Snoop Dogg’s show in the Berlin Max-Schmeling-Halle: sex, weed and beer

The joke that Snoop Dogg makes at the beginning of his concert in Berlin’s Max-Schmeling-Halle is a good one. However, at first you only see him on the screen in the back of the stage, sitting in a backstage room: he almost missed his own concert!

It goes without saying that the rapper is also alluding to his marijuana use, which has thrown him off track on a number of occasions. Incidentally, anyone who went to hip-hop concerts in the 1990s can sing their own song about these missed performances.

Snoop Dogg then appears live on stage, “it’s showtime!”, together with two rappers and a DJ at the mixing desk. He wears a psychedelic black and white patterned, sports-style one-piece suit, white-rimmed sunglasses and long dreads as a headdress. And he begins his Snoop Show, which has less of a focus on the present, for example with pieces from current albums that Snoop releases regularly, but is solely committed to the past.

Featuring Notorious BIG and Tupac

Eazy E. is the first to appear on screen in close-up, the legendary NWA rapper who died prematurely in 1995, predating Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg became famous. Snoop also covers his “Boyz’n’ the Hood”.

And so it goes on through the history of hip-hop in the 1990s: here Notorious BIG, who was murdered in 1997 (“Hypnotize Me”), there Tupac Shakur, who was also murdered six months earlier in a drive-by shooting (“California Love”, “Two Of Amerikaz Most Wanted”), here House of Pain (“Jump Around”), there 50 Cent, Ice Cube, Warren G and of course Dr. Dre, Snoop’s mentor and producer of his 1993 debut album, Doggystyle. Welcome to the Hip Hop Museum!

The 51-year-old, skinny Snoop leads through this with his typical nonchalance and nonchalance and his still wonderfully nasally smooth rap voice, which Autotune only knows from hearsay. Of course, he also has his own old hits in the program, and they are staged accordingly: seven scantily clad pole dancers accompany the program (plus a dancer with a monkey mask), do lascivious gymnastics on their poles and hold him, that must also be the case, not only on “Sexual Eruption”, buttocks, according to the title of the debut album.

money, weed and sex

So the show not only has museum character, but also seems quite anachronistic with its barely broken, even affirmatively turned sexism, its celebration of weed and gin, optionally beer, with the shots that Snoop fires from a red plastic gun filled with banknotes, with all that gangster stuff.

Nevertheless, the whole thing is enormously entertaining, especially if you understand it as museum-like and historical, not least in comparison to the dull, unimaginatively puristic performance of the opening act D 12, Eminem’s former band vehicle.

Ode to smoking weed

Finally, Pharrell Williams is brought in as the suit-wearing emcee to set up one of Snoop’s biggest hits, “Drop It Like It’s Hot.” Which in turn – probably involuntarily – indicates that Snoop is a gifted rapper who can ennoble other people’s pieces (just think of the wonderful “That Girl” by Pharrell Williams), but himself depends on the quality of his producers.

The finale fits in with this, a piece by Snoop with Wiz Khalifa and Bruno Mars, which the sold-out hall sings along to with soul, “Young, Wild and Free”, an ode to smoking weed, to youth, to loosening up. If it’s meant ironically and self-deprecating: It doesn’t get any better than that.

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