Mid-life
crises manifest themselves in different ways. Maybe you’ve traded in your
minivan for a new Mustang. Maybe you’ve decided it's time to steal your daughter's albums and become a Belieber.
Or maybe you’ve changed your name from Snoop Dogg to Snoop Lion and decided to
record yourself a reggae album.
Look, I know
what you’re thinking. I know they are doing great things with minivans these
days. I get that. But if you think you are above having the word “lion” added
to the end of your name as your mid-forties creeps up on you, you are mistaken,
and Snoop Dogg’s new album Reincarnated is
a beautiful example. Snoop Dogg, a man who last year famously claimed to smoke
81 blunts a day, is on the short-list of "People I’d Actually Believe If They
Claimed They Were The Reincarnation Of Bob Marley," but he still has a bit of
work for me to do if he wants me to refer to him as Snoop Lion. For one, he
needs to release an album that doesn’t feature people like Chris Brown and
Akon. I also can’t be the only one who finds it hard to believe that Bob Marley
would ever record a song called “Ashtrays and Heartbreaks” featuring Miley
Cyrus.
But if you
like reggae, Reincarnated is kind of
good. I must emphasize “if you like reggae” once more, because if you are
listening to this album to find any semblance of early-90’s Snoop, you are
smoking up the wrong tree. Reincarnated is
an example of a successful, newly-reborn musician using his connections in the
music industry to release an album in a wholly different and much more specific
genre than he’s used to. It’s also an example, unfortunately, that Snoop Dogg can
release a reggae album just for the hell of it because he’s Snoop Dogg, while
plenty of other talented yet unknown reggae bands can’t because they’re not.
And here I must emphasize “kind of good” because all reggae music – and let’s
just be honest with each other for a moment – basically sounds the same. To
make it in the reggae biz you have to either really, REALLY stand out or be
famous already and not fuck everything up. Snoop is famous already and he didn’t
fuck everything up, so he deserves some bud.
Reincarnated seems to be an album that
is less “by” Snoop Dogg and more “under the supervision” of Snoop Dogg. There
are very few songs in which you can identify
his voice with absolute certainty; you have to listen closely. You’d assume Snoop
would use his silky smooth voice and rap over reggae beats throughout the
entire album, but that doesn’t really happen. This is a straight-up reggae album,
which is interesting because of the way it’s been presented to us. Based on
what we know about the world, people automatically assume that a reggae album
by Snoop Dogg is going to be awful. But if this was called something like, oh I
don’t know, Bobby Bahamas Presents Reggae
All-Stars Vol. III, it would come with a little more credibility. The problem
is that it would be a hell of a lot harder to distribute.
So we are
left with songs like “Ashtrays and Heartbreaks” featuring Miley Cyrus. Please
believe me: I so wanted to hate this song, but she kind of steals the album
from Snoop on this one. You don’t know how much pain I’m going through as I’m
typing this paragraph; as a devout fan of Slightly Stoopid and Rebelution and
Iration and other well-established, contemporary reggae bands, I hate that Miley
Cyrus has weaseled her way into this discussion. But she seems to have a reggae-friendly voice and it’s the best song on a
solid reggae album, so credit must be given where credit is due.
Another
highlight of the album is the creatively-titled “Smoke the Weed,” featuring the
always-fun Collie Buddz. It’s like he actually knows what he’s doing in this
song; when he has Collie Buddz cleverly pay tribute to Soul II Soul’s classic “Back
to Life” by singing “Back to weed/back to reality,” you get a sense of what is
really important to him, and wonder why Snoop Dogg didn’t thrust himself into
the reggae world sooner.
Grade: C+
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