The Time Snoop Told Me About His Life As A Pimp.
He says, for him, pimping was easy. It also motivated him to become a family man.
So, I’m in Snoop’s Porsche 911. We’re cruising up some freeway in Southern California going 80 and he’s steering with his knees while skilling a blunt with his hands but he’s not missing a curve in the road. It’s 2006, this is late career Snoop, and he’s got interests outside of hiphop. We just spent a couple of hours at practice for his team in the Snoop Youth Football League, the Pomona Steelers. He’s coaching 10-, 11-, and 12-year-olds and he’s super serious about technique, strategy, attitude, everything. He’s so intense and focused, you’d think he was coaching in the NFL. His love for these kids is clear. He seems like the best dad ever. He may be, but there’s a little more to the story than we can see just now. He’s also been working as a pimp lately, but we’ll get into that.
Snoop pulls into a very regular-looking suburban neighborhood and then into the driveway of a very normal looking split-level ranch house that the Brady Bunch might’ve lived in. If I told you a hiphop superstar lives on this block you might not believe it and you wouldn’t be able to guess which house they live in. And the thing is, I didn’t know we were going to Snoop’s house today. We had not discussed this. I feel like I’m about to really get to know Snoop.
So, I’m in Snoop’s house, a very normal looking upper middle class looking house. Nothing pretentious, nothing ostentatious, not much that would even suggest that a rap star lives here. There’s lots of art on the walls, especially paintings of dogs in graceful poses.
Someone once said, “No man is a celebrity in his own house,” and that was never truer than for Snoop on this day. We walked to the living room where there was a big plush couch and a big screen TV, but Snoop’s three sons are sitting on the couch, eating snacks, and watching cartoons. Snoop looks at this scene with regret and says, “This room used to be mine.” In that moment the rap legend seemed like a normal middle-class Dad who’s lost control of his favorite room because his kids have taken it over. He’s been humbled in his home. It was real, it was sweet, it was sad. No man is a celebrity in his own home.
But then he walked through the living room and out a back door and into the backyard where there was a little house. A man cave? A dogg pound? He invited me inside and that’s when I got into who Snoop really really is.
So, I’m up in Snoop’s man cave. There’s a single two-seat couch so we’re literally knee to knee. It’s nice but not so nice that the kids will want to take it over. On the TV is football. Pee wee football. He’s watching game tape of the youth football team that his team will play next week. He’s clearly watched this tape before. He says look at #10. That’s the running back. He loves to sweep around to the right. We gotta force him left. Snoop’s dedication to these kids is impressive. He loves them deeply and takes coaching them very seriously.
But also, journalists are supposed to be nosey, and there was only one thing could have been considered decorative art in the whole place. Behind the little couch on the wall was a large, framed photograph. Three men at a party: Snoop in a big mink, Puffy in a big mink, and in between them a much smaller, older man in a huge mink. I said to Snoop, who’s the other guy? He says, Oh that’s my wife’s father. In the 70s he was the biggest pimp in Long Beach. That somehow led to us talking about Snoop’s recent career in pimping. I had not known that he’d been a pimp. I just followed the conversation and suddenly we went there. I don’t think he intended to talk about it. It just came up but once we were there, he kept it super real.
So, I’m in Snoop’s memories of his time as a pimp. He said it was more like a calling. He said it was so easy for him, it was like shooting layups. He said pimpin ain’t a job, it’s a sport. He said he had women on every exit from the 10 to the 101 because he had barracudas—women who recruited new women for him. He said Max Julien, who starred in The Mack, was like a father to him and he taught Snoop the rules of pimping, but he says it always came naturally to him. He said in high school he and a friend were planning on going to the school talent show looking like pimps. Then a girl came to them and volunteered to play their ho and be on a leash during the show. The three of them went to the talent show together and won.
Snoop said as a pro it was just as easy. He said he never hit anyone, he wasn’t a gorilla pimp, but he made sure his girls never looked another pimp in the eyes. He said he was just giving them a comfort zone and an opportunity because he knows many people who like buying it. He said he went to the Players Ball in Detroit with 12 women and won a Lifetime Achievement award.
Now, I got married the year before this conversation so I was acutely aware of how a wife can influence your life. And I was confused that this story about him becoming a pimp did not yet include his wife. Surely she must have had something to say. So, I said, What did your wife say about all of this? He said, I already told you her father was a pimp. So, she was used to being around the life. So, at first, she looked the other way. He said she understood that this was a lifelong dream of his and she let him live it out if he didn’t bring the girls to the house. But sometimes when he was going to a Player’s Ball, he’d have the other pimps come by and get dressed at his house. So, he wasn’t making her see the girls, but the life was getting thrown in her face.
But despite the freedom that she was giving him, in 2004 Snoop filed for divorce and went even deeper into the life. He picked up even more women and went to lots of Players Balls. But at one of them several pimps pulled him aside and called him in. They said Ok you’ve had your fun in this world. Now go back to your wife. He did. They ended divorce proceedings and reshaped their relationship. Snoop said “Before I would never listen to her. Everything I say is law. On the comeback, I’m more of an ear instead of a mouth, instead of a hand.”
He said he got his pimping dreams out of his system and went back home. I saw a man who was being superdad to his own kids and to hundreds of kids in the community and I realized that this Snoop-as-superfamilyman chapter was a response or a rebalancing after his excursion from family life. He had had his midlife dream or crisis or whatever it was and kindof left his family and when he went back to family life, he did that in a massive way.