About This Time 20 Years Ago… It’s The Hits Of October-ish 2004!

The Hottest Hit On The Planet:

“SNOOOOOOOOOOOOP!”

What an entrance heh? Just when you thought Snoop Dogg couldn’t possibly get any cooler he moseys on into his latest jam, announced by a weirdly whimsical “SNOOOOOOOOOOOOP!”

Slowly but surely Snoop managed to transform himself from a gangsta rapper from Long Beach, California, recording his “Nuthin’ But A G Thang” verse over the phone whilst in jail, into a living, breathing cartoon character. Less of a person, more of a persona.

Even after Snoop dropped the “Doggy” from his name, a move that ought to have seen him be treated more seriously, he couldn’t stop it from from happening.

“Drop It Like It’s Hot” serves as the mid-point in this transition. Snoop was still a famous rapper, but he wasn’t just famous for being a rapper. Snoop was more famous for just being Snoop.

Turns out there’s a lot of money to be made in just being Snoop. Turns out that the Snoop “brand” was capable of being “extended” into a whole bunch of different “categories.” As they say in the marketing profession.

According to Snoop’s LinkedIn page:

But it’s true. He does. He joined in 2023. Snoop now sells:

• A line of “Gin & Juice” cocktails
• 19 Crimes wine
• Canine fashion label Snoop Doggie Doggs
• An investment fund called Casa Verde Capital – “the leading venture capital firm focusing exclusively on the cannabis industry”

Not to mention his own cannabis brand – Leafs By Snoop.™ Following the consumption of, you can satisfy your munchies with his own branded Snoop Cereal:

All of that was still in the future, but Snoop already had a bunch of business ventures percolating in 2004. Here he is talking about them to Billboard:

“I wanted to create that bond and that love between the public and myself by creating things… within the realm of Snoop Dogg.”

Let me try to translate that into Snoop-speak:

That’s much better. As any marketing professional will tell you, it is critical to maintain the authenticity of your “brand voice.”

Marketing professionals would also agree with Snoop about the need to keep his business ventures “within the realm of Snoop Dogg.” Marketing professionals refer to this as “brand consistency.” For “brand consistency” is a critical component of “brand authenticity” which in turn is a key consideration for building “brand loyalty.”

So what was within the realm of Snoop Dogg?

• Movies, for one. Any movie in which Snoop could look fly whilst talking sly. Any movie in which he could build his brand as a cartoon caricature of a weed smokin’, fly-shit wearing, pimpin’ hustler. As a bad boy, with a lot of hoes.

Starsky & Hutch for example. Also Soul Plane in which Snoop played a pilot for a Black-owned airline with low-rider planes and a safety video based on Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor.”  That movie didn’t earn a whole lot in the cinema, largely because everyone had already bought a bootleg copy on the streets.

• Having a comedy-skit show on MTV was definitely within the realm of Snoop Dogg. A show that was inevitably titled Doggy Fizzle Televizzle, in which you, the probably stoned television audience, could watch Snoop being Snoop for 30 minutes straight! 

Having viewed the first episode for research purposes, I feel qualified to inform you that Doggy Fizzle Televizzle has not, as the kids say, “aged well”, even if Snoop did like to defend it with a “it’s not distasteful, it’s all in good taste” (it’s really not) and “there’s not as many bleeps as The Osbournes, surely a low bar to clear.

Porn was another “category” in which the Snoop brand could be “leveraged.”

It started with Snoop hosting an episode of Girls Gone Wild.  This was inevitably followed by Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle, produced by Larry Flynt! Snoop was getting so good at the porn game that he directed the next one – Snoop Dogg’s Hustlaz: Diary of a Pimp – himself under the easily guessable pseudonym of Snoop Scorsese. It was the biggest selling porno of 2003! Don’t worry, I won’t embed it. Snoop truly did specialize in makin’ all the girls get naked.

The realm of Snoop Dogg almost stretched as far as It’s A Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie.

But Snoop’s scene got cut after a backlash from Bill O’Reilly, and Project Islamic Hope’s Najee Ali.

