Are Snoop Dogg and Nate Dogg related?
Snoop Dogg and Nate Dogg appeared on a lot of the same songs together, and they each adopted the “Dogg” moniker as part of their public personas. But their bond went deeper than that—they were family.
Hip-hop can be a close-knit circle, with plenty of rappers being related to each other. RZA, GZA and the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard of the Wu Tang Clan are cousins, as are Q-Tip and Consequence of A Tribe Called Quest fame. Dr Dre and Warren G are step brothers, while, in terms of the newer generation of hip-hop stars, Kendrick Lamar is the big cousin of Baby Keem. Family ties within the hip-hop community remains a common feature.
Snoop and Nate Dogg were cousins, too, their shared musical careers underpinned by this deeper family connection. They were both born in Long Beach, California, with Nate being the older of the two, born in 1969, with Snoop following in ’71.
When he was 17, Nate dropped out of school and ended up joining the military. He remained in service for three years, before being discharged in 1989. Snoop, on the other hand, was getting into trouble around this period.
As a teenager, Snoop had started getting caught up in a life of crime. In ’89, the same year as Nate left the military, he got caught in possession of cocaine and was arrested and spent a period in jail.
But when Snoop got out of jail, he linked up with his cousin Nate Dogg, Nate’s cousin Lil’ ½ Dead, as well as their friend Warren G. They started practicing their rapping together, and Snoop, Nate and Warren later formed the group 213. That name came from Long Beach’s telephone area code at the time.
The young group of rappers started to record music onto tapes, often working in the back of a record store. This was the VIP Record Store in Long Beach, which, in 2015, Warren G spoke about in an interview with Passion of the Weiss.
“VIP Record Store was somewhere the whole neighborhood would go to,” Warren recalled. “It was our hang-out spot and then we found out they had a little studio in the back so we were there all the time trying to do demos in there. They would let us come back there sometimes, mainly just Snoop though, but it was a landmark where everyone would kick it.”
While the group used to work a lot out of VIP, 213 apparently recorded their first demo at a friend’s house. This demo, fatefully, ended up being heard by Dr Dre, who liked what he heard. With Dre now involved, these burgeoning rappers were on the path to success. Snoop and Nate Dogg, a pair of cousins, ultimately went on to share in huge levels of success in hip-hop.