This story is part of the 2025 TIME100. Read Hoda Kotb’s tribute to Snoop Dogg here.
Maybe it’s the constant intake of weed, or surviving in some mean streets, but Calvin Broadus—known to his associates as Dogg and the rest of the world as Snoop—is a very peaceable guy. His mother gave him the nickname Snoopy after noticing the similarities between her son and the happy-go-lucky puppy in the Peanuts cartoons and she nailed it. He hands out hugs, even to reporters he’s just met. He declines to be irritated even by very nosy questions. He frequently wears sunglasses. He’s very funny. He likes to dance. He really likes to nap.
But at this very moment, in one of the studios in the Compound, his suite of offices situated between a gas station and an airport rental-car return lot in Los Angeles, Snoop, 53, is annoyed. Repeatedly using phrases that TIME doesn’t spell out, he is excoriating a recording company that he feels is being underhand. “They’re sticking you up,” he says to an associate. “You just let me get in there, talk to them, and be like, ‘All right, hold on. This is what's happening. [Rapping his fist on some Snoop merchandise] See that name right here? You see these kids right here? It's a whole different genre that's gonna spend with us. You n-ggas owe us. So reshuffle that contract, y'all pay us to be on the road, and then we'll go out there and do it.’”
What nefarious outlaw organization has got the affable Snoop so riled up? It’s Kidz Bop, the company that rerecords pop songs into ear candy for the under 10-set. In August 2022, Snoop and his team created a series of child-friendly videos featuring animated animals who sing, dance, and chant affirmations, led by a tall friendly dog who’s voiced by Snoop. Doggyland, as it's known, has taken off, especially the affirmations. To some parents, it might seem jarring to hear phrases like “I get better every single day” in the distinctive voice they associate with lines like “I got a pocket full of rubbers,” but the songs have millions of fans and Kidz Bop has invited Snoop, or his nom de toy Bow Wizzle, to join a tour of 65 cities it’s planning. Snoop finds this insulting, not because it’s gangsta-incompatible, but because the incentives are insufficient.
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At a time when people increasingly huddle within cultural fortresses of their algorithms, Snoop is a battering ram, forcing his way across the drawbridges into any venue where there is an audience. He can release a new rap album and a series of children’s toys in the span of a few weeks. He has his own branded Skechers collection and his own branded weed. “Gin and Juice,” the profane 1994 party song, is now a beverage sold at Target. He was a bespectacled spectacle at the Olympics, watching equestrian events with his buddy Martha Stewart and jumping in the pool with Michael Phelps, and a judge on The Voice, where he got weepy during the elimination round. He has released or licensed his name to cookbooks, snack foods, ice cream, jewelry, a branded clothing line with Walmart, wine, video games, NFTs, and, yes, doggy outfits. In May his signature laid-back drawl will be heard at commencement at the University of Southern California's business school, but he can also be heard reading any bedtime story or instruction manual as one of the voices of Speechify.
Over his roughly three decades in the spotlight, Snoop has somehow found a way to be whoever a particular audience needs him to be without betraying who he is. "I just feel like my fan base is people, because my mother taught me to love people,” he says. “So I feel like I attract people, and my sh-t connects to all people." Wherever you go and whatever you consume, Snoop is there. He is the one true omnipresent Dogg.
A day spent at the Compound, despite Snoop’s chill vibe, is not a relaxing one. He’s very focused, even though he is pretty much always zooted. (The weed is not an act. The man blazes up so much, it’s like he’s expecting Moses.) And there are so many Snoops: coach Snoop, producer Snoop, entrepreneur Snoop, rapper Snoop. The Compound boasts a drive-in movie theater for about 20 cars, a game room, a casino, three recording studios, a full-size basketball court, and a barber, but on the day TIME visits, it’s all business. It is not football season, but he’s got meetings about his league. He’s got meetings about Death Row Records, the label that made him famous when he was young and he bought in 2022. He’s got Doggyland material to record. A suspicious visitor might infer some of these meetings were set up as a show-and-tell, but Snoop never phones it in.
“Snoop is a born f-cking hustler,” says Dr. Dre, the iconic producer and Snoop’s longtime collaborator, who marvels not only at the breadth of things his friend does, but at the durability of his rap career. “He cannot sit down. I personally won't—and can't—do all the things that he's doing. He's everywhere. There's been times where I'm actually trying to get him to slow down and just take a break and focus on one thing. But it's just not in his nature.”
When asked if he worries about oversaturating the market with Dogg, Snoop is polite but firm. “The way you framing it, with all due respect, is like I'll do anything,” he says. These days he’s less interested in being a hired hand and more interested in being a partner. “I want you to frame it like I'll do anything if I own the brand. That's a big difference. So me marketing and branding for a company—if I don't own it, I ain't f-cking with it.” Rather than selling out, Snoop suggests, he’s making moves. He can’t name any business titan whose example he follows. “That don't exist in my world,” he says. “Titans that impressed me were local people in my neighborhood as a kid, and they were doing things that were considered illegal.”
