How a Dogg Became a Lion

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/arts/music/new-releases-by-snoop-lion-and-william.html

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The rechristening of Snoop Dogg (né Snoop Doggy Dogg) into Snoop Lion, the extremely chill reggae superhero, at first didn’t seem much like an evolution. He’d long been low-key, long had an air of knowing semi-spirituality, long been preoccupied with smoking weed. Did he really need to don Rastafarian drag too?

But what Snoop Dogg had not long been, he said, was a force for good. “Snoop Dogg was a part of the problem, and Snoop Lion is a part of the solution,” he recently told The Huffington Post (while adding the caveat that Snoop Dogg was not in fact retired). And this wasn’t just a stalemate in his career, but also in the genre. Snoop Lion wanted to make positive, uplifting music, a path he suggested was not available to him in hip-hop.

For the moment, let’s view this supposition generously and sympathetically. Social uplift hasn’t been at the center of hip-hop’s consciousness for, you could argue, almost two decades. There’s plenty of joy in the genre, but much of it is linked to consumerism and sexual bravado. And there are occasional tributaries of social and political awareness — think about the dark commentary on Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “Watch the Throne” — but they’re not the foundation of the house, only decoration.

Assume, then, that Snoop Lion is onto something — that a hole needs to be filled. That said, there has been no less compelling argument for social commentary in pop music than “Reincarnated” (RCA), the Snoop Lion “debut” album, in recent memory. It ranks at or near the top of vexing choices made by once-platinum artists, full of lazy, half-baked pablum that does more harm to Snoop Lion than good for others.

Maybe he doesn’t rap very well anymore and thinks that switching to a degraded form of roots reggae — a slower, more lethargic genre — will obscure that fact. Maybe his intentions are pure, but his capacity to execute them is small. After all, it’s been some time since Snoop was a musical force. In the 2000s, apart from the singles “Drop It Like It’s Hot” and “Sexual Eruption,” he’s been better on television, from “Doggy Fizzle Televizzle” to appearances on “The Martha Stewart Show.”

Here, his proclamations for change read like posters written by third graders: “All the pollution in this world me just cant stand it/Global warming make the whole world panic.” It’s telling that the liveliest and most convincing song on this album is “Fruit Juice,” a bubbly flirtation that’s blissfully free of politics.

Snoop is well liked enough to command attention and contributions from artists like Drake, Miley Cyrus, Mavado and Popcaan, but depending on which Jamaican you talk to, Snoop is either a child returning to the homeland or an unwelcome interloper. He does reggae no favors with his halfhearted attempts at patois. (Busta Rhymes runs circles around Snoop on the bonus track “Remedy” — his would be a reggae album worth hearing.)

The producer of much of the album is Major Lazer, the dancehall-meets-dance-music side project of Diplo and others, which is an odd choice for someone seeking to plant deep roots. The best Major Lazer tracks here are the ones that are least purely faithful to reggae, as is the case on Major Lazer’s own new album, “Free the Universe” (Secretly Canadian).

Snoop Lion isn’t alone in looking outside the genre in hopes of transmitting a message of uplift. The rapper and producer will.i.am has just released his fourth solo album, “#willpower” (Interscope), which continues his transformation to dance music captain from hip-hop bohemian.

Snoop Dogg and will.i.am have more in common than is immediately apparent. They’re from the same generation — Snoop is 41, will.i.am 38 — are both from the Los Angeles area and have connections to N.W.A.; Snoop was a protégé of Dr. Dre, and will.i.am’s pre-Black Eyed Peas group the Atban Klann was signed to Eazy-E’s Ruthless Records.

How they responded to those circumstances couldn’t have been more different. Snoop was one of the titans of gangster rap’s crossover moment, and it will take decades of subpar reggae to offset that history. When will.i.am emerged as part of the Black Eyed Peas, he was a rare descendant of the conscious rap of the early 1990s still to breathe mainstream air into the 2000s.

Will.i.am is far more convincing as a dance music star than Snoop is as a reggae carpetbagger. In part, that’s because will.i.am is irredeemably corny, a quality that’s well suited to dance anthems. He is not ashamed to bleat out inane proclamations (“I make Google money/That’s a lotta clicks”) and this album benefits from his shamelessness. It’s frequently catchy and almost always compellingly energetic.

It does, though, close with a plinky piano song, “Ghetto Ghetto,” which features at least one child singing, “Where I live, we have nothing,” and awkward will.i.am verses about poverty: “They be wondering why the girls grow up to be dancers/then we wonder why the boys grow up to be dealers/and they be angry at the whole world ready to kill us.” Well-intentioned and clumsy as it is, it might have meant more on an actual hip-hop album, not as the coda to one man’s continuing escape from the genre.