Snoop Dogg

#1It was raining outside a Los Angeles courthouse in February 1996.

#2Snoop Dogg was 24, already one of the biggest young rappers in America. "Doggystyle" had made him a star, and his lazy, unmistakable drawl seemed to be everywhere.

#3But when he came out of court that day, he wasn't carrying a record or an award.

#4He was carrying his one-year-old son, Corde.

#5Snoop later said he'd spent the trial wondering whether he'd actually get to raise him.

#6There was a reason for that. Philip Woldemariam had been shot and killed in 1993, and Snoop and his bodyguard McKinley Lee had been charged in connection with the killing. The jury acquitted them of murder and conspiracy to commit assault. It couldn't agree on voluntary manslaughter, so that count ended in a mistrial.

#7A man had died. For Woldemariam's family, this wasn't a dramatic chapter in a celebrity comeback story.

#8For Snoop, though, those years had created a strange double life. He was becoming a superstar at almost the same moment he was wondering whether he might go to prison.

#9So when the trial finally ended, it looked like the danger was behind him.

#10It wasn't.

#11The world that had made him famous was about to start falling apart.

#12His name was Calvin Broadus.

#13He grew up in Long Beach, sang in church, and played piano. His mother, Beverly Tate, thought he looked like Snoopy from "Peanuts," so she started calling him “Snoop.”

#14After high school, things got rougher. Drug-related trouble sent him to jail, and probation violations brought him back more than once.

#15Music was still there.

#16He made it with his cousin Nate Dogg and his friend Warren G. Together they formed 213, recording with whatever equipment they could get their hands on.

#17Warren also happened to have a stepbrother with a very useful ear.

#18Dr. Dre.

#19At some point, a tape of Snoop reached Dre. Warren told Snoop that Dre liked what he'd heard and wanted to work with him.

#20Snoop thought he was being pranked.

#21Then Dre got on the phone.

#22Come to the studio Monday.

#23That was it. One call, and Calvin Broadus was suddenly headed somewhere completely different.

#24Dr. Dre didn't bring Snoop in for one tiny guest verse and send him home.

#25He put him on "Deep Cover" in 1992. Then Snoop turned up all over Dre's album "The Chronic."

#26Snoop didn't even have a solo album yet, but listeners already knew that voice.

#27Then came "Doggystyle," released through Death Row Records in 1993.

#28It blew up.

#29Almost overnight, Snoop became one of the faces of gangsta rap.

#30And almost at the same time, he was facing a murder case.

#31That meant fame and danger ran side by side. One day there were magazines and television cameras. Another day there was a courtroom and the possibility of losing his freedom.

#32By 1996, the verdict seemed like a reset.

#33Then Dre left Death Row.

#34A few months after Dre's departure, Tupac Shakur was shot in Las Vegas.

#35He died six days later.

#36Snoop and Tupac weren't on perfect terms at the end. Snoop later said Tupac had been angry after Snoop publicly said he didn't personally hate Biggie or Puff Daddy, right when the East Coast–West Coast feud had become dangerously personal.

#37Maybe they would've worked it out.

#38They never got the chance.

#39Then Suge Knight went to prison.

#40In a remarkably short stretch of time, Dre was gone, Tupac was dead, and Suge was incarcerated.

#41Snoop was still standing.

#42He released "Tha Doggfather" without Dre. It debuted at No. 1, so this wasn't some commercial collapse. But it didn't hit like "Doggystyle."

#43And the bigger problem was happening behind the scenes.

#44Snoop later said he felt he wasn't being paid properly at Death Row. Budgets became an issue. Control became an issue.

#45He'd just won his freedom in court.

#46Now he had to figure out how to get free of the company that had made him famous.

#47Snoop wanted to hit back.

#48Years later, he described the project he had in mind. The title wasn't subtle:

#49"Fuck Death Row."

#50He was going to attack the label in public.

#51Then Master P showed up.

#52Master P had built No Limit Records in New Orleans with a very different idea of how a rap business could work.

#53When he heard what Snoop was planning, he didn't tell him to make the diss record nastier.

#54He told him not to make it.

#55In Snoop's telling, Master P warned that if he kept escalating things, he might not live long enough to see the album come out.

#56That doesn't prove there was a specific murder plot against Snoop. It tells us how dangerous Snoop himself believed the situation had become.

#57His instinct was to fight.

#58Master P gave him another option.

#59Leave.

#60And he didn't just change labels.

