An American Success Story, Gangsta-Style

“I can’t think of a better way to get into training for the music business,” rap star Snoop Dogg says in this as-told-to autobiography, “than to be selling dope on a street corner in broad daylight,” as he was doing in his native Long Beach at age 16.

Both enterprises, he says, force you to “keep your pimp hand strong, just to survive,” and though Snoop now claims to be on a mission from God to “increase the peace, spread the music, educate and elevate,” he can’t conceal his ambivalence. Like winners in other Darwinian struggles, he’s too proud of his exploits in the gangsta life to reject it altogether.

Snoop’s story, eloquently told (for a rapper, after all, is a poet) and smoothly assembled by Davin Seay (though much of it in language that can’t be quoted in a family newspaper), poses as an outsider’s manifesto. In truth, it’s a classic American success story:

Fatherless inner-city child, born Calvin Broadus, had sex at 12, drank and smoked “chronic,” got decent grades but barely completed high school, joined the Crips, peddled crack, was an ex-con at 20--then discovered he had a talent, found energy and confidence inside himself to develop it, and became world famous at 21 with his album “Doggystyle,” produced by the legendary Dr. Dre of Death Row Records.

Quite a ride, and it was only beginning. “Being famous isn’t about finally living your life the way you always imagined it was going to be,” Snoop says. “It’s about living some other life entirely.”

Within a year he was accused of murder in the Aug. 25, 1993, slaying of Philip “Little Smooth” Woldemariam by Snoop’s bodyguard, McKinley “Malik” Lee. The authorities, he alleges, had no real case but filed one anyway out of post-riot paranoia, and kept him under threat of life in prison until his acquittal three years later.

“A man that’s got to defend himself has already lost his self-respect,” Snoop insists. “It’s not up to me to justify gangsta rap, ghetto life or gang warfare. I’m not interested in making a case for my innocence.” Then he proceeds to do exactly that. Which isn’t to contradict Snoop’s assertion that he’s telling the truth and nothing but. What could be more natural than ambivalence on the part of someone who has experienced such extremes of fortune?

Consider his views of white people. Snoop says that “underneath the skin we’re all the same,” but immediately adds: “The difference between them and us is sometimes so wide that we might as well be a different animal.” Beneficiaries of racism, whites have lost their edge, he opines; they wait for African Americans to create a culture for them, then rip it off.

That said, though, Snoop tells how at his concerts in Scandinavia, the audiences are “an ocean of pale faces, blue eyes and blond hair,” kids able to “relate to hip-hop as strong as anybody that’s as black as I am.” Why? Because hip-hop is about “being real,” he says, and anyone can relate to that. “It doesn’t matter what color you are.” He’s come full circle.

Similarly, Snoop’s religious convictions, his love for his family, his friendship with doomed fellow rapper Tupac Shakur, go together with cold-blooded ambition and a bristling attitude. He couldn’t have succeeded without any of these, he recognizes--though the exact way in which they mixed in him, and not in so many other wannabes, remains elusive. Every success story, at bottom, is a mystery.