America's Most Lovable Pimp

He also attributes his success to being a Seventies baby. "Any rapper who come from the Seventies got a little bit more flavor than the Eighties babies. The music we listened to as a kid gave us more melody. The Eighties was about a gold chain, a jheri curl -- it wasn't about flavor. Everything in the Seventies was flavor: the basketball players, Redd Foxx, Al Green, Soul Train."

Dre also found that Snoop has tons of charisma, he's tough and clearly not to be tested, but he's also fun to be around. He smiles easily, is naturally funny and often breaks into rapping or singing for no apparent reason. The afternoon before football practice, as he waits to go onstage for a miniconcert sponsored by Power 106, sitting in a locker room surrounded by blunt-smoking friends, from Bishop Don Magic Juan to B-Real to his homeboy Soopafly, Snoop eases a blunt from his mouth and calls out to everyone in the room in a serious tone, "Don't do drugs!" Everyone looks up from their fat blunts and big bags of weed and gives him quizzical looks. Then he cracks a big smile. "I don't mean y'all, I just mean the kids." He takes a toke, and everyone laughs and goes back to doing drugs. A moment later, he suddenly begins crooning that Fifties classic, "Under the boardwalk/Got my first piece of head/Under the boardwalk/I was late for school. . . ." His cell phone rings, and he snaps into business mode.

"How much am I getting?" he says. He pauses, then says, incredulous, "$10,000 and one PlayStation 3?" He turns the cell to his face so he can talk right into the mouthpiece without having to hear. "Tell that nigga," he snarls, "I want three PlayStation 3s and $15,000, or fuck off." He angrily snaps the phone shut. But Snoop's mood changes quickly when a man comes in with a beautiful brunette on each arm. "Snoop," he says, "I want you to meet these two fifteen-year-old girls." Snoop immediately breaks into song. "I don't see nuttin' wrong," he sings like R. Kelly, "with a little bump n' grind . . ." and everyone laughs again.

Snoop wasn't supposed to be the star of 1992's The Chronic. It was Dr. Dre's album. But Snoop was so charismatic and his style was so fresh (in the hip-hop sense and the dictionary meaning), he became an instant national celebrity. In 1993, his first solo album, Doggystyle, debuted at Number One and sold more than 5 million copies, and Snoop became the face of Death Row Records, then the most infamous label in the industry. It was helmed by Suge Knight, a muscled mountain of machismo who was the most feared man in the record business, whispered to have bullied other rivals by dangling them upside down off balconies. That same year, Snoop was charged with homicide in the shooting death of a gangbanger. After a well-publicized trial he was found not guilty, but Death Row soon fell apart. In late 1995, Tupac was signed, then he was murdered a year later in Las Vegas. (Asked if he thinks Suge had 'Pac killed, Snoop wouldn't say yes or no. "I can't even speak on that 'cause it was an ugly situation in general," he says. "I'm just thankful I wasn't there, 'cause if I was, I probably woulda been in the car with them.") The next year, Suge was handed a nine-year prison sentence for probation violation, and few were sad to see him go away. "When you get that kinda power, you gotta treat people right so when you get in a down situation, it'll be more favorable for you," Snoop says about Suge's fall. "It's like the minute he got locked up, everyone was like, 'Damn, I'm glad he got locked up.' If you got the power, why not try to make some of these people your friends? As opposed to makin' everybody really scared of you. When you like that -- when you go down -- ain't nobody gon' be there for that call."

Shortly after Suge was incarcerated, Dr. Dre left Death Row to start his own label, Aftermath, angering Suge. Then Snoop moved on to Master P's No Limit Records, and Suge was angered again. "The nigga threatened my life when he was in jail," Snoop says. "Niggas tried to get at me at concerts; they put my address on a tape. He was gonna give a nigga a Benz if a nigga cut my hair -- all kinda fuckin' with me." In 2001, when Suge was released from jail after serving nearly five years, Snoop turned the tables. "I had to let him know I didn't give a fuck about none of that fake-ass power shit you was supposed to be on, and all this money and all these Bloods you hidin' behind," he says, his voice low and cold and angry. "I felt like challenging him would either expose his hole card or I would have to kill the nigga. And I was ready to do it. That's where I was with it. So when he got out of jail, I'm fuckin' with him." He wrote a song called "Pimp Slapp'd" -- "This nigga's a bitch like his wife/Suge Knight's a bitch, and that's on my life." And then he took aim directly at Suge: "I'm bringin' all my gangster homeboys in your motherfuckin' mix and doin' the shit you normally do, how you step to niggas and make niggas scared," he snarls. "I stepped to him [four years ago] at the BET Awards with my niggas, and he was more scared than a motherfucker. That was the scenario when niggas knew the balance had shifted. That's when everybody felt like the floodgates was open on Suge. Snoop dissed him in public, and he didn't do nothing."

"You weren't afraid that -- "

He cuts me off. "Fuck, nah." He lets the words sink in. "Never was afraid of him. I was afraid I was gonna have to kill him. That's what I was afraid of."