#61Snoop later said Master P wanted him out of Los Angeles. So Snoop took his family to Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

#62He'd been preparing a direct attack on Death Row.

#63Instead, he changed his entire environment.

#64Snoop later said the move helped settle him down.

#65Then Master P showed him something else.

#66Ownership.

#67Snoop has said that during the Death Row years, even the house he lived in and the cars he drove could be in Suge Knight's name.

#68From the outside, he looked rich.

#69That wasn't the same as owning what made him look rich.

#70Master P thought differently.

#71Own the house. Own the car. Understand the business. Become the boss.

#72Snoop later put Master P's role in much stronger terms. He said Master P saved his life.

#73That doesn't mean Master P single-handedly transformed him. Snoop had already survived a murder trial, become a father, watched Tupac die, and seen Death Row unravel.

#74But Master P gave him somewhere else to go.

#75And another way to think about power.

#76In 1998, Snoop released "Da Game Is to Be Sold, Not to Be Told" through No Limit.

#77It went to No. 1.

#78Master P also dropped Snoop into the wider No Limit world, putting him on records with artists like Mystikal, Silkk the Shocker, and C-Murder.

#79Snoop didn't leave Death Row and become yesterday's star.

#80He entered another rap ecosystem and kept moving.

#81Then someone familiar came back into the picture.

#82Dr. Dre.

#83Their relationship wasn't a neat story where they split once and then reunited 30 years later. Snoop was already talking in the late 1990s about wanting to work with Dre again, and the two did reconnect musically.

#84At first, Dre had pulled Snoop into his world.

#85Now they were meeting again with Death Row behind both of them.

#86Snoop wasn't surviving by erasing his past.

#87He was carrying it somewhere else.

#88By 2004, Snoop wasn't new anymore.

#89If his career had followed the usual script, he could've been settling into “1990s legend” status while younger artists took over.

#90Instead, he made "Drop It Like It's Hot" with Pharrell Williams.

#91It went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

#92Snoop's first No. 1 on that chart.

#93Not during "Doggystyle." Not during the first Death Row explosion.

#94More than a decade into his career.

#95The voice hadn't changed much.

#96The room around it had.

#97And around the same time, Snoop was finding another room that had nothing to do with a recording studio.

#98Football started with Snoop's own family.

#99He got involved while watching his son Corde play, began coaching, and in 2005 launched the Snoop Youth Football League for kids around Los Angeles.

#100One of those kids was C.J. Stroud, years before he became an NFL quarterback.

#101Stroud's mother Kimberly wasn't immediately thrilled.

#102The league was run by Snoop Dogg.

#103That name came with baggage.

#104So she went to see it for herself.

#105What she found was organized, serious, professional. Her view changed, and Stroud ended up playing there for two seasons.

#106It's a small scene, but it says a lot.

#107In the 1990s, Snoop had been the kind of artist some parents would've wanted kept away from their kids.

#108Now a parent was trusting him with hers.

#109In 2008, Snoop showed up somewhere even less expected: Martha Stewart's daytime TV show.

#110They made mashed potatoes.

#111On paper, the pairing looked like a producer's joke. Martha represented cooking, entertaining, and polished American domestic life.

#112Snoop represented "Doggystyle."

#113Then they got on camera and somehow it worked.

#114Snoop later credited Martha with doing something important: she let rappers walk into daytime television without asking them to stop being rappers first.

#115She didn't turn Snoop into somebody else.

#116She gave Snoop another place where being Snoop could work.

#117The relationship kept going. They spent time together at Justin Bieber's 2015 comedy roast, where Snoop discovered just how hard Martha could land a joke.

#118By 2016, they had "Martha & Snoop's Potluck Dinner Party."

#119Sure, it was smart television built around contrast.

#120But the friendship lasted beyond the gimmick.

#121Martha entered Snoop's world.

#122Snoop entered Martha's.

#123Neither had to leave their own behind.

#124People often describe Snoop as a master of reinvention.

#125But look closely and something doesn't fit.

#126He rarely replaced one version of himself with another.

#127He didn't stop rapping when he became a football coach. He didn't stop coaching when he became a TV personality. He didn't scrub away Long Beach to sit beside Martha Stewart.

#128The roles just kept stacking.

#129Rapper. Father. Businessman. Coach. TV personality. Martha's friend.

#130And underneath all of them, Snoop kept making records.

#131Then in 2022, one of the oldest parts of his story flipped completely.

#132Snoop Dogg acquired the Death Row Records brand.