Any endorsement he offers often requires more than a check with his name on it. “You can pay me, but that ain't all we doing,” he says. “We gonna make sure you take care of this community initiative that I have. And it could be silent or it can be loud, but that's a part of the deal as well.”
Twenty years ago, Snoop spent about a million dollars to start a middle-school youth football and cheer league in South Central Los Angeles. He booked fields, hired coaches, bought uniforms (in multiple styles) and equipment, and flew his players interstate to play competitive teams. “We needed a positive outlet for kids to be a part of something in those trouble hours when school let out,” says the Snoop Young Football League’s commissioner and co-founder, Khalil Wadood. “Instead of them just hanging in the hood, they're at the football field.” Currently the league has about 2,500 players and 1,000 cheerleaders plus 10 teams and 45 cheerleaders in Snoop’s Special Stars, a parallel league for disabled kids started by Nykauni Tademy, the woman who served as the team mom for the Pomona Steelers, one of the teams Snoop coached.
About 50 players from the league have made it into the NFL. But more than 1,000 have gotten into college, most on football scholarships. One of them, Jaylin Smith, an NFL hopeful in this year’s draft, has come to see Snoop on the day TIME visits, to give him a USC letterman jacket. Smith, who is about to graduate from the university, was a feisty but tiny 10-year-old with a widowed father who was trying to keep him and his four siblings fed, housed, and off the streets when he joined Snoop’s team. “He told me one thing that kind of stuck with me for life. It was ‘stay ready so you'll never have to get ready,’” says Smith. “It kind of just changed my perspective on any situation off the field, on the field, but it ultimately just helped me for patience.”
When Snoop arrives at the meeting, with an entourage but sans spliff—to ensure Smith does not fail a drug test from secondhand smoke—he fusses over the gift and tells Smith he has no advice to offer but then gives some anyway. “When you get on that team, the dudes that's already there don't want you to be there because you finna take somebody's job,” he warns. He recommends that Smith, a 5-ft. 10-in., 197-lb. mass of muscle and sinew strengthen his core. His entourage starts to snicker. “Y'all laughing, but I know what the f-ck I'm talking about, n-ggas, your core. That's what's gonna be most important!”
After 40 minutes of joking and encouragement, Snoop dons the letterman jacket and returns to his main studio to meet with one of his Death Row recording artists, Jane Handcock, a songwriter he’s trying to take into the limelight. “The challenge is just trying to create a lane for our artists that's unique to who they are,” he says. “The original Death Row identity is gangster rap, and the new identity is great music, good people, peace and love.” He’s even toying with the idea of releasing Doggyland music on it.
He puts on a track, bows his head, and nods along with it. Recording may not be as lucrative for him as other enterprises—and Death Row is arguably not the best name for a peace-and-love vibe—but music remains Snoop’s first love. “People think I get caught up in commercials and movies and TV and fail to realize that my foundation is music,” he says. “I have to realign everybody to understand it. There's none of it without the music.” He has little appetite for the ruthless machinations of music promotion, however. He signed Handcock partly because she “sings like a bird” and reminded him of his mother.
“Everything I do up here is family,” he says, gesturing to the recording studio known as the Mothership, which has the feel of a bridge of the Starship Enterprise but with more sports memorabilia, including a size 12 basketball sneaker made from the fabric of one of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s old Lakers uniforms. “I built this for family. And God gives you the ability to have a family that you're born with, and then he gives you the ability to create your own family. This is a family I created.”
After dousing Smith and Handcock with waves of enthusiasm, he widens his lens to the populace at large. The tension around Kidz Bop now dissolved, Claude Brooks, who runs the Doggyland business, previews a remix they’re hoping Snoop will do with Baby Shark. (Be warned: It’s very catchy.) Snoop does an impromptu shark dance. Also, YouTube wants more affirmations, so after one quick read-through of a stapled sheet, Snoop puts down his blunt and slips into his recording booth to assume his Bow Wizzle persona. The raps—“I choose my feelings. You? I choose my feelings too!”— are about as far as can be from such hits as “Can You Control Yo Hoe” or “Drop It While It’s Hot.” But Snoop is all in. “If you want to go far, first need to see yourself there,” he raps and then stops. “That's a cold line right there. That's cold.”
