Last summer, Snoop Dogg headlined the backpack-centric Rock the Bells tour, performing his classic debut album, Doggystyle, in full every night and drawing rapturous reviews. This year, Snoop will make a few stops on Charlie Sheen's continuous-trainwreck Violent Torpedo of Truth tour, performing a song that he and Sheen have apparently recorded together. That duality is pretty much circa-2011 Snoop in a nutshell. He's a rap legend, and he's also an unapologetically inane public figure, someone who's more famous for being famous than he is for rapping. He seems to enjoy both roles in equal measure. And so late-period Snoop albums become weird, uncentered artifacts, with no real idea or consistent personality pulling them all together. You get sweeping attempts at crossover hits, nasty street-rap throwbacks, and bizarre cross-genre collaborations that any self-aware A&R never would've allowed. And even though Snoop is nowhere near the commercial force he once was, he can still round up a fuckton of famous people whenever he decides to record an album. Not too many artists would bury their Kanye West collaborations on track 18 of their albums, but that's what Snoop does on Doggumentary, his latest reminder to the world that he's still an active musician.
More than many of Snoop's recent efforts, Doggumentary has something of a sonic identity. Snoop mines slick, slapbass-heavy 1980s R&B and computer-funk on the album, working with producers like Fredwreck, Jake One, and Battlecat to conjure the smooth soul of the early Reagan era. Another rap veteran recently did great things with that same loose aesthetic playground: Big Boi on last year's excellent Sir Lucious Left Foot. But where Big Boi and his collaborators attacked that stuff with a giddy sense of experimental joy, Snoop just lets it sit there, as if his older-than-time persona will be enough to sell whatever he wants. And so vast stretches of the way-too-long Doggumentary drift by, making no impression whatsoever.
Snoop is still a perfectly capable rapper, but he doesn't let off a single memorable line on the whole album. Instead, his greatest strengths now are his delivery-- he can stick right to whatever beat the world throws at him-- and his wizened, familiar voice. Since neither of these things has changed in the past decade, every new Snoop verse feels like a verse we've heard before, with the possible exception of the parts of the gently moralistic "Peer Pressure" where Snoop tells kids to project inner strength and resist alcohol and drugs-- messages that directly contradict almost every other song on his album.
With Snoop more often than not acting as a big blank at the center of his own album, many of the best moments on Doggumentary belong to his collaborators: E-40 letting loose tumbling flows over chaotic Rick Rock production on "My Fucn House", R. Kelly bringing regal grace to an eerie Lex Luger beat on "Platinum", Devin the Dude's loping everydude warmth on the otherwise shameful "I Don't Need No Bitch". As for Snoop himself, the best parts come in the moments where he stops rapping altogether and sings instead, or where he raps so easily that he might as well be singing. It's surprising that he doesn't do that more often here, since the mostly-sung "Sensual Seduction" was his last serious solo hit. And here we get "Boom", with Snoop skipping lazily over a sample of Yazoo's deathless electro classic "Situation", and "Wet"-- a song inexplicably written for Prince William's bachelor party-- where Snoop intones freaky come-ons through heavy Auto-Tune over the Cataracts' spaced-out synth squirts.
And then there's "Superman", the acoustic-ramble Willie Nelson duet that absolutely shouldn't work but somehow does. Snoop and Willie are both braided, weed-addicted elder-statesman outlaw figures, so it makes sense that they'd get along. But this song, like the supremely silly 2008 Everlast collab "My Medicine", shows that Snoop's gravelly drawl is pretty well-suited for country music. If he ever decides to push himself again, that's one direction available to him. But let's be serious: Snoop Dogg is not pushing himself anytime soon.
