Snoop Dogg: "Sensual Seduction"

It’s official: Autotune has done to R&B what creatine did to Major League Baseball. The performance enhancing plug-in has sullied the sport of virtuosic soul singing at the very moment American Idol should be reviving it. Ever since Akon and T-Pain transmogrified into pitch-perfect sex machines, just about every record on the charts has come with a big bold asterisk, like Rihanna, “Umbrella… splat: *.” For those Whole Foods shoppers who like their Soul earthy and their hip hop organic, Snoop Dogg might seem like a negligible casualty in the onslaught of autotune. After all, we’re not talking about a smooth operator with soft hands like a Musiq Soulchild, a Marvin Gaye, or even a Nate Dog, here. But we are talking about a voice Robert Christgau rightly ranked alongside Billie Holiday’s and Nat King Cole’s for its elusive, mysterious grain. This original gangsta rapper earned that grain when he learned to rap (and play innocent) in a Californian correctional facility, but send his voice through an autotune plug-in, and all that criminal history is laundered faster than you can google George W. Bush’s D.U.I. record.

Snoop Dogg hasn’t just lost his bark, but his bite, too. Fifteen years ago, he was staggering from gin and juice, dropping post-coital exit lines like “I don’t love u hoes, I’m out the do’.” Now he has time to “smoke us a cigarette, fall back to sleep.” (The great Snoop Dogg succumbs to slumber? Who knew?) And of course that newly found appreciation for spooning signals a momentous transition: rap’s most unflappable felon has found himself in a wistful mood, a painless evolution from his pensive “Stacey Adams” cut on 2000’s Last Meal. The autotune warble gives him a remorseful, almost tragic timbre while the soap opera strings pull with the irresistible lure of domesticity. Snoop has rapped about not being able to express this kind of sensitivity since he battled the devil in “Murder Was the Case,” and from the sounds of that weeping lilt, those demons have been expunged, permanently. Which is great news for everybody. If a convicted coke peddler can make it from jail to there, via Death Row Records of all vehicles, then America hasn’t totally failed its promise. Not yet.

Long before Compton had mystique, and Calvin Broadus had a degrading nickname, two threads ran through R&B and Soul: tender-toned, smooth-as-satin sentimentalists like the Temptations’ Eddie Kendricks, or the O’Jays’ Walter Williams—and gruff, gutsy leads like Teddy Pendergrass and The O’Jays’ Eddie Levert. In his early 20s, a blossoming Stevie Wonder collapsed these two traditions into a single, acrobatic wail. But with auto-tune rubbing out the edges — and with groggly-voiced Trap Stars like Young Jeezy bringing ‘em back — 2007 has seen the re-emergence of that split. Some of us, however, would have never thought to place the snarling Snoop Dogg on the silky side of that split.