Why Snoop Dogg’s Reggae Album ‘Reincarnated’ Didn’t Work

American rapper Snoop Dogg came under the microscope during the US Embassy’s Black History/Reggae Month Star Spangled Sit Down session last Wednesday, as panellists discussed whether or not he had taken the right approach toward using Reggae for his Reincarnated album.

Snoop’s album, released to mixed reviews from music critics in March 2013, came up for discussion after host Debbie Bissoon raised the question as to whether Americans “who take on Jamaican culture” find that it “works for them”.

Billboard Magazine’s Pat Meschino was a straight-shooter in her assessment of Snoop, who had come to Jamaica in 2012, and declared among other things that he was a “reincarnation of Bob Marley”, a notion which upset the Gong’s fans in Jamaica and across the world.

“I think he was his own worst enemy with some of the things he was saying when he said he was Bob Marley incarnate.  Obviously, you are going to offend a lot of people and put a lot of people off.  They are not gonna come to this project with an objective ear.  They are gonna like ‘dude, what are you talking about’?” she declared.

“That individual project, I feel that he could have involved a lot more Jamaican talent a lot more Jamaican writers, producers. If you are coming all the way to Jamaica and you are making this whole thing about you are now Snoop Lion and all this stuff I would have loved to see a lot more Jamaican involvement in that project.  So, it depends on who the artists are and how deeply they want to go into the music,” she said.

The 14 track album had only two collabs with Jamaicans, and a series of collabs with Drake, Chris Brown, Busta Rhymes, T.I., Akon, Miley Cyrus, Rita Ora, and the rapper’s own daughter Cori B.

The album, which Pitchfork called an “ill-advised cultural safari that too weird to fly but too monied to fail” debuted at No. 16 on the Billboard 200 chart and topped the Reggae Albums chart for 34 weeks.

At the time of Snoop’s purported conversion to Rastafari, during a three-week trip to Jamaica, he was criticized for adopting the moniker Snoop Lion, and many Rastafarians insisted that he was making a mockery of the Rastafari culture and should cease immediately.

Several years later Dancehall King Yellowman had declared to TMZ, that Snoop had failed at Reggae and should stick to rapping.

Snoop also evoked the wrath of Sizzla Kalonji, who had lashed him in a diss track tiled Burn Out Smithsonians, on the Sickness riddim.  In the song’s intro, which was a stinging rebuke of Snoop, Sizzla had declared that: “All you do is go around and record the sacred service in the holy temple of His Majesty and try to sell it”.

On Wednesday, Meschino also cited Irish singer Sinead O’Connor, as the perfect example of an artist who immersed herself totally in the Jamaican culture and collaborated with, honoured and paid homage to some of Jamaica’s finest Reggae musicians to produce her album Throw Down Your Arms, as a perfect example of a foreigner to Jamaicans and the music they created and invited them to be part of her tour.

“One project years back that I loved was the singer Sinead O’Connor… how she embraced the culture, Sly and Robbie not only produced and played on it, they toured with her.  The show I saw in New York, Burning Spear played percussion with the band. It was just amazing,” Meschino recounted.

“And she dug into the catalogues of the Abyssinians; just went really deep into some of the songs that she chose to cover, that being a good example of someone who really did it right.  Like they went beyond just talking about I am gonna do this Reggae project and really reached out to the genre’s most celebrate musicians and producers and some of the greatest songs within the Reggae catalogue and decided to work them over and did a great job with it,” she explained.

“You can feel the difference when someone is deeply invested in the music in the culture as opposed to as opposed to oh, I am just at this point in my career, what haven’t I tried?  There is a very different approach which means two very different way of going about it…,” she added.

O’Connor had linked with Jamaica’s riddim twins Sly Dunbar and the late Robbie Shakespeare to produce Throw Down Your Arms, a 14-track album which featured her interpretations of Reggae classics, among them covers of Burning Spear’s Marcus Say Jah No Dead, Marcus Garvey, Door Peep, Throw Down Your Arms and He Prayed.  The pop singer had also covered Buju Banton’s Untold Stories, Peter Tosh’s Downpressor Man, Curly Locks by Junior Byles, as well as War by Bob Marley & The Wailers.

During his 2012 trip to Jamaica, had engaged in a Rastafarian purification ceremony at a Nyabinghi temple, Snoop Dogg made a name change to Snoop Lion, and in addition to recording his album, filmed a promotional documentary titled Reincarnated.

During the making of the film, he had visited Bunny Wailer and invited him to sing on the new album.  After agreeing, Bunny had expressed his hope that Snoop’s adoption of the Rastafari was not a bid at commercialization.

However, according to Rolling Stone Magazine, the Reincarnated film had featured copious amounts of product placement for Adidas, which were sponsors of Snoop and which financed the project.

Bunny Wailer had subsequently lashed Snoop in an interview with TMZ, and had decried what he described as the rapper’s “outright fraudulent use of the Rastafari community’s personalities and symbolism” and his failure to meet “contractual, moral and verbal commitments.”

In response, Snoop had dropped Bunny from the project and declared, in a Rolling Stone interview that, among other things, he had “given Bunny a platform to speak and make money”.

“In the Nineties, he could have never tried that because I’d have slapped the dog sht out of his old ass. How dare you? After all I’ve done for you? How dare you? You wasn’t the sht in The Wailers. You was just one of them: Bob, Peter Tosh, then you,” he had said in a rant aimed at Bunny.