[A Music SubSeries: 007]

Like we always do about this time…

Before I ever heard the album version of “Gin and Juice” I would incessantly watch the music video on MTV. Multiple times per day. When I would stay home sick during eighth grade it would play basically once per hour.

I was so naïve I thought the long blisterpack of condoms that Dr. Dre hands to Snoop during the party scene was some sort of wallet of credit cards. I didn’t know who in the world the Springfield Indians were, but I wanted that blue and green hockey jersey. I still don’t, and I still do. ⁽¹⁾

I first got my hands on Snoop Doggy Dogg’s Doggystyle in 1993. I picked it up from a used CD bin in the back of Double D’s baseball card shop in Manteno. Unquestionably it quickly became not only my favorite rap record, but for years, until I’d come to my senses, it would hold its place as my favorite album of all time.

Reading my Christian boys magazine Breakaway, I saw letters from other kids who were so ashamed that they bought the Doggystyle CD that they immediately threw it away or hid it in their closet. I listened to it, in all its filthy g-funk gangster goodness for what it was: ingenious, distinctive synth driven melody, not unlike the sounds from my 16-bit Super Nintendo.

With lyrical topics and themes so completely foreign to me that I couldn’t look away. Hide Snoop under a bushel? No! He exuded coolness to me. I’d never seen anyone like that before, and at age thirteen I was prime market to be transfixed by West Coast gangsta rap.

Thirty years later I’d still argue it’s one of the most important hip-hop albums ever released, let alone in the 90s. I could talk about it for more time than I’d like to admit.

Dr. Dre drum loops blended with funky bassists bellowing vibes. This was the catalogue cut. Minimoog synthesizers, obsolete and analogue, weaving earworm slasher flick horror melody over the formula was the equation. Scratches and add-ons from the fully equipped Akai MPC60 sampler. Knobs and filters, timbre and envelopes, pitch shifting to a depth of lush, layered gangster groove, all the while Snoop poeticizing smooth murder and po’ pimping.

Depressants. Materialism. Violence. Misogyny.

Low-riders and Cool Water cologne.

A guest vocal roster from the Dogg Pound, RBX, Bushwick Bill, and the Lady of Rage, who happened to be a better lyricist than all of them combined. I suppose in that climate a female rapper would need to be lightyears beyond her male counterparts to even have a prayer of getting on a sexist and patriarchal, yet highly anticipated album like this.

Also – rest in Peace, Nate Dogg.

That album artwork was so strange in that it was laid out like Sunday morning comic strip. It was clearly offensive and overtly sexual, and as a kid I just couldn’t not be captivated by the quirks and the mystery of what they were even talking about.

It was so colorfully vibrant in both a literal sense as well as an objectionable, distasteful display of a rudimentary comic in the form of life in the LBC. Pure raunch by way of six-dollar used CD to singlehandedly overtake my historical Evangelical sitcom lineage of McGee & Me.

I memorized the liner notes and for years I was under the impression that the Ice Cube & Dr. Dre collab record Helter Skelter would soon come out. I had roughly zero idea of the former beef between Ice Cube and Dr. Dre and I had no clue what NWA even was. I had no perception of the notion that Death Row Records might not put out a record that was stated on the liner notes of a quadruple platinum selling CD.

From “Bathtub” with Warren G, to “Tha Shiznit” freestyle to the Slick Rick cover. From the disco-funk Blaxploitation renderings of “Doggy Dogg World”, through the skits, and to very hardcore verse from Lil Malik. I spun that blue CD so frequently and pulled it in and out of my case logic so often, I scratched the disc all up. After a year or two I bought the CD again, as crisp as a brand new 20-sack.

After listening to the pristine recording on my new skip-free disc I noticed that a song was missing. I looked at the track listing and sure enough, the song “Gz Up, Hoez Down” was no longer noted. Not only that, but the confusing, phantom song “Tha Next Episode” that used to be displayed on the back of the CD was gone, too. 

This was all very confounding for a teenage halfwit like me who thought the mysterious haze of corporate record companies run by adults would somehow not make mistakes. Lord knows, ol’ Suge tried his best.

I Crip-walked right back over to NRM at Northfield Square Mall and straight up asked the kid working behind the counter.

“Hey. What the hell happened to “Gz Up, Hoez Down”?

He hadn’t heard of the track, let alone the fact that it was missing. But he did spin a tale about Nirvana removing “Endless, Nameless” from Nevermind after the initial CD pressing.⁽²⁾ So, I figured at the very least, it was a thing that could happen. Oddities in life, adding new shades, taking away structure, emphasizing the reality of gradation and refinement. I would have no idea what happened until I had access to the internet years down the way. I spent a lot of time looking for that first pressing on CD again – which I never was able to find.

I came to learn that due to unauthorized Isley Brothers sample, after the first pressing of Doggystyle, “Gz Up, Hoez Down” had to be removed. While they were at it, they revised the back of the album to eliminate “Tha Next Episode” which was never fully recorded in the first place. (There is a version of this on Dr Dre’s Chronic 2001 but it’s an entirely different track. There was also a half-finished version released in some capacity).

I started buying vinyl in 2000 when I was about twenty. But even though Doggystyle is one of my very favorite albums, I’ve remained steadfast. I hadn’t purchased it on vinyl for the last twenty-three years because I’ve specifically been waiting for the day where the ridiculously cartoonish misogyny of “Gz Up, Hoez Down” could be reinstated. 

But the day of Doggystyle has finally come in the form of the 30th Anniversary pressing. For “Gz up, Hoez Down” is back in action. I haven’t heard the song since I attempted to download it on Napster in 1999 and it came out as a warbled mess, unworthy of a single re-play. But here it is, in all this decadence and absurdity, the falter and moral failing of a nineteen-year-old Snoop Doggy Dogg. Ah, just like I remember it.

Snoop’s debut full length album pressing is on two twelve-inch discs – twin halos, grand enough to silhouette the Lady of Rage’s Afro puffs, and a clear vinyl variant as translucent and pure as the oscillators on Dr Dre’s analogue Moog Voyager.

The gatefold displays the artwork in a crude pantheon of an immature, sophomoric poop joke that forced my brain to remember. I wince yet there is more nuance baked in. The humor borders on irony for me as something along the lines of my giant JNCO pants of 1995. Not feasible to fit in with today’s standards of adulthood, yet glowing pride for what held my spirit during a window of time in my teenage years.

Now we can handle this like some gentlemen, or we can get into some gangsta shit.

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[A Reclaimed Timbre Record Review]

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(1) There’s also an alternate synth melody in the video version of Gin & Juice and for the life of me, I can’t understand why that beautiful tune wasn’t on the actual album version of the song. Though my best assumption was that it was simply an afterthought. But like…why?!

(2) “Endless, Nameless” was actually left off of the first 20,000 to 50,000 copies pressed for Nevermind. It was also on the same track as “Something in the Way”, but just like ten minutes later, after a hush of silence, leading in to the abrupt, guttural M80 explosion that is “Endless, Nameless”.