Snoop Dogg Did Us Wrong. Or DID He?
Tonally, the opprobrium for Snoop's Inaugural appearance, sounds, somehow...a skosh suspicious. Hating Trump is one thing but is it the same thing as hating someone who doesn't hate him?
They say that the opposite of love is not actually hate. No, not that passion-full agenda of hates that could easily turn to loves, but rather indifference. I’ll cross the street to service a deep and abiding hatred. Probably just how I would to serve an enduring love. But if it’s something I could not give a shit about then I tend to not give a shit about it, one way or another.
Which is to say I hate the Red Hot Chili Peppers not the least of which is because Flea tried to run me down with his Mercedes (and yes, the make of the car makes me saltier than if he had tried to run me down with a Yugo). But Oasis? Whatever, man.
So it goes with the guy who WE just elected president. Unlike some of the rest of you though, as a native New Yorker, my hatred for Donald Trump and his blowhardistic ways, well, I’ve hated him since the 1970s. For a variety of reasons but mostly because of the open racism that attended all of his early real estate doings. He wouldn’t rent to Black folks in New York where it wasn’t even an open SECRET that he wouldn’t.
He was just a real Archie Bunker without Norman Lear writing for him. That is, without a punchline in sight, Trump trod all over the politesse that helped soft soap redlining, block busting and the white flight that framed 1970’s conversations about who could live where and set the scene for all of the later action that caused President Gerald Ford to urge New York, as the local papers had pegged it, to drop dead.
Moreover, the sad man-boy he started out as seemed much more in love with the power of celebrity, with him as its focus, than anything of real substance.
Which is precisely how America got itself fucked.
You see, celebrity has become substantive. Not because it actually is but because in the absence of anything else with actual gravity, it’s had to be. His show then exposed him, New York vibe and all, to the rest of an America that had come to use the city itself as a punchline (where’d that salsa come from? “NEW YORK CITY?!?!”), so much so that when it came time to run for president in 2016, he had become “their” guy.
So what had been writ small when it came to New York — the nativism, the anger, the prevailing sense that things were fucked and “we” knew who had fucked them — was then writ large across the face of America and Trump had handily beaten Nurse Ratched, er, we mean Hillary Clinton because of it.
Of course, Black folks, as perfectly placed with the now-unfunny Dave Chappelle in an SNL open, opined that The Blacks were not surprised. This is America where for anything to go right for us for any length of time, blood had had to be spilled. Making us a lot less susceptible to surprises where basements are concerned or considerations are had for how low America could go.
In 2024 though, when Snoop Dogg (and Nelly? Who we thought was largely, um, dead?) agrees to perform at Donald Trump’s inauguration after an election he either genuinely won OR stole depending on what kind of lunatic you’re riding with, the world lost its mind.
How COULD Snoop do such a thing??!?
Those who said this would not be alone in saying it either, as the one who just wrote the sentence you just read said the same thing. I thought of multiple varieties of House Negroes, the not-Black OJ Simpson, Eazy E visiting the Bush White House and the ultimate and aforementioned Sammy Davis Jr. hugging Nixon. And I started to feel uncomfortable.
[O]rganized crime, a place where there are specifically no ideologues… [where] one hand washes the other here…there’s still a big difference between, Donnie Brasco style, a friend of mine and a friend of ours.
The vitriol, the sense of, initially, entitlement and then abandonment, the outrage. All from people who’ve probably not listened to Snoop’s music since the ‘90s. Which is OK as Snoop has easily eclipsed any sort of career as a rapper. Snoop with bows with Martha Stewart and all of his nonmusical ventures has gone well beyond being a businessman and, with a nod to another accommodating Negro, Jay Z, he is now the business. Man.
Him saying “Fuck Donald Trump” during a Biden administration is being trucked out as some example of hypocrisy. Even if you know that Trump pardoned a prisoner friend of his. Because, you see, this is part of the key and what most seem to missing. That is, those without even a passing understanding of organized crime, a place where there are specifically no ideologues, have forgotten that one hand washes the other here and there’s still a big difference between, Donnie Brasco style, a friend of mine and a friend of ours.
Besides, despite decades of “both sides” othering Black folks, who are we beholden to, and why?
Which brings me back around to Steven Spielberg’s film on the great JG Ballard’s book Empire of the Sun. In one of the more significant opening sequences a train pulls into a Japanese prisoner of war camp. The doors slide open and armed Japanese soldiers are standing outside of them. One orders a soldier prisoner to pick up a rock.
The soldier of whom the request was made starts going all Geneva Convention and states that as an officer of the British army and almost before he can finish his sentence, his head is stove in by a rifle-wielding Japanese soldier, knocking him to the ground. John Malkovich jumps out of the rail car and the British officer waves him off in the mistaken belief that Malkovich was trying to help him.
Malkovich, the actor, shoots him a look AND then picks up the rock. The look? The look informs all of the above saying, as it did, if it keeps my head on my shoulders I’m picking up the g-ddamned rock.
Snoop is picking up the rock. Like Bezos. Like Tim Cook.
Would I play Trump’s inauguration? Well, BUNUEL would not. But we’d have nothing to lose, and very clearly nothing to gain from doing so. We’re not multimillionaires, our friends in prison are unlikely to draw pardons, and our “businesses” are largely interference free. Which is to say, we can afford to shit on Trump.
But among those who can’t afford to do so, why be so chippy about them making choices that don’t serve the rest of us simply because we feel that our choices helped put them there in the first place? They owe us nothing.
“Dumb asses.” My mother’s contempt for House Negro accommodations is nonnegotiable. “If you want to lose your Black audience by playing to a guy who has and will hurt your own people go ahead.”
But is Snoop’s audience even Black anymore? Moreover, which guy in a position to not do so, has not done so when it countered his interests? And here we’re talking about presidents doing things counter to the interests of Black people. Or gay people. Or women. Or people of other colors.
And so Snoop might be a cynical opportunist…but there but for the grace of G-d and a few hundred million dollars go I.
Am I in the Snoop business? Not even a little bit, the last record of his that I bought was almost two decades ago. But I am in the business of minding my own business (the key to good dental health) and for those who say the business of America IS our business, I’d counter with: then Snoop’s choice should be easy for you to understand then.
Right? Yeah, I guess so.
There. Now, you feel any better? I do and will. Especially when Trump starts giving it to all of his supporters (not the cynical opportunists, but the true believers) who can then claim that they “never saw it coming.”
Reached for a quote then I will say as I have been: Fuck Donald Trump. Backed up with “I told you so.” And I absolutely will have.
You lay out a very good argument for why Snoop did that, but it sickens me that we've gotten to a point where doing that is necessary.