Snoop Dogg has faltered in the past as a top mainstream rap artist, with the first album released by Priority struggling to sell in 2002, knocking the Long Beach MC off the Billboard 200 top ten for the first time in his career. Even with the groups Eastsidaz and 213 he did better, from this point of view. At the end of 2009, he goes back to releasing something with Priority: perhaps, this is the moment when he falls as a mainstream rapper.
Studio album number ten, Snoop has held a good average since he started. The production is created by DJ Battlecat, The Neptunes, Nottz, Lil Jon, Terrace Martin, Tricky Stewart, The-Dream, Teddy Riley, B-Don, Danja, Jason Martin, PMG, Scoop DeVille, Super Ced and Snoop Dogg himself. Guests are Brandy, Jazmine Sullivan, The-Dream, Nipsey Hussle, Problem, Kokane, Pharrell Williams, Soulja Boy, Lil Jon, and R. Kelly. The disc consists of intro, outro, other twelve tracks and 54 minutes of performance. The music is heavy and bad, annoying and cheap, the whole set is forgettable and ignorable. This can be written for almost any Snoop Dogg album after 1996, so, what's the difference from the others? I try to explain it. On track four, I actually wanted to hear what Lil Jon had to say here. This is the poor level of the production.
I looked for it: "1800" has one of the worst beats on the album, it's shoddy and Snoop Dogg spits bars with one of his less inspired flows that he ever pulled out, and he's generally always uninspired. After listening to this track a couple of times, I still haven't figured out where Lil Jon was: he's actually credited for making monosyllabic words at the beginning, middle and end of the track. Amazing. I hope for him that he got paid for this feat because he deserved it.
After two solo tracks, Lil Jon opens the series of tracks with guests: the production is simplistic, there's nothing really worth listening to. Jazmine Sullivan offers a good rnb hook, but the bouncy musical carpet of Teddy Riley, Scoop DeVille and PMG lowers its quality and detracts value from it. The-Dream is one of the few good things about the project, even if it doesn't do a completely good job behind the keyboards. Kokane, Pharrell, R. Kelly, there's an excess of singers, none of them save the album and their contribution only serves to cover scandalous beats: Danja brings out the worst one in the latest solo song, "That's tha Homie". Among the rappers stand out Nipsey Hussle, who jabs "Upside Down" over a weak beat, and Soulja Boy: he sounds at its best with Snoop Dogg and almost obscures him in his own track, that's impressive.
Released by Snoop label and Priority, the album receives mixed reviews from critics (you can easily see who's competent and who's not in between) and is a commercial flop that has few precedents for the rapper: it's the worst result on the Billboard 200 and among rap records (fifth) and struggles to sell copies in the European market. With an unlimited amount of laziness and lack of inspiration, Snoop Dogg tries to attract audiences from all possible markets (crunk, rnb, pop, underground rap) without being able to find the right way to sell the product. He'll have his revenge shortly after the release of this LP, participating in Katy Perry's atomic hit "California Gurls", which will give him back some of the audience lost in hip-hop by borrowing it from pop, will give him new commercial life and it will take away all its credibility already undermined by bad records like this. 3/10.
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