Snoop Doggy Dogg: A ‘Style’ All His Own

SNOOP DOGGY DOGG

“Doggy Style”

Death Row/Interscope

* * * 1/2

This is his very first album, but at this point Snoop Doggy Dogg may be the most famous rapper in the world. He has been on the cover of every music publication worth its ink, his escapades (some nefarious) are notorious, and his new video has been the most-requested on MTV for the last few weeks, despite the fact that he had not so much as a single out.

The much-delayed “Doggy Style”--the most anticipated rap album in history for nearly two-thirds of the year--delivers. Snoop’s rhymes may not be especially clever, at least not compared to Ice Cube’s or Chuck D.’s; his virtuosity is nothing like LL Cool J’s or the D.O.C.’s, but no rapper has ever occupied a beat the way Snoop does, sliding around corners, lounging on the syncopations, slipping into the cracks and crevices of the grooves.

On “What’s My Name?,” Snoop raps over bits and echoes of half a dozen George Clinton songs filtered and pumped and rolled into a ball that sounds quite unlike anything P-Funk ever did but is inseparable from it, and he combines strains of every rap he did on Dr. Dre’s album into something else altogether, postmodernism made flesh. Here is possibly the first post-mortem hip-hop song in history, spookily rapped from the wrong side of a drive-by shooting.

And Dre’s production takes hip-hop to another level, organic yet relentless, the air alive with sleigh bells, sighs, countermelodies, wisps of Temptations-style backing vocals and low-mixed call-and-response that seems to float in from the ether, as if all the world were an old soul song: one cut even features soul-chestnut backup from the Dramatics, with the only possible lyrics consisting of the words “Snoop Doggy Dogg.” Awesome.

New albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor) to four (excellent).