Dancing in the pool with Olympic swimming legend Michael Phelps. Dancing with LeBron James and the U.S. men’s basketball team. Trading dance moves with gymnast Simone Biles and her teammates. Catching a glimpse of the Mona Lisa inside the Louvre.
Spirit la la!!!
Biles and American swimmer Katie Ledecky may have been crowned GOAT athletes at the Summer Games, but they're sharing the spotlight with DO-Double-G as Snoopmania sweeps Paris.
Snoop Dogg, who began his career as one of the West Coast hip-hop scene's most prominent gangsta rappers, has emerged as the most valuable player on NBC's Olympic coverage this year, helping the network to record ratings. Since carrying the torch at the opening ceremony, the lanky, suave entertainer has been an ever-present presence, balancing his role as NBC's special correspondent with that of cheerleader at numerous events, including fencing, judo and badminton.
His strut into Saturday’s equestrian competition dressed head to toe in elite jockey attire (including a dressage tailcoat) immediately grabbed headlines. His taped segments with top athletes have featured prominently in the network’s prime-time highlights. An Olympic pin showing him exhaling the multi-colored Olympic ring logo in front of the Eiffel Tower (parodying his love of marijuana) is such a popular item that even he reportedly can’t get his hands on one.
“It's about peace, love, sports and unity,” she said in a TikTok video, describing her excitement at being at the Games.
While the rapper has long been a familiar figure in pop culture — whether on the sidelines of major sporting events, in films (“Training Day,” “The Garfield Movie”) and television (MTV's “Doggy Fizzle Television”), as a product endorser (Corona beer, Tostitos), talent show coach (“The Voice”), game show host (“The Joker's Wild”), guest performer (“California Gurls” with Katy Perry) and BFF to Martha Stewart — Snoopla at the Olympics has firmly secured his position as a crossover superstar with broad demographic appeal.
But watching him dine at a fancy Paris restaurant with Stewart, banter with American volleyball duo Sara Hughes and Kelly Cheng and dance with Biles may cause whiplash for longtime Snoop watchers, who still remember the hardcore gangsta rapper who once bragged in verse about killing police officers (“187 on an undercover cop”), regularly used his songs to call women “b—,” “hos” and “tricks,” and flirted with softcore pornography with his “Snoop Dogg’s Buckwild Bus Tour.”
His hit 2004 album “R&G (Rhythm & Gangsta): The Masterpiece,” which is being reissued this month to celebrate its 20th anniversary, includes the song “Can U Control Yo Hoe?”, which contains the lyrics: “You gotta put that b— in her place / Even if it’s slapping her in the face / You gotta control your hoe.”
That album's big hit, “Drop It Like It's Hot,” features violent imagery against an irresistible, catchy beat: “If you touch me close, you're on red lightning / Oh, you got a gun, so you wanna come back? / AK-47 now n— drop that / Cement shoes, now I'm on the move / Your family's crying, now you're on the news / They can't find you and now they miss you / Need I remind you that I'm just here to twist you / Pistol whip you, dip you, then flip you…”
In an interview with the Times about the album and other projects, Snoop himself said it “represents Snoop and what he stands for, musically, physically, mentally and spiritually, where he's been and where he's going.”
Which makes his transformation into America's favorite at the Paris Olympics all the more fascinating: How did Snoop, born Calvin Broadus, reinvent himself as an acceptable cultural figure for a television network during its biggest broadcast?
For one, the rapper — who, while never denying or apologizing for his past comments, has avoided the backlash that has hit the likes of Jo Koy, Andrew Dice Clay and Don Lemon — began the process of softening his tone long before he ever hit the banks of the Seine.
Snoop is a veteran youth football coach who once gave every player on the victorious Rowland Heights Raiders team, on which two of his sons played, a brand new WRFF bicycle. His continued dedication to youth sports has made him an ideal candidate for NBC's ultra-positive Olympics brand. In 2005, he founded the Snoop Youth Football League, a nonprofit organization, to help inner-city children. The program has helped more than 60,000 young people, according to its website.
