Two decades on from the release of Doggystle, Snoop Dogg’s debut album, the rapper has again collaborated with super-producer Dr Dre on Missionary - a record that, based on its title, is a kind of spiritual successor...
Moving swiftly on: why now? In an interview with Complex, Snoop has suggested that the pair have returned to fill a vacant space in the hip-hop landscape.
“That void is Dr Dre's sound,” he confirms. “When Dr Dre makes music, his music don't sound like nobody else's music. And it's a uniqueness about his sound that me and him make together and I'm just honoured to still be able to do it at a high level and for him to be able to produce me.”
Asked to comment on the current scene, Dre says: “I don't want to be disrespectful to anybody right now, but I'm not really inspired by what's happening with hip-hop these days. It's not for me. I've always said I'm not going to disrespect it or anything like that, but I haven't heard anything that makes me go 'fuck, why didn't I do that?' I haven't heard that in a long time, which makes my job easy to be honest.”
Which isn’t to say that Dre is looking to repeat former glories: “I don't listen to any of the songs I've ever made since 1985,” he claims. What’s more, he isn’t ruling out the possibility that some big new talent could be about to break through.
“There's probably some kid right now banging on his drum machine, a keyboard, that's going to do some shit that is going to make us go like, what the fuck is that?” he says.
One artist that does have the respect of both Snoop Dogg and Dre is Sting, who appears on Missionary in the Message In A Bottle-inspired Another Part Of Me.
“It was an interpolation of his song and we was thinking who could we get on it, and we said we might as well go after Sting,” recalls Snoop. “And when we sent it to him, that motherfucker sent the record back how fast?”
“I don’t know. We were just trying to get the song cleared and he sent us a song back with his vocals on it,” says Dre.
And the results, reckons Snoop, are impressive: “He sound harder than me on that. I'm like, damn Sting, you cold-blooded with this shit. To me, it shows the growth of who I am and where I'm at to have a duet with somebody like that.”
Missionary is out now.
