Snoop Dogg was more famous for being famous than for rapping long before the E! network gave him a reality show. His pimp persona hardened into shtick at least a decade ago, and music has felt like an afterthought for him ever since he embarked on an endless run of stoner-comedy cameos. The dangerous urgency and viciously charismatic lean of his early Doggystyle peak are distant memories. And yet he's somehow managed to evolve into a model of gangsta consistency, a sort of rap version of Tom Petty or Alan Jackson. He cranks out lazy, effortless hits at a scary clip, slightly tweaking his formula as the musical climate changes without ever leaving his comfort zone. On "Neva Have 2 Worry", the fifth track of his ninth album, Snoop reminds us that he "ain't never went gold"; every one of those previous eight albums sold a million copies. Those numbers are worldwide, not domestic, but still. He's doing something right.
"Neva Have 2 Worry" is a lean autobiographical track, but it's not a frustrated emo-memoir like Nas' "Last Real Nigga Alive" or Bun B's "The Story". Snoop doesn't do self-disclosure. Rather than giving us inside glimpses of his triumphs and failures, Snoop calmly recites his accomplishments, taking quick pauses to remind us of his murder trial and to defend himself from accusations of misogyny by kicking more misogyny. We don't learn anything from "Neva Have 2 Worry", but it sounds great: Snoop's craggy sing-song purr sinking deep into his own lush, smooth, low-key track. It doesn't reward close attention, but it fills the air beautifully.
That's true of almost all of Ego Trippin'. Snoop says basically nothing new over the course of the album's way-excessive 21 tracks, but he usually sounds good saying it, and the expansive, expensive production gives him the sort of luxuriant bed that few rappers can afford anymore. First single "Sexual Eruption" might find Snoop cooing though one of T-Pain's vocoders and extolling the virtues of bedtime reciprocity, but those tweaks are subtle; it's not like Snoop is diving headlong into feminism or electro. Rather, the slight, unremarkable track seems to exist mostly as an excuse for its retro-VHS video than as a song in its own right. That video is the best thing Snoop's done in years, a better vehicle for his sly, self-aware persona than any of the songs on this album. And yet there's something encouraging about endless confidence and professionalism on display here. In a time when the rap industry is in serious money-drain tumult, Snoop sounds as unperturbed as ever, and better for it.
Many of the tracks on Ego Trippin' come from some iteration of the newly-formed QDT, a production trio of Snoop, new jack swing architect and former Blackstreet frontman Teddy Riley, and g-funk architect and former convict DJ Quik. All of these guys are pros, and it's great to hear Snoop using his enviable position to play patron to those two underrated pop veterans. Quik's beat for "Press Play" is all fluid soul-rap, its Isley Brothers sample twittering gorgeously over its rippling guitars and horn-stabs. And on "SD Is Out", Riley somehow pulls off the neat trick of crafting a lush snap beat, its spare production absolutely at home in its pillowy layers of bass and vocoders. But tracks as pretty as these can't erase the sad reality that Snoop is running through trite pimp-life clichés for the billionth time, talking about macking hoes with Leonardo DiCaprio and never quite sounding enthused about the women he's reportedly fucking. Even the love song he dedicates to his wife turns out to be more about Snoop's globe-trotting exploits than anything resembling actual sentiment.
So it comes as a relief whenever Snoop deviates from his usual talking-points to give us the odd stylistic curveball. And those curveballs can often be pretty great on their own merits, as when Snoop covers the Time's Minneapolis new-wave funk manifesto "Cool", singing in a self-obsessed whine about diamonds on his toes while Riley faithfully recreates the original's Princely synths. And then there's the utterly inexplicable country-fried "My Medicine", which Snoop dedicates to "my main man Johnny Cash, a real American gangster" before intoning "Grand Ole Opry, here we come" and sing-rapping about weed over Everlast's respectable Tennessee Three pastiche. It's the closest thing we've ever had to a straight-up country song from one of the world's most recognizable rappers, and it's also a celebration of drugs dedicated to a beloved figure whose pill habit almost killed him more than once; I sort of can't believe it exists.
As batshit awesome as "My Medicine" is, the best two moments of Ego Trippin' are its two last songs, "Why Did You Leave Me" and "Can't Say Goodbye", both wide-open heartbroken emo-pop-soul lilts on which Snoop sounds more like an actual human being rather than a walking catchphrase dispenser. The first is a generous, bedraggled breakup track with an absurdly catchy beat from Hitboy and Polow da Don; three months from now, it'll probably be inescapable. And on the second, Snoop and the Gap Band's Charlie Wilson moan empathy for the people who share their backgrounds over a gorgeously elegiac Riley track. These are some grown-up songs, and Snoop probably has a whole album of them somewhere in him. But as long as the pothead-pimp shtick keeps selling, we'll probably never hear it.