The Snoop Dogg brand was at peak-saturation point when “Drop It Like It’s Hot” dropped. Snoop’s various business ventures and media appearances helped to build his brand, which helped sell his hits, which helped to build his brand again, which helped to sell his clothing line … phew my head is spinning.

For example, “Drop It Like It’s Hot” features what is probably the best-known passage of pure-uncut Snoop-speak ever committed to wax:

“So don’t change the dizzle, turn it up a little
I got a living room full of fine dime brizzles
Waiting on the Pizzle, the Dizzle and the Shizzle
G’s to the bizzack, now ladies here we gizzo”

I’m 99% sure that Snoop is just taking the piss towards the end of that.

“Don’t change the dizzle, turn it up a little” came from the theme song to the previously mentioned Doggy Fizzle Televizzle, as though Snoop was using his hit single to promote his cable show. Maybe Snoop thought it would convince MTV to pay him a rumoured $1 million for a second season. But MTV had already moved on to Xzibit’s Pimp My Ri3de.

Prior to “Drop It Like It’s Hot” Snoop was already an omnipresent force in popular culture. He was on both the TV screen and in the magazines. After “Drop It Like It’s Hot” Snoop even found himself on The Ellen Show. What did Snoop do on The Ellen Show? He tried to teach her Snoop-speak, of course. Over the next decade or so, Snoop would find himself spending a surprisingly large proportion of his time patiently teaching Snoop-speak to white ladies.

“Drop It Like It’s Hot” is one of the coolest hit singles of the 00s not only because it’s Snoop Dogg at his Snoop Doggiest, but because it’s also The Neptunes at their most alien and spaced-out.

Pharrell and Chad had long been endlessly inventive in introducing surprising sounds to the R&B club ecosystem – on Kelis’ “Milkshake” for example, clubbers were introduced to the sound of the darbuka, the national drum of Egypt! – and on “Drop It Like It’s Hot” we get Pharrell’s most avant-garde instrument choice yet: his mouth!

The “Drop It Like It’s Hot” groove is basically a bunch of mouth-clicks. The main instrument is silence. The production on “Drop It Like It’s Hot” is so empty and void of noise that the hiss of a spray can stands in for a hi-hat. “Drop It Like It’s Hot” might just be the most zonked out track Snoop has ever rapped on.

On “Drop It Like It’s Hot” Snoop and Pharrell seem to be competing over who sounds as though they are putting in the least amount of effort. Somewhat surprisingly I think, given that Snoop had spent more than a decade sounding as though he never had to try, Pharrell wins.

Pharrell’s rap is barely a rap at all. It’s a murmur. A mumble. About how he’s a nice dude, with some nice dreams. About how he’s an eligible bachelor, with a million-dollar boat. It all sounds cool as f*ck.

You know what else sounds cool?

“SNOOOOOOOOOOOOP!”

“SNOOOOOOOOOOOOP!”

That “SNOOOOOOOOOOOOP!” is even more playful than the mouth-clicks. It’s that very playfulness that is “Drop It Like It’s Hot”s secret sauce. It’s the contrast between Snoop matter-of-fact muttering about being a pistol-whipping Crip and a groove that could have been made by kindergarten kids. It sinister, yet silly. As though Snoop is so sharp he can spizzle nonsense over the top of what may as well be a toy xylophone and a kazoo and still come out sounding like a real boss.

Somewhere in Muppet-land, someone was surely kicking themselves.

“Drop It Like It’s Hot” is a 9.

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Meanwhile, in Political Punk Land:

In November 2004, George W Bush – widely regarded to be the dumbest U.S. President up to that point – was elected for a second term. Many experts, smarter than me, have written many thought-pieces, and proposed many theories, about how this could have possibly occurred.

All these columns however, all these theories, have neglected one important factor.

That Green Day: the Biggest Punk Band In The Land, decided, a few short months before the Presidential election, to bombard rock radio with a political jingle referring to the American people as “idiots.”

