Snoop Dogg is one of the most characterful figures that hip hop has ever produced. At times, it feels like he’s almost too cartoonish to be real. It’s a trope that leaves his lethal lyrics overlooked and his audience forgetting that there is a genuine human underneath the facade.
Of course, due to the endless advertisements that Snoop gets himself involved with and him playing up endlessly to a caricature that he’s carefully curated, it can be easy to forget he’s an originator of the G-Funk sound. That aforementioned scene changed the hip-hop landscape throughout the 1990s, and his developmental hand in the genre’s evolution can’t be underplayed.
However, when he was growing up, rap music wasn’t as readily available as it is today — it was an underground thing. If you weren’t in the know, then hip hop could easily have passed you by. There was one record that proved to be Snoop’s gateway drug, and chances are, you’ve never even heard of it.
Speaking with Jimmy Kimmel a few years ago, Snoop spoke about the song that made him first want to be a rapper in a revealing interview. “The first song that made me love music was an artist called Jimmy Spicer,” ‘The Doggfather’ said endearingly. “He had a song called ‘Super Rhymes’.”
That track then made Snoop try to write himself, and when he was “11 or 12”, the rapper penned his first track, ‘I Am A Poet’. Although, by his own admission, it was “garbage”, which Snoop delivers with a wry smile.
‘Adventures of Super Rhyme’, to give the song its full name, was released back in 1980 when Snoop was only nine years old. He was hooked from that moment, but it would take him a couple more years before plucking up the courage and even more to master the craft.
Elsewhere in the chat, the always smiling Snoop provided the unenviable answer for any hip-hop head after Kimmel asked, “I don’t mean to put you on the spot, but who are your top three favourite rappers of all time?”
Picking a top ten is hard enough, but Snoop delivered his with ease amid the pressure of the glaring studio audience. “Slick Rick, Ice Cube…” as the tension built waiting for his third choice, the rapper smirked and confirmed “Snoop Dogg.”
Listen to the track which indoctrinated Snoop below, and pour one out for the late Jimmy Spicer, who we sadly lost in 2019.
