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2 Snoop Doggy Dogg: ‘G Funk Intro’ - on ‘Doggystile’, Death Row A 8337CD

Bell Hooks, on the other hand, senses some danger in the wholesale endorsement of machismo.
 

And in the same way that rap poses problems for white European youth who cannot engage in its politics, musically, several components that are vital to traditional western musical understanding, like melody and harmony, are unessential when it comes to rap. In this respect as a genre, it differs markedly from mainstream pop (and, indeed, from much of the world’s music), and has triggered confusion in the traditionally minded musical establishment. Apologists for rap, particularly amongst teenagers, assert that the ceaseless stories about vigilante violence are harmless and escapist, as if the struggle for survival on the streets is a paradigm for all suffering. But in reality, some high profile shootings between rival rap factions have done little to persuade liberal minds that the violence alluded isn’t absolutely real. Gangsta rap is about gangsters. It really does eulogise the position of the lawless and the sexually rampant black male in an urban environment. However, to dismiss rap because of its negative dimensions would be to flush out a beautiful baby with some particularly murky bathwater.

Through the songs on the CD ‘Doggystile’, Snoop Doggy Dogg offers an impressive mythical counter world, which is reminiscent of Warren G’s ‘Regulate’. These are urban tales which have put aside the boasting and the bombast of earlier rap ( ... there are thousands of examples, but try ‘Is it live’ by Run DMC, or ‘Amerikkka’s most Wanted’ by Ice Cube.) for a more gentle, humorous and ironic representation of the hero. Whereas it is quite likely that Run DMC and Ice Cube actually mean every word of their hyperbolic ranting, ‘Regulate’ and ‘Doggystile’ paint pictures of Los Angeles or New York that are pure whimsy. In these small sagas of the streets, Warren G and Snoop Dogg assume the stature of a Hercules or a Don Juan - mythic heroes that define a culture. There is no requirement to be politically correct because these stories represent the acting-out of the universal id, the atavistic underside of the social fabric. In both recordings, the central purpose is to aggrandise the mythical doings and deeds of the respective heroes who are often referred to in the third person. The storyteller assumes the role of evangelist, and the rap becomes a chronicle of the messiah. These songs are at one and the same time ‘about the rapper’ and ‘by the rapper’, in the same way that the Bible is both ‘about God’ and the ‘Word of God’ simultaneously.

‘Regulate’ is about how Nate Dog and Warren G set about ‘regulating’ street violence after they had been beaten up and robbed themselves when approaching some whores. The story is presented in a laid back, almost unconcerned style as if to suggest that the dynamic pair were really rather weary of being obliged to sort out the streets of Long Beach City once more. The very word ‘regulate’ suggests, rather subtly, refined control. It doesn’t mean ‘stop’: it does mean to control a level of activity and implies the granting of permission on the part of Nate Dog and Warren G.

‘G Funk Intro’ is more up-tempo and funny. In it, Snoop is portrayed as a dog, and his disciples are dogs too. Their quest is not as elevated as Warren G’s - they are not out to clean up the streets of crime, far from it. (‘Get your pooper scooper out ‘cos this nigger’s talking shit’) Instead, they are about to terrorise the bitches in the neighbourhood. (‘All the while, we do it doggystile’) There’s a ‘credo’, a list of articles of association with which all of the pack are in agreement. Whether this is

‘hunting in packs and we do it from the back’, or whether it is ‘regulation’, all of these activities are regarded as a sub set of G-Funk dogma. Towards the end of both lyrics, the sagas are placed in the firmament of G-Funk, rather in the way that a sermon is properly concluded with a blessing.
 

Where Warren G attempts to make something transcendent out of G-Funk, Snoop Dogg proclaims himself a prime mover in the G-Funk phenomenon.
 

It is, after all, outrageous to portray the hero as a dog. Not a noble dog from the ‘Boy’s Own’ tradition, but one that ‘shake the tics off his dick’. It inverts accepted notions of honour. This obverse little story opens with a pompous bass voice-over with immaculate vowels of the anchor-man. As if linking news stories together, he frames this tale of night time prowlers in the unforgiving black and white of a B-movie cityscape: it’s Batman, it’s Elliot Ness, it’s a dog’s eye view of humanity.
 

There are other animalistic references. All the way through the piece are a few crazy little samples, shouting ‘ooh dah dah!’, and panned hard left or right to give them a distinct but peripheral position. They are always far back in the mix, suggesting that the Dragnet style voice-over is oblivious to them, or is unaware of their presence. It is classic stage craft: we, the audience are aware of both of them, but we are unsure how aware they are of each other in the context of the play-within-the-play. More accurately, these are not animal noises, but people sounding like animals, more in the style of a schoolboy taunt than an approximation of a monkey. There’s a bit of signifyin’ going on here, as if to say to a dominant culture ( - the Dragnet style voice-over), ‘you treat us like animals then we’ll behave like animals’ ( - the monkey impressions in the trees). Similarly, there are sampled dog barks which, rather nicely, stick to the off-beats.

From the beginning, there’s bass-line which, because of its farty texture, colours the whole piece. Its is played with an analogue synth timbre using extensive pitch bend. The bends always fall, suggesting a loss of energy with each note. It’s a two bar repeating sequence, following a familiar D - C - Bb - A bass line.

