Music
Snoop-Dogg
Kyle Horimoto (Stanford Center for Technology & Innovation,
April-September 2009, U.S.A.)
It’s hard to make it big in the music industry. Many of the music world’s biggest stars used money they already had to propel themselves to the top. The more remarkable ones, though, rose to the top from nothing. Cordozar Calvin Broadus, better known by his nickname Snoop Dogg, is a prime example of these artists.
Snoop grew up in a very poor area of Long Beach, California. Often his father would abandon the family, leaving Snoop to fend for himself. Since his family was often absent from his life, he became part of the Rollin 20 Crips gang in the Eastside of Long Beach. The Crips, infamous for their prominent drug dealing and violence, brought Snoop into a dangerous world where a small dispute with a rival gang could result in a huge brawl, possibly even a gunfight.
From http://www.clubwallpaper.
jp/2010/10/snoop-dogg-f253.html
Although Snoop had a strong sense of camaraderie with his fellow gangsters, he was dirt poor and lived each day with the knowledge that a rival gang could kill him for next to no reason. How could he possibly rise from these conditions to fame and fortune in the music world?
Snoop was always musically inclined, singing in his church’s choir in his childhood and freestyle rapping through his teenage years. In 1992, rap legend Dr. Dre heard a tape that he had recorded, and this would serve to be the stepping-stone for Snoop’s entire career. Dr. Dre, widely regarded as the most influential gangster rapper of all time, took Snoop as his prote´ge´. Dre and his close friends helped Snoop train his raw rapping ability into more structured verses, hooks, and choruses.
One would suspect that for a very poor person to become a big star in the rich music industry, he would have to hide his past self to some extent in order to appear more acceptable to the public. However, Snoop’s rise to fame came when he rapped about where he came from. The primary theme of his first album, Doggystyle, was that Snoop was a gangster. This came as a big contrast to conventional music. Most of the music at the time told of stories, experiences, love, and various ideals. Snoop, on the other hand, rapped about who he was and where he came from, explicitly mentioning taboo subjects such as his drug use and refusing to euphemize any subjects not normally broached.
Snoop’s success continued as he recorded more albums, and he began to gain a sense of authenticity and reverence for his rise to success from the ghetto of Long Beach.However, despite the fact that he was beginning to earn millions of dollars, he continued to claim his authenticity and links to his roots. In his song Wrong Way, for instance, he states, “I don’t want anybody to get the wrong idea about me. I’ve got nothing to hide ― I want the world to see I’m a gangster.” Nearly 20 years after he released his first album, Snoop is still today one of the music world’s most popular artists, ironically gaining his fame for just being himself, a poor man from the Eastside of Long Beach.
