Posted By BillHeise on May 19, 2009

Okay, so I keep thinking that I’m going to manage one day to get around to writing my post on the Nina Hagen’s original music; but once again this week I’ve gotten too busy. It’s a long post on the limitations of self as the focus of philosophical inquiry. (Yeah, I know. How cool am I?).  I’ll post it next week, for sure.

In the meantime, I want to make my case for another controversial “artiste”: Snoop Dogg. Yes, you laugh; but I actually like Snoop Dogg. I do not listen to lyrics, and that meant that for a long time I dismissed Snoop Dogg, as well as most of rap. He brought me into the fold by extending himself beyond the usual domain of the rap artist. I’ve already talked about Snoop Dogg being the first mainstream artist to wander over into the Bollywood music scene. He is also the first mainstream rap artist to go south the join up with Yankee Daddy in the Gansgsta Zone video:

There are a lot of similarities between Nina and Snoop Dogg. He does not limit his musical genius to rap and its narrow offshoots. This is an important point to me. Snoop Dogg may not live his life as I would. (As a matter of fact, I’m fairly sure of that). But as a musician, if I follow Snoop Dogg, I can get things from his music that I cannot get from the music of others in his genre. This because he doesn’t take himself so seriously that he cannot experiment a little, as we can see here in a campy tribute to the German singer Roy Black.

He travels pretty far afield, as when he is singing on stage with Willy Nelson:

Or here, where he is singing the music of the Doors:

He doesn’t have the range of a Nina Hagen, of course; but I would say that he deserves credit for expanding beyond the margins of his roots in West Coast g-funk hip-hop.

Of course, there’s always something to appreciate closer to Snoop Dogg’s roots, as we see when he covers House of Pain’s Jump Around:

If you haven’t heard this song, you can hear the full version here. It’s excellent. But, then again, they’re all excellent.

Anyway, this is how I was introduced to rap.

Categories: What I'm Listening to This Week
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