What was Billie Joe Armstrong thinking? What was he trying to accomplish? Was he thinking at all? Did Billie Joe truly believe that swinging voters, those struggling to decide between the dumb and the dull, would hear “American Idiot” on the radio and think “well I don’t want Green Day to think I’m an idiot… I guess I’d better vote for John Kerry”?

Or would they feel they were being attacked by elitist rockstars? Green Day were, after all, recording a rock opera! And they came from California! Green Day probably used such expressions as “flyover states.”

Alternatively, would they feel that they were being lectured at by idiot rockstars? Because, let’s face it: Billie Joe Armstrong has never really come across as someone who was all that smart.

Some of that idiot impression was due to genes. The kind of genes that still makes Billie Joe look like a snotty-nosed schoolboy even in his 50s. But it was also because when Green Day had first appeared on the radio and MTV a decade earlier, they had been singing about getting stoned and masturbating.

Since “American Idiot” was so clearly directed at Bush and his supporters, since Green Day were so clearly supporting John Kerry, albeit in not exactly glowing terms – drummer Tre Cool putting it like this: “you vote for blood or you vote for ketchup. I’m votin’ ketchup” – did “American Idiot” simply create the impression in the mind of the average rock-radio listener that John Kerry was aligned with people who thought that Americans were idiots? Ergo, that John Kerry himself, thought that the American people were idiots?

This was not the soundbite that John Kerry needed America to hear.

Sometime in September 2004, Green Day and John Kerry were on the same Letterman show, sharing the same green room.

John Kerry did not want to hear an “American Idiot.”

It’s not impossible that John Kerry’s disinterest in hearing “American Idiot” had nothing to do with political strategy. Maybe it was because he had already pledged his allegiance to Green Day’s rivals for the title of Greatest Pop Punk Band Alive, Blink 182.

A whole lot of people were presumedly offended by “American Idiot” at the time. The same way that Trump supporters have more recently been offended that the band has changed the lyrics from “not part of a redneck agenda” to “not part of a MAGA agenda.” But I’ve done the deepest dive I could and found surprisingly little trace of it.

One article mentions a woman at an airport in Orange County telling Billie Joe “I just want you to know I’m proud to be an American Idiot!” Which is a stupid thing to say of course, but she can’t have been the only one to have thought it.

Mmmm… this did not bode well. That was the issue of Q in which the band was seriously considering burning the flag for the cover photo – “It means nothing to me” said Mike, on bass: “let’s burn the f*ckin’ thing.”

All that hanging out with politicians had clearly taught them the importance of staying on-message.

“American Idiot” was obviously written in response to George W. Bush and “The War On Terror” and everything else that was happening at the time. And by everything else… well, here’s Billie Joe trying to explain what it’s about whilst teenage girls scream in the background.

“The song is just dealing with what is going on with American pop culture right now, television, war and news and reality television all coming together at the same time and dealing with like Viagra commercials in between… it causes a lot of confusion.”

I’m sure it does.

But it was also written in response to hearing a song by Lynyrd Skynyrd on the radio:

 So he got to the studio and he scribbled down the lyrics.

“I looked at the guys like, “Do you mind that I’m saying this?” And they were like, “No, we agree with you.”

Fine, and I’m sure it felt good to get that out. I’m sure a lot of people felt real good shouting it out at the top of their voices, singing along to the age of paranoia. But those people were never going to vote for Bush anyway. However, in this information age of hysteria, “American Idiot” was going out to those who might not agree that Americans were idiots. To those who might not like to be referred to as idiots. To those who might be pushed towards Bush as a result.

Just to be clear: I am not, for an instant, suggesting that Billie Joe Armstrong is solely responsible for the second term of the Bush Administration.

It might feel satisfying to get a song like “American Idiot” off your chest, and to find that other people – millions of people – feel the same way.

It must feel gratifying to know that you are doing something! But that’s not the question you need to ask. The question you need to ask is: will “American Idiot” help to create the world that you want to see? Or will it make it worse? Is it especially helpful for a spiky haired punk band to go around calling the American people idiots just months before a Presidential election?

