In a skit early on Snoop Dogg’s second album, 1996’s Tha Doggfather, he bridles at someone’s suggestion that his production would grow “delicate” following the acrimonious Dr. Dre/Death Row split. “I don’t give a fuck about no beat,” he says. You, too, might be this defiant if your voice were so irresistibly pliable that you were allowed to cover Slick Rick on your debut album. And yet some of the beats on Doggfather are, in fact, delicate, leaving him unanchored from the heavy low end that was Doggystyle’s signature. It was a mistake that he would rarely make again: For the next 20-plus years, Snoop would identify the producers who could ferry him from era to era, yielding forward-thinking hits at the appropriate intervals to keep him from turning fully into a legacy act, even when it seems he would be perfectly happy becoming one.
From Tha Streets 2 Tha Suites, released last week with little ceremony, comes during a quietly prolific period as Snoop closes in on 50, and reminds of the reliably high floor that some booming, funk-inflected production and Snoop’s still-virtuosic voice provide. Streets pulls about half of its beats from the Bay Area, a fact that Snoop intermittently reflects in his slang and syntax. ProHoeZak produces and handles hook duty on the strip-club bait “Say It Witcha Booty” and on “Roaches In My Ashtray,” where he plays a serviceable faux-Nate Dogg; longtime collaborator Rick Rock is in predictably trunk-rattling form on opener “CEO.” And it’s the veteran duo the Mekanix who furnish the album’s best song, “Gang Signs,” a duet with the Sacramento rapper Mozzy so supremely bassy that its final minute, where Snoop talks idly to his engineer about how to tweak said bass and when to fly the hook back in, is as replayable as the chorus sections of many radio hits.
The more assertive fare is balanced by the lush, half-sung “Sittin’ On Blades” which, placed squarely in the middle, brings a tranquility to the album. But the rest of Streets pales slightly next to that song and “Gang Signs.” “Look Around,” the album’s penultimate song, is the one cut that scans as a genuine retread of a dozen superior ones in Snoop’s catalog. And the mogul talk, which dominates songs like “CEO” and “Get Yo Bread Up,” grows inevitably rote. Despite that the architecture––the beats combined with Snoop’s commitment to switching vocal approaches every eight or 12 bars––is a reliable safeguard against any real derailment. And then, of course, there’s the voice. Take the Eastsidaz reunion, “Fetty In the Bag.” Snoop’s opening verse has a passage of writing that grows almost comically lazy (“Twice as nice, never paying the price/Baking a cake––have a slice”) and yet retains the metronomic, head-nodding quality of his more engaged work, thanks to the gravity of his timbre and cadence. There are times Streets begs for the chip on Neva Left’s shoulder, or for a hint of I Wanna Thank Me’s sociopolitical bent. But, Streets seems to argue, summer is almost here, and to complain would be bad form.
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