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 are, in fact, delicate, leaving him unanchored from the heavy low end that was ’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.