“American Idiot” performed particularly well in those parts of the world – Australia, the UK, Europe, Canada – where American idiocy is taken as read, where “Americans are so stupid” is one of those facts that everyone knows even if they know nothing else.

Case In Point: An Overheard In Melbourne entry from, I guess, four or five years later (I’m paraphrasing from memory):

(They were mistaking Obama for Osama in case that wasn’t obvious.)

That’s so embarrassing. I don’t want people to think Australians are all like that. I don’t want to be an Australian idiot.

“American Idiot” is a 6.

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Meanwhile, in Stupidly Long Song Titles Land:

Well, you can’t say they didn’t try to warn us.

“No Logo” by Naomi Klein was dropped in December 1999. What a way for The Left to end the 20th Century! The Left had spent the 90s a little uncertain about where to go after the fall of the Soviet Union. But now they had an Anti-Consumerist Manifesto!

But that Johnny Boy had “No Logo” in mind – subconsciously at least – when they wrote “You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve” is almost certain given that Naomi spent a whole lot of time banging on about shoes. Specifically sneakers. More specifically, Nike sweatshops.

As in “Adidas sleek mystique reversed” which sounds like something that Naomi might have written if “No Logo” was composed as a haiku.

One of the members of Johnny Boy:

…had been the keyboard tech for Manic Street Preachers, whose lead singer, James Dean Bradfield, also produced the record. This feels relevant since Manic Street Preachers were themselves famous for their unwieldly song titles.

 “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next” remains the UK Number One with the longest song title (with no brackets). (it’s an 8)

Even that wasn’t as much of a mouthful as the song title that was nothing more than one single word: “Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayitsworldwouldfallapart.” But for its combination of poetic wordiness and levity and vaguely worded threats, “You Are Generation…” beats them both.

“You Are The Generation” begins with The “Be My Baby” Beat: Setting the scene for Johnny Boy’s whole aesthetic as a couple waxing nostalgic about a more innocent time when girl groups wore more clothes. Nothing quite says “Now Is The Worst Time To Be Young In The History Of The World And You All Suck” quite like the “Be My Baby” Beat, and if that turns out to have been the original title of the song, it would not surprise me at all. The early 2000s were THE WORST!!

Although the fact that Kylie’s “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” is playing in the background of that scene feels like reason enough.

There have always been people who have hated the era they’ve ended up in. But the early 2000s genuinely did feel as though it was THE WORST!

A world where it truly felt that Big Business owned EVERYTHING! A post-Britney world where the only pop options were variations on the Britney theme (sexy-Britney Christina, punk-Britney P!nk, punk-Britney-with-a-tie Avril), and where the two soul-crushingly dominant television programs were Big Brother and Idol, shows that only appeared to exist in order to maximize mobile phone company profits.

The best thing about “You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve” is probably the title. Which generation are they referring to? Their own? Or were they referring to the younger generation? Since every generation probably buys more shoes than the generation before it, every generation is the generation that bought more shoes. If buying more shoes is the decisive factor for getting what we deserve, then we are in caught in a vicious circle of accumulative suckage!

Buying shoes does seem like a trivial crime for such a vaguely worded threat. According to Johnny Boy’s world view it is not the sinister senior management and shareholders of global corporations who are the enemy, it’s the kids on the street for buying into it. Or at least into buying the shoes.

At least partially it’s because “Shoes” was never heard by people who didn’t already agree with the song’s premise to begin with. Not a single person who heard “Shoes” didn’t already feel a vague sense of unease about what their consumerism was doing to the planet, or to kids in Chinese sweat shops. Sure, preaching to the converted was hardly going to change the world, but neither was telling people that they were idiots. “Shoes” felt like an in-joke, and in a world where the monoculture felt so oppressive, an in-joke felt like a password to the resistance. Listening to “Shoes” let you feel like the member of a club dedicated to the downfall of consumerist society.

It was all a lie, of course.

“You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve” is a 9.

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