things new, Snoop Dogg felt it was important for rappers to acknowledge their musical forefathers.
“We have to be more leaders to show homage, to hug each other and to say to each other, ‘Yo, your shit’s dope, cuz. You’re bad,’” Snoop Dogg said. “That’s always been my thing. . . . I never had that problem of telling a nigga that they was dope. It didn’t bother me because I felt like, in the game that we’re playing, if I play at my highest level, y’all can’t fuck with me, so it don’t hurt me to give you a compliment. And I like playing with niggas that push me. I started off with Dr. Dre and the D.O.C., the baddest motherfuckers in the game. There wasn’t nothing better than that when I got in the game, besides Ice Cube.”
With its initial buzz and the additional push from radio and videos, Doggystyle became one of the bestselling rap albums of all time, moving more than four million copies in less than seven months. It also stands as a watershed rap release.
“Snoop is classic,” said the Game, the Compton rapper and fellow Dr. Dre protégé whose debut album was released more than eleven years after Snoop Dogg’s debut project. “Doggystyle, that was the only album he needed to solidify him in West Coast gangster rap forever.”
Given Doggystyle’s popularity, Snoop Dogg was an in-demand performer at music industry events, including awards shows. The rapper blurred the lines between art and reality when he performed the Doggystyle song “Murder Was the Case” at the September 8, 1994, MTV Video Music Awards. The song begins with Snoop Dogg getting shot. As he lies on the ground bleeding to death, he makes a deal with the Devil so that he can see the birth of his child. He wakes up from a coma, lives like a baller, and buys his mother a Mercedes-Benz and his girlfriend a Jaguar. But then he gets incarcerated and sees one of his friends get stabbed in the neck.
When Brooklyn rapper Masta Ace appeared on Marley Marl’s 1988 landmark posse cut “The Symphony,” a high-energy song with top-tier lyricism from Big Daddy Kane, Kool G Rap, and Craig G, being aligned with established rap figures seemed to have his career on a fast track to success.
But when labelmate and comedic rapper Biz Markie was a no-show to a subsequent recording session, Masta Ace decided to impersonate Biz Markie on his “Me and the Biz” single, the first release from Masta Ace’s debut album, 1990’s Take a Look Around. The song was panned and Masta Ace caught a lot of flak for what people perceived to be a novelty record. While much of the rest of Take a Look Around was simmering with insightful social commentary, strong storytelling, and impressive wordplay, it failed to gain much commercial traction.
The rap world had changed dramatically as Masta Ace prepared to work on his second album. N.W.A had become a dominant force with a far-reaching influence. “It wasn’t just West Coast rap, because New York was on that, too,” Masta Ace said. “Dudes [in New York] were rhyming about wearing Timberlands, drinking forties, guns, and just taking it to this real negative direction.
“They [gangster rap albums] were being purchased in places in America you would have never thought people were listening to this stuff,” Masta Ace continued. “The middle of America, the red states, the suburbs of America, all these white kids were growing up listening to this and maybe didn’t know anything about Boogie Down Productions or Run-DMC or anything that came before it, but they gravitated to this music and that kind of became the prevailing sound of what people associated with hip-hop music, even though there was a lot more to hip-hop music. But as soon as it crossed into the living rooms of America, the white living rooms of America, it turned into this other phenomenon, and it kind of took over for a long period of time.”
With the rap world evolving, Masta Ace changed creative course with his own material.
“I wanted to come back and do the hardest album I could do,” Masta Ace said. “I looked at the landscape and I said that, ‘It appears that people probably think the only way to do a super-hard album is to rap about gangster stuff or guns, rap about drinking and smoking and partying, and shooting people that get in your way.’ My goal was to make the hardest album I could do without falling into any of those typical patterns that I felt every other artist was doing at the time.”
Flanked by a new crew of artists, he returned rechristened as the leader of Masta Ace Incorporated. The group’s 1993 album, SlaughtaHouse, took aim at hardcore rap and the artists who espoused violence for the sake of violence, as well as the companies who clamored for that type of material. The album is a stark look at the impact violence and violent imagery was having on rap consumers and the communities in which they lived. “A Walk Thru The Valley” features Ace wondering what goes through the mind of a black man when he’s about to shoot another black man, while on “Late Model Sedan,” he laments feeling like he needs to carry a gun, saying that he ought to be safe in a black neighborhood. The title track features material from faux rappers “MC Negro” and “Ignant MC,” who are celebrating their imaginary Brains on the Sidewalk album.
“That was really the hardest, most underground, most grimiest record that I’ve done,” Masta Ace said. “I went out of my way on that album to point out that I didn’t have a gun, that I wasn’t smoking weed, I wasn’t drinking forties, but that this was hardcore hip-hop.”
At the end of his “Murder Was the Case” performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, Snoop Dogg said, “I’m innocent. I’m innocent,” which is not on the album version of the song and was taken as commentary about his ongoing murder case.
The following month, Death Row Records also took the innovative step (in the rap world, at least) of releasing a Murder Was the Case short film and soundtrack. Rock acts such as the Beatles and the Monkees starred in their own feature films in the sixties, but rappers had yet to have similar productions. At eighteen minutes long, Murder Was the Case closely followed the storyline of the song. A remixed version of the cut appeared on the soundtrack.
“I was always with trying different shit,” Snoop Dogg said. “Even when I tried ‘Murder Was the Case,’ that was me wanting to make a song about actually visualizing death and being able to come back from that, just having a crazy thought in my head and wanting to try that.”
The Murder Was the Case soundtrack became the third consecutive blockbuster release for Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Death Row Records. The soundtrack featured several notable tracks. Most prominent was “Natural Born Killaz,” which reunited Dr. Dre and Ice Cube. It was the first time the two rappers had worked on or appeared on a song together since Ice Cube left Ruthless Records five years prior.
THA DOGG POUND: DOGG FOOD FOR THOUGHT
After being showcased alongside Daz and Kurupt on Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, Snoop Dogg kept Tha Dogg Pound members and the rest of the Death Row Records roster in the mix on Doggystyle. Daz and Kurupt were key players on the LP, appearing on “Doggy Dogg World,” among other cuts. Daz also contributed backing vocals on “Gin and Juice” and “Murder Was the Case,” while Kurupt appeared on fan favorite “Aint No Fun (If The Homies Cant Have None)” with Nate Dogg and Warren G.
The soundtrack also featured Tha Dogg Pound’s “What Would U Do?” The propulsive first cut from Daz and Kurupt as a standalone entity established them as a duo to watch. The song also gained additional exposure from its inclusion on the soundtrack for Oliver Stone’s 1994 film Natural Born Killers, which starred Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis as a pair of serial murderers who are glorified by the media as they carry out their crimes and try to evade capture by the police.
DJ Quik’s freshly minted relationship with Death Row Records was also showcased on the Murder Was the Case soundtrack. He was being managed by Death Row co-owner Suge Knight at the time, and his “Dollars & Sense” song was featured on the collection. On this track, DJ Quik dissed Compton’s Most Wanted rapper MC Eiht and made bold declarations of his membership in the Tree Top Pirus, a Compton-based Bloods gang. From his disses of MC Eiht, which included saying he dropped the g from his name because he wasn’t a G (gangster), to his flaunting his gang ties and his affiliation with Death Row Records, DJ Quik created waves with “Dollars & Sense.”
With the attention Murder Was the Case was generating, it became a brisk seller, moving more than two million units in its first two months in stores and another million over the next six months.
But while gangbanging on wax was proving to be incredibly profitable, gang-banging in the streets was becoming an epidemic that was spreading beyond Los Angeles to other major cities throughout the country.