The entertainer has called his 1996 acquittal on first- and second-degree murder charges in the shooting death of a Los Angeles gang member a major turning point in his life, one that guided his decision to change his image and become a more responsible public and family figure.
“I was one of the most feared and hated people, tormented and mistreated by politicians and ministers who downplayed me because they didn’t know who I was,” Snoop told Jemele Hill last year on her podcast “Jemele Hill Is Unbothered.” “They only knew a perception they had of me based on my upbringing, my past that I hadn’t really shed because I had signed to a record label that was considering my past.”
The metamorphosis intensified in 2004, just as he was releasing “R&G,” when he took on a dizzying array of projects, including his first leading dramatic role in “The Tenants,” an independent feature co-starring Dylan McDermott, Rose Byrne and Aldis Hodge in which Snoop plays a tortured novelist.
Admittedly, his career transition has had its bumps over the years. “The Tenants” barely premiered, and Snoop’s warm, tender on-camera persona didn’t always come through when the lights went out, when he could be moody and difficult. That rawness has occasionally spilled over into the public eye, too. Snoop sparked an uproar in 2020 when he lashed out at Gayle King after the “CBS Mornings” co-host addressed rape allegations against the late Lakers star Kobe Bryant during an interview with former WNBA player Lisa Leslie, a friend of Bryant’s, shortly after the basketball champion, his infant daughter and seven others were killed in a helicopter crash.
“How dare you try to burn my colleague's reputation?” the rapper shouted in a video posted on social media. “Respect the family and get away before we come looking for you!”
After receiving criticism from Lakers legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and others, Snoop apologized for both the language he used and the disrespectful tone: “Two wrongs don't make a right,” he posted. “I should have handled it a different way, I was raised a lot better.”
Still, such missteps have been rare. Instead, Snoop Dogg has generally focused on cultivating interests and relationships that would broaden his appeal beyond hip-hop fans, most notably his friendship and collaboration with Stewart, the businesswoman and lifestyle icon. Since meeting in 2015 while sitting next to each other at a Comedy Central appearance by singer Justin Bieber, the two have formed an unlikely partnership over numerous guest appearances, comedy segments and even a celebrity cooking show, “Martha and Snoop's Potluck Dinner Party.”
The partnership with Snoop helped put the discerning chef and artisan in front of a younger, hipper audience, while Stewart's grandmother helped make the rapper accessible to a wider range of consumers. Their funny quips have been featured in Olympic coverage.
Less easy to pin down, but no less important, is the fact that Snoop’s rise also reflects a radical cultural shift for both hip-hop music and marijuana culture. In the past, both the gangsta rap and marijuana use that defined Snoop’s public persona were attacked by society to the point that they are no longer considered a threat. (Flavor Flav, a member of the controversial and politically active rap group Public Enemy, has also had a prominent presence at the Paris Games, and former N.W.A. member Ice Cube has made several popular films, many of them, like “Are We There Yet?” and “Barbershop,” family-oriented.)
Snoop’s Olympic tour isn’t so much a coming-out party for this kinder, gentler version of himself as the culmination of a decades-long process. He’s even made a few nods to his past (he did a brief Crip walk during his Olympic torch march and alluded to his “lung power” while in the pool with Phelps), as if to signal that there’s nothing to worry about anymore. As one observer tweeted, “My mom called me and told me how much she loves watching Snoop Dogg at the Olympics and I had to remind her that she punished me once for buying his CD.”
All of his savvy media moves over the past 20 years have allowed him to stay in touch with his gangster roots while also expanding his reach onto the biggest stage in world sport.
The fact that the strategy has been so successful may be because it isn’t a strategy at all, as Snoop told Hill: “When you see me with Martha Stewart, I’m 100% Snoop Dogg. When you see me in the hood, I’m 100% Snoop Dogg. I’m the same person. That’s how I come off. Being myself is all I know how to do.”
