As we approached the sold-out Snoop Dogg show at the Uptown Theatre in Napa, I played a little game called “What did Snoop Dogg do with his day in the wine country?” Did he go wine-tasting at fancy wineries owned by out-of-town hedge fund investors? Did he get a salt rubdown at a luxuriously expensive spa? Did he spend the day smoking weed in his hotel room and ordering out from some five-star restaurant serving rustic California cuisine in Saint Helena?
Once the show started (and the painfully loud bass of opening act Pac Div came to a merciful end), I realized that what Snoop Dogg (not a Lion in sight) brought to Napa was the feeling of a good, old-fashioned, backyard, Southern California summer BBQ on one of the coldest days yet in 2012. The crowd was flying high (literally) and it was party-time, Long Beach loving vibes all around, as Snoop blasted through a medley of his greatest hits like ‘Who Am I,’ with its Parliament vibes, LBC call outs, and the classic refrain, ‘Bow wow wow yippie yo yippie yay.’ After that, he busted out some lesser known hits followed by ‘Gin and Juice,’ ‘Drop It Like It’s Hot,’ ‘Still a G Thang,’ and a two minute cameo from Katy Perry’s sickly sweet confection ‘California Gurls.’
Underneath a massive banner emblazoned with an image of a rasta-tammed, super high, grinning-to-the- moon Snoop surrounded by weed leaves and joints, Snoop let his crew take the lead on quite a few songs, and left the goofy entertainment mainly to Nasty Dogg, a furry mascot that carried a gigantic cartoon blunt around the stage for most of the show, when he wasn’t waving a giant furry dildo at the audience (a woman in the audience mimicked a blow job on it for such an uncomfortably long time that even Snoop seemed to be blushing—Napa gets crazzeeeeeeee!) Shout-outs to Nate Dogg happened about every five minutes, and even though I was hoping to go into labor (nothing like being eight months pregnant at a Snoop show) while the lanky hip-hop gangster turned rastafarian played his hit, ‘Beautiful,’ my dream didn’t come true because he skipped it all together (guess it’s hard to pull off without Pharrell) and never took the stage for an encore. Despite wearing a beige prison garb outfit with rasta colors on the pocket, Snoop’s only reference to his newly embraced religion came at the very end of the show, when he shouted out Haile Selassie and gave a voracious “Jah Rastafarianism!” ( a move that only slightly recalled Andy Samberg’s Ras Trent), followed by Bob Marley on the stereo system.
The decision to end the show with “Young, Wild and Free” Snoop’s hit with protege Wiz Khalifa and Bruno Mars was straight out of the best practices playbook. We ate it up, dancing, singing along, feeling like kids again while the puffs of smoke lifted up like magic clouds into the rafters. It was a feel-good, life-affirming moment in a day that will go down as one of the most tragic days in modern American history, and we enjoyed each and every blessed second of it.
Nothing makes you feel more like a relic than reading and relishing a massive oral history of Music Television. Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum assembled hundreds of pages of recollections of the network, and there’s a buried memory trip every few millimeters. Because yes, the book covers the years 1981 to 1992, but if you were alive and young and watching television then, I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution isn’t about bands, or music videos, or the birth of reality television, or pop culture. It’s about you.
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