Snoop Dogg is that cat to the nth degree. The braided and goateed favorite son of Long Beach, Calif., popularly known as "tha L-B-C," has dominated the rap music dojo from his days bangin' with Dr. Dre on the 1992 bomb "The Chronic" to his own chart toppers like "Doggystyle" and "No Limit Top Dogg" and his latest ghetto classic, "Tha Last Meal." He was birthed on Oct. 20, 1971, under the dog star of G-dom. And long before he was helping to define, along with Dre, Ice Cube and others, that style popularly known as "West Coast" or "gangsta" rap, little Calvin Broadus was nicknamed "Snoop" by his parents, who thought he looked like Charlie Brown's hipper-than-thou beagle.

From jump, Snoop had a sobriquet most kids would kill for. Sure, a name like Snoop doesn't make a career, but it is definitely an asset. So is the sort of effortless charisma Snoop has, not to mention his inimitable rap "flow," that verbal dexterity, sharpened by the streets and a stint in the Los Angeles County pen for hustling crack when he was barely out of high school. As with any personification of the laid-back, blunt-smoking L.A. steelo, a gang-star's rep is bolstered by an aura of menace. Though Snoop has never had the urgent, in-your-face thuggishness of his colleagues, he has made no secret of his association with L.A.'s oldest black criminal enterprise, the Crips (hence his fondness for blue). He beat the rap for murder in 1996 when a jury found him not guilty in the 1993 shooting death of one Philip Woldermariam by Snoop's bodyguard McKinley Lee (when Woldermariam, for reasons still unclear, came gunning for Snoop). There's his beef with former employer and Death Row titan Marion "Suge" Knight, which has been going on ever since Snoop ditched Death Row for Master P's No Limit in 1998. And on a yearly basis, it seems like the po-po snag Snoop or someone in his employ with weed.

Like rock stars back in the day, members of rap's crème de la crème are expected to be rule breakers, badasses and so on. They're supposed to be outlaws, anti-authoritarian figures, getting away with murder and just about everything else to be, in the words of one of Snoop's most famous lyrics from the "Doggystyle" album, "rollin' down the street smokin' Indo, sippin' on gin and juice/Laid back -- with my mind on my money and my money on my mind."

	Print story E-mail story

Think of the Dionysian revelry of rockers like Mick Jagger or David Bowie -- perhaps Bowie more than Jagger, since the Thin White Duke was like an ivory-hewn precursor of Snoop -- and you begin to get a sense of what Snoop's appeal is to the masses. Snoop himself broke it down in this passage from his 1999 autobiography "Tha Doggfather":

Maybe you're holding down a nine-to-five, paying out on a second mortgage, with child support, alimony, car payments ... all that shit. Maybe your life was locked down, set to unroll all by itself, right on schedule from cradle to grave. Maybe it was all safe and secure and settled from the minute you popped out and they put your name on a plastic bracelet around your wrist.

And maybe that shit is getting old. You might look around and ask yourself, "Is this all there is?" and then you hear one of my songs on the radio or catch a video on MTV and suddenly it all starts looking larger than life -- your sorry life anyway. In Snoop Dogg's world, the bad guys are badder, the good guys are gooder, the scrilla is fatter, and the women are finer than you've ever seen. But most of all, in my world, you can read the rules. You know who your friends are. You can spot your enemies a mile away. Life is more precious because death can be waiting around any corner, at any time.

This attitude recalls an artistic tradition far older than rap. It stretches back to the Marquis de Sade, Rimbaud and Verlaine and, even further, to Euripides' play "The Bacchae," where the god of wine and women sets himself against the very foundations of society -- and wins. I doubt that Snoop has read Rabelais, Céline or Huysmans, but the triumph of decadence over the skull-numbing boredom of the status quo is one of the most powerful themes in the history of art and literature.

I can hear the lit-crit know-it-alls snorting their disapproval. But undeniably, above the wigger-kid brio of Eminem, or the now-passé goth sociopathic sensibilities of Marilyn Manson, and towering over the insignificant sputterings of what masquerades as literature these days, Snoop Dogg is a one-man threat to society's established order. With Bush in the White House and riots in the streets of Cincinnati over yet another cop killing of an African-American youth, what could possibly be more of a menace to authority than an immensely wealthy black man spitting phrases like "cuz it's 1-8-7 on an undercover cop" (that number being cop code for murder) or blowing chronic smoke into the faces of our drug czars?

Register and receive a free "Best of Brilliant Careers" e-book