#133That wording matters. It doesn't mean every historic Death Row master or every right connected to his early career suddenly became his. The publicly announced deal centered on the Death Row Records brand.

#134But the reversal was still hard to miss.

#135In the 1990s, Snoop was a Death Row artist.

#136He struggled to leave. He thought about making "Fuck Death Row." Master P persuaded him not to escalate the fight and showed him a different model built around ownership.

#137More than 20 years later, Snoop owned the Death Row brand.

#138The young Snoop had been trying to figure out how to get away from it.

#139The older Snoop bought it.

#140And he didn't leave it sitting there as a nostalgia logo.

#141Death Row became part of his current music life again.

#142Soon after the acquisition, Snoop performed at the Super Bowl LVI halftime show with Dr. Dre.

#143Three decades earlier, Dre had heard an unknown kid from Long Beach on a tape and told him to come to the studio.

#144Now both men had built entire careers and businesses of their own.

#145Then, in 2024, they made "Missionary" together. Snoop's Death Row and Dre's Aftermath appeared on the same project.

#146This wasn't two people meeting again after 30 years apart.

#147They'd separated, reconnected, worked together, drifted, and worked together again.

#148The shape of the relationship kept changing.

#149The relationship itself never really disappeared.

#150And that same year, Snoop walked into another place nobody could've predicted in 1992.

#151The Olympics.

#152For the 2024 Paris Olympics, NBC sent Snoop to France as a special correspondent.

#153He met athletes, tried sports, carried the Olympic torch, and moved through events reacting exactly like himself.

#154Then came the image that almost looked made up.

#155Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart at Versailles, dressed for the equestrian events and watching dressage together.

#156Go back to 1993.

#157"Doggystyle" was arriving while Snoop was heading toward a murder trial.

#158Thirty-one years later, he was sitting at Versailles with Martha Stewart covering Olympic equestrian competition for American television.

#159But the important part wasn't that Snoop no longer looked like Snoop.

#160He did.

#161That's why it worked.

#162NBC didn't turn him into a conventional sports broadcaster. It let him react, joke, cheer, and talk in his own voice.

#163The audience liked it enough that NBC brought him back.

#164At the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, Snoop returned.

#165This time, one of the labels attached to him sounded almost impossible next to the Snoop Dogg of the early 1990s:

#166“Ambassador of Happiness.”

#167He also appeared around Team USA in an honorary coaching role, encouraging athletes and serving as a kind of roaming hype man.

#168The rapper who had once sat at the center of American fear about gangsta rap was now being used by an Olympic broadcaster to spread joy.

#169That sounds like a clean redemption story.

#170Except Snoop was still rapping.

#171He made "Missionary" with Dre in 2024. He released more music in 2025. He released "10 Til' Midnight" in 2026.

#172He hadn't quit being a rapper and become an Olympic personality.

#173He'd made Olympic personality another thing Snoop Dogg could be.

#174And while all of that was happening, his story looped back even further than Death Row.

#175Beverly Tate died in 2021.

#176Long before the world knew Snoop Dogg, she knew Calvin. She was the one who gave him the nickname “Snoop,” back when he was still a kid singing in church.

#177On April 27, 2025, the day that would've been Beverly's 74th birthday, Snoop released a gospel album called "Altar Call."

#178His mother was on the cover.

#179The opening song mourned her.

#180And the label releasing it was Death Row Records.

#181A church kid got the name Snoop from his mother.

#182He grew up and became one of gangsta rap's defining stars. Death Row made him famous. He struggled to escape it. He later said he learned to think differently about ownership.

#183Then, decades later, he owned the Death Row brand.

#184And through that label, he released a gospel record for the mother who had named him Snoop in the first place.

#185Calvin Broadus never completely disappeared inside Snoop Dogg.

#186The rapper didn't disappear when the father showed up. The father didn't disappear when the coach showed up. The coach didn't disappear when Martha's friend showed up. And none of them disappeared when the Olympic “Ambassador of Happiness” arrived.

#187Snoop's trick wasn't becoming a different person every few years.

#188It was figuring out how many different things one Snoop Dogg could be.

#189Before Snoop formally joined No Limit, Master P asked him for a small feature.

#190Snoop named his price as “15.” In his memory, he meant $1,500.

#191Master P handed him $35,000 instead.

#192For an artist already frustrated by money and ownership at Death Row, that was a strange introduction to a new kind of businessman.

#193Why would Master P pay a rapper who wasn't even signed to him far more than the rapper had asked for?