2.1

But it’s the ‘grain’ of the timbre which is loaded with significance. It is the almost visceral quality of the timbre that is the site of the meaning. There is a well established semantic relationship between deep, farty bass notes, and power; particularly where power is a function of money (‘ ... with my mind on my money ...’). The spectacular bass trombones that introduce the BBC’s ‘The Money Programme’, and the John Barry brass stabs that punctuate the theme music to the James Bond film ‘Dr No’ attest to this connection.

It was Sigmund Freud who suggested that there existed a subliminal connection between shit (and especially the collection of it) and money, evidenced in the vernacular phrases ‘stinking rich’, ‘rolling in it’, ‘filthy lucre’ and so forth. It seems likely that, should such an association exist, in musical terms it would be expressed as a coded fart.

Example 2.2 is an episodic marker. It happens every sixteen bars in the music which accompanies the rap. Before Rage (as evangelist) commences his testimony to the glory of Snoop, religious propriety is further parodied in that the voices sing "Ah- - " (like Angels in traditional Christmas carols): they are males singing falsetto (like Renaissance choristers): there is an illusion to chorale style harmony, and there is a kitsch sharpened 7th which sounds like a leading note within the context of functional harmony.

2.2

Then the rap kicks off:
 

Then, episodic marker delineates the end of verse 1 (see 2.3).

Snoop’s voice is phased (like Nate Dog’s in ‘Regulate’) to suggest a cosmic quality, as if he, Snoop, is a presence as much as a person. This association of phased voices and ‘other worldliness’ probably originates in early sci-fi, where alien beings routinely spoke American English with funny accents and primitive electronic enhancements. This is not the only place in this rap where early ‘sci-fi’ FX are alluded to. Uncontrolled science which had the capability to wipe out humanity was a favourite theme of B-movies, and without exception was accompanied with the kind of modernistic bleeps that allegedly emanated from unfathomably complicated scientific equipment. In the opening moments of ‘G Funk Intro’, there are just such bleeps in chaotic counterpoint with the animalistic ‘ooh dah-dah’ s and the off-beat barking dogs. Later, in the final episode of the song, to accompany the words ‘Foaming at the mouth and wagging his tail/Searching through the yard with a keen sense of smell’ there’s a rather wobbly ‘onde-martinot’ sine wave sound ....

2.3

..... which soars above the rap, once again, taken up by the Dragnet style anchorman.

Drawing all the strands in this track together, one is confronted by a rather empty metaphor. It instantly recognisable as postmodern, being a collage of B-movie images (the Dragnet voice-over: the location on the streets of an American city: the allusions to crazy science). But this formula, which when adopted by white America and European culture is often frothy and fun ( like Thomas Dolby’s ‘Aliens ate my Buick’, or Queen’s ‘Radio Gaga’ video ), is turned into a seriously bleak joke. In its emphasis on revulsion, and even in the minor details of squalor, it confronts not just middle America, but almost all accepted standards of decency. It challenges the ordinary kid, the ordinary joe, to denounce it. To dispatch it to the dustbin of poor taste. The parody of ‘properness’, as in the construction of an obverse credo, and in the periodic choral outbursts from a baroque sounding choir of counter tenors is a good joke. We laugh. But when considered alongside all the gangsta rhetoric and the insistence on an absolutely negative ideology, yet again, it sounds like the hymn of rage of the victims in society. It is the same rage that inspired recordings like Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’, and much later Public Enemy’s ‘Fight the Power’, tracks which had the power to shock, and to work constructively toward lessening black pain. In ‘G Funk Intro’, the rage has become distorted and reduced to mere mannerism and stylishness.

APPLICATIONS

From the same period in rap, MC Hammer attempted to use rap to assert a specifically Christian voice. Critics asserted that the language of rap per se transmitted messages which were essentially opposed to Christian doctrine, and that the messages became confused as a consequence. Hammer’s ‘Do not pass me by’ (Capitol CL 650) is a rare collage of rap with baptist hymnody, and, like Snoop Dogg, suggests a complete moral order with the rapper at the centre. The combination of ecstatic gospel singing and high energy rapping create a breathtaking and original synthesis of African-American musical styles.

‘Fight the Power’ - Public Enemy (Motown ZB 42877) evokes a world of urban unrest and race struggle. The video which accompanied the release of ‘Fight the Power’ made no apology for the portrayal of urban guerillas, dressed in military fatigues leading a street parade through the ghetto, and invoked the memory of Martin Luther King and, more particularly, Malcolm X in support of the cause. Whereas Snoop Dogg’s politicisation remains at a purely hypothetical level, Public Enemy seemed significantly more determined to practice what they were preaching. They exemplify the great schism is contemporary African-American culture between the liberal, integrationist and Christian tradition of the churches and Dr. Martin Luther King, and the radical, separatist approach typified by Louis Farrakhan Jnr and the Nation of Islam. Any study of Public Enemy should take note of the creative and pioneering use of the sampler as a musically expressive instrument. Their use of the sampler defined the style for the next decade. (Although almost all rap groups in the 1990 - 1995 period used sampled drum grooves, Cypress Hill is a group whose compositional technique exemplifies the post-Public Enemy development of the genre).

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