Kendrick Lamar’s favourite Snoop Dogg album
Growing up in the 1990s on the West Coast of America, Kendrick Lamar was unsurprisingly raised on the music of Snoop Dogg. It was an early love in his life, teaching him valuable lessons about the fundamental elements of hip-hop and how to rap, which he later used to launch his own career.
When Snoop first made a name for himself with his debut album, 1993’s Doggystyle, hip-hop was still relatively in its infancy compared with today and the rapper didn’t have decades of history to use as inspiration. Instead, he pioneered a unique style which made him stand out in the landscape of the genre, and become an imitable figure.
In fact, throughout the ’90s, each rapper had their own flow which made them feel like comic book characters that existed within a parallel universe. While Snoop has always been a larger than life personality, underneath the humour and facade, he’s a serious rapper who is capable of going bar for bar with the best of them.
With his first full length album, Snoop set himself an impossibly high benchmark with Doggystyle, and even likely by his own admission, he’s never hit the same heights again. The era-defining record, produced by Dr Dre, plucked him from the streets of Los Angeles into superstardom and changed his life forever.
For the first time, G-funk was no longer a sub-genre that existed exclusively in California, but was known internationally, and even kids across suburbia were dancing in their bedrooms to the record. Staggeringly, in the first week alone, Doggystyle sold over 800,000 copies in the United States, and Snoop was the name on everybody in the music industry’s lips.
Nevertheless, despite the widespread appeal of the album, as a Compton kid, Kendrick could connect to Doggystyle on a deeper level than most. While he was too young to understand certain aspects of the LP, it still spoke to him deeply, and Snoop was an example of a local artist successfully using hip-hop to create a better life.
During a conversation with Complex in 2012, Lamar named Doggystyle as one of his favourite records of all time, explaining, “‘Who Am I (What’s My Name)’ is probably one of the first rap records I really learned all the way. I remember watching it on The Box, the cable channel you had to like order and call. I remember them playing that and ‘I Got 5 On It’ like 10 times in a row on certain days.”
The ‘Not Like Us’ rapper continued: “What’s one of my favorite songs…There was a posse track I cannot think of the name of it [“Stranded on Death Row”]. It had everybody on it. RBX is on it, Lady of Rage was on it, Kurupt was on it.”
While Kendrick has too many accomplishments in his career to list, he was recently hailed as the “King of the West” by Snoop Dogg, the ultimate compliment imaginable. After Lamar performed ‘The Pop Out: Ken and Friends’ at The Inglewood Forum on June 19th, 2024, Snoop was full of praise for his peer, describing the Juneteenth performance as “beautiful”.
When Lamar was listening to Doggystyle as a child, he could never have dreamed that the tables would later turn and Snoop would one day be the one lauding immense praise upon him.