The positivity appears to be paying off. In recent business meetings with hospitality and beverage executives, Snoop says, about a quarter of them mentioned his music. Only one talked about Missionary, the album he released in December. The rest wanted to talk about Doggyland. Even his grandchildren like to address him as Bow Wizzle instead of Papa Snoop. (He prefers the latter.) Snoop has neurodivergent individuals in his family, and the songs seem to be striking a particular chord with people who are parenting similar kids. The toy versions are selling briskly; the Bow Wizzle Tonie toy is currently sold out.
But the relentless eagerness has had its costs. Snoop has said yes to things that have proved problematic. The breakfast cereal he launched with Master P. led to a legal dispute with Post Consumer Brands and Walmart. And although he’s avowedly apolitical—he has voted only once in his life, for Joe Biden—he played at the Crypto Ball in Washington, D.C., which organizers touted as a celebration of President Donald Trump’s inauguration. It wasn’t an official event, but some fans saw his participation as selling out given his scathing criticism of the President in the past. “I don't do politics and I don't do religion,” he says. “I don't represent the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. I represent the motherf-cking gangster party.” Given the opportunity to correct any misimpressions about the ball, Snoop says he’s forgotten it ever happened. “We moved on to a whole nother day,” he says. “Nothing to talk about.”
Today’s Snoop is so genial and indefatigably upbeat that it’s hard to believe that he was charged with murder in 1993. He and his bodyguard were acquitted after a trial of almost three months, although the jury deadlocked on lesser charges of involuntary manslaughter. He makes no secret of having sold drugs as a young adult. He first tried weed when he was 5 years old and his teenage uncle left a roach clip on the table. “I used to come from the energy of let's go do some sh-t that's wrong,” he says. “Let's go do something that's stupid.” The murder case, which was sealed at his request in 2024, was a turning point. After that, he started to reevaluate whom he spent time with.
Snoop was mostly raised by his mother, Beverly Broadus Green, but he doesn’t blame his dad, Vernell Varnado, for not being around. The two are close now. “I don't know what happened when I was a kid, but I do know that he's been good to me, he's been good to my grandkids, and I love him, and I have nothing to forgive him for,” says Snoop. He feels people get it backward. Instead of asking why his dad wasn't around, he’s grateful. “You gave my mother the seed to make me,” he says. “I owe you.”
When he was 9, his mother started going to church and became an evangelist. She kicked him out at 17, when she discovered he was selling drugs, but she fully supported his music career and defended him against his critics. “She always said I was going to be a preacher,” he says. Snoop has put his proselytizing chops to more commercial use, but he did release a gospel album, Bible of Love. In his mom’s last days in the hospital before her death in 2021, that was the music the family played to make her more comfortable.
In his younger days, Snoop made his name with some spectacularly misogynist lyrics, but he and his wife, Shante Broadus, have been married for 28 years. He has four kids (one with another woman) and nine grandkids. The couple separated for about a year in 2004 as Snoop tried out the lifestyle he was rapping about. He didn’t take to it. “I thought that's what I wanted, but that's not what I wanted,” he says. “I wanted to be home with my wife and my kids, and I apologized and got my act together and came on back home.”
So perhaps Dr. Dre, producer of his breakthrough album Doggystyle, knew what he was doing when he chose Missionary as the title for Snoop’s latest release, and used a condom wrapper—a symbol of conscientious pleasure—as the cover art. (“We just thought it was funny,” says Dre.) In the time between the two albums, Snoop has mastered the art of career safe sex, staying provocative enough to be exciting, but sweet enough to be welcome. He has also moved in the opposite direction of American cultural and political life: away from extremism and toward unity. In terms of overcoming differences, it’s hard to imagine a more unlikely friendship than the one he has with Stewart. “I feel like when we met, it was at a time in both of our careers where it catapulted us to a different level,” he says. “And it showed the world that you don't have to segregate.” Snoop’s biggest bad habit these days is vacuuming. “I wish I could stop,” he says. “We could be in a meeting right now, and if there's some things on the ground, I have to vacuum to clean it up.”
Despite all evidence to the contrary, there is still some terrain Snoop feels he needs to conquer. He’s toying with getting into the meme-coin business. He’d like to start an elementary school, where the curriculum would include financial literacy. Dre would love to get him out on a tour with some of his fellow 2022 Super Bowl performers. He hasn't committed to that but is already plotting another album and has said he’ll “most likely” be at the Winter Games in Italy next year. He’s made a bunch of movies, but not of the caliber he’d like; he doesn’t come out and say he wants an Oscar, but he wants to be considered for that kind of role. “I feel like it deserves that conversation,” he says. As with most of Snoop’s pursuits, he’s moving it ahead quietly and doggedly. “I'm manifesting,” he says, in a way that would make Bow Wizzle proud. “I'm on a mission to make it do what it do.”
Styled by Talia Coles; set design by Kelly Fondry; hair by Tasha Hayward; barbered by Donald Conley; make-up by Katherine Chandler; production by Petty Cash