Album Review: 10 Til’ Midnight by Snoop Dogg
The 22nd Snoop record rests on the same premise as its sleeve. He bought Death Row, he is from where he is from, and the kids need to know.
The sleeve places eight figures into a black-and-white phalanx with red and blue accents flickering at the corners. That staging is basically the same confrontational stagger N.W.A. used in 1988 to push their own block of Compton into the foreground of American pop music. Quoting Straight Outta Compton on the cover of a 22nd solo full-length is, essentially, a claim about who built the West Coast, and Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. has been planted there longer than most of the people he is quoting (although the cover look like it was created by AI). 10 Til’ Midnight is his fourth release since he reacquired Death Row Records from MNRK Music Group four years ago, and almost every line on it follows from that purchase.
He names the label out loud. Swizz Beatz is still ad-libbing the hook on “Step” when Snoop’s first verse, a couple bars past “50 somethin’ years old, and still with this Crip shit,” arrives at “Death Row is an army, a fucking navy/Turn crumbs into biscuits, it’s all gravy”. He names it on “Stop Counting My Poccets,” whose intro is a complaint about a chickenhead doing math on his money out loud, and whose first verse pivots into the flat declarative “Death Row Records, yeah, nigga, I own it.” He names it on “Pop My Shit,” where verse two snaps “Death Row Records is back, Crips and Pirus.” He names it again on “QTSAMYAH,” where October London sings “If you ain’t on Death Row/You probably feelin’ famished” as the chorus reprise.
There is a “you” on this LP, and the “you” is almost always young. “OG to BG” runs Soopafly’s bassline under a verse that spins autobiography into instruction:
“Half of the homies had hands on real keys
I’m not talkin’ instruments for this incident
We sell crack and mines by the increment.”
Snoop’s mother surfaces a few bars later, warning him, “In due time, nigga, you’ll do time,” and his teenage self refuses to listen. Kanobby’s hook circles in as a hand on the shoulder (“I’m just givin’ you a little game/BG, yeah”), then Snoop’s outro chases right behind it: “I pray that you grow to be OGs/And don’t get caught by the alphabet boys/Let that sink in.” Alphabet boys are federal. A 54-year-old Long Beach Crip (himself once a YN with a mother saying as much) is repeating, plainly, what mothers always say. “17 Rules” stages that lecture as a story, MyGuyMars’s piano figure ticking through while the numerals one through seventeen plant beats inside a sentence about a kid pulling fifteen years for a shooting at twelve, then a RICO at nineteen that ends the arithmetic at life. Verse two arrives at “What happened to the little homie? Cuh, he got life.” The same reflex swings at younger rappers throwing subliminals across “Leave That Dogg Alone” (“You a peasant tryna wrestle with a legend, huh/Tryna tug on my tail like it’s nothin’”), and Snoop signs off the record on “QTSAMYAH” with “Some of you niggas won’t get a hit/Until you get hit, nigga.”
Pharrell wires “Lied 2 U” with his usual glossed R&B bounce, the kind of beat he has been giving Snoop sessions since R&G (Rhythm & Gangsta), while Snoop perches on top dismissing the man whispering in his woman’s ear with “He claim he that boss, and he well off/But I’m the nigga that fell off/That nigga lied to you”. Swizz Beatz reuses his elastic DMX-era ad-lib on “Step.” Nottz, the Virginia journeyman who came up cutting Busta Rhymes records and has since handed beats to everyone from Royce 5’9” to Kendrick Lamar, runs the loose horn-and-snare gait of “Stop Counting My Poccets” and the slow West Coast roll of “Long Beachin’.” Soopafly takes “OG to BG” plus “No Ticcet Needed,” the latter looping a sample of The Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride” beneath a hosting scene of platinum plaques and Snoop’s stage direction “I’ll be right back in somethin’ more comfortable.” Rick Rock supplies “Bread Under the Bed,” with Stresmatic chanting “I keep my bread under the bed/Rubber bands, rubber bands, rubber bands” over the chorus.
Nottz’s other Snoop production this run, “Long Beachin’,” rolls on a molasses-paced West Coast bounce under Shawn Louisiana’s pre-chorus about three-wheel tires screechin’ and Dickies still saggin’. Then Snoop slides in. He speaks rather than raps, with the cadence pitched between an introduction and a deposition:
“From playin’ marbles at Roosevelt Elementary School
To playing rack ‘em up at Martin Luther King Jr. Park
All the way on up to Long Beach Poly High School
Home of scholars and champions.”
He says it plain. Roosevelt Elementary sits at Pacific Avenue and Pacific Coast Highway, a bike ride from King Park on Lemon. Long Beach Poly has graduated more NFL players than any other high school in California, a stat the school updates yearly. Snoop ends the verse with “We are the turf by the surf/That is Long Beach City to be exact,” reading it off like a street address. Forty-something years out of those blocks (and counting) have not moved Snoop a single block away, and the Straight Outta Compton quote on the cover becomes a relay between two cities sharing five miles of the 710.
Snoop self-produces “Slid Off,” and the bounce rolls on while he cycles through “I get money while you get sleep” energy and never lets the verse climb anywhere. Trinidad James whips off a sharp hook on “Pop My Shit,” but Snoop’s verses underneath read as tour-bus checklist and “Big Mac is back” McDonald’s wordplay; the writing here has none of the heat “OG to BG” had. “Daddy Rich” is a fifty-second Richard Pryor sample from Car Wash doing all of its own work, planted as a billboard for the next track. None of these slumps sinks the record. They sit in the room with sharper company.
Peezy’s verse on “Dogg Wattup Doe” is the actual surprise here. The Detroit rapper, signed to Real 1 and the Boss Lady’s Ghetto Connection, walks into a track that the interlude explicitly frames as “Detroit vs. everybody” and runs a quiet seminar on plain-talk rap mechanics: “I can get ‘em to your front door, you just send me the bread/Send the trackin’ number, when they land, you just meet me.” Six bars later he drifts off the hustle pose into something closer to a confession about burnout: “Think I might retire from the booth and go just do a film/Tired of niggas rappin’ ‘bout this shit we really do for real.” Cross-regional alliance has been one of Snoop’s oldest tricks; he has been pulling rappers from outside Compton onto Dogg Pound product since the Doggystyle sessions, and Peezy here is, quietly, the cleanest version of it in years. Verse two exits on “The loudest niggas talkin’ be the brokest niggas in the room.” Snoop laughs through it almost involuntarily, and the hook rolls back in as they run the whole thing again.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “OG to BG,” “17 Rules,” “Long Beachin’”