Master P and Snoop Dogg’s relationship is an interesting one and a friendship that arguably made Snoop the legend he is today. As a 22-year-old, in 1993, Snoop found fame following the release of his iconic debut album, Doggystyle, which has become a G-funk classic. However, his Death Row experience wasn’t all positive.
For a long time, people have known that the now-incarcerated gangster and former label executive Suge Knight was not paying his artists fairly and exploited them regularly. From 2Pac to Snoop Dogg, he put Death Row acts in dangerous situations and locked them into unfair contracts they knew little about.
However, following the dissipation of Death Row in 1998, all of its integral acts took different paths. Dr Dre teamed up with Interscope’s Jimmy Iovine to form Aftermath Entertainment, and unexpectedly, Snoop Dogg moved to Louisiana to work with Master P (real name Percy Miller) at No Limit Records.
Snoop Dogg has previously said that the Louisiana rapper and label executive gave his career a “second chance” during the dormancy that followed his messy exit from Death Row and helped a musically lost kid from Long Beach get back on his feet.
In an interview with HipHopDX, the Long Beach artist sang P’s praises, stating, “[I credit] him for saving my life, giving me a second chance, teaching me the business, enabling me to be Snoop Dogg and have fun and live and not have beef and have controversy in my life and allowing me to find my way to happiness. That’s what Master P did for me.” Moreover, Snoop (real name Calvin Broadus) has previously admitted that No Limit was the first record label that saw him make a substantial amount of money.
Despite his success while on Death Row, in a conversation with Noreaga and DJ EFN of the Drink Champs podcast, Snoop unveiled, “They was the only n*ggas getting money in the industry. This is important. Puffy and them [Bad Boy] was rocking, but they wasn’t getting no money like Master P was. I had been around they camp, I had been around Def Jam, I was on Death Row, I had seen all the n*ggas that supposedly had the money…Master P had the muthaf*ckin’ money.”
From buying Broadus a house to showing him the importance of creative control, ownership and the mechanics of publishing, Miller showed the West Coast emcee a lot. However, he also saved the ‘Gin And Juice’ artist’s life by preventing him from releasing a scathing diss track.
During an appearance on The Pivot podcast, Broadus once unveiled that Miller saved his life concerning the track, revealing, “It was called ‘F*ck Death Row.’ People were smart enough to know I wasn’t ready to go to war. I was just vigilant, and I was like ‘F*ck that I gotta defend my pride,’ but my pride would have got me killed! Sometimes you gotta be smarter than the average bear.”
He continued, “You gotta know and understand why you’re here, and I needed him [Master P] as a big brother and a mentor to pull me out of that bad environment, take me to the South and show me a different world. My family are from Mississippi see, sometimes you gotta get taken back to your roots, and I was able to go see my grandmother, and I was able to see certain family members.”
Master P effectively saved Snoop Dogg from creating his own demise as, at the time, Suge Knight was still very much running things at Death Row and would have most definitely hurt Broadus. You can hear Snoop explain the lucky escape in the video below.
