04 May Snoop Dogg, Patron Saint of Funn

Snoop Dogg might have the best job in all of pop music. No one else flaunts as many hits or smokes stronger stuff while being surrounded by females and having thousands of people chant his name.

The throng at the BofA Stage on Wednesday night was probably 10,000 strong—bigger, rowdier, multi-cultier, hands-in-the-air-ier than we’re likely to see for the rest of the fest. Compared to this year’s remaining headliners, Snoop is a godfather (Doggfather?), still as bankable today as he was in his early-’90s heyday. The beautiful thing about hip-hop is that, at its best, it’s a self-aware product of accumulated history, a collection of references to eras and performers past. Last night, Snoop tapped into not just the highlights of his 20 years as a pop-music icon, but the entire spectrum of hip-hop, funk, soul, disco and reggae music, turning in a natural, celebratory, uplifting performance to rival heroes like George Clinton, Bob Marley and Otis Redding.

(Yes, I said reggae music. The one-drop rhythm of the style was absent, but Snoop peppered his 90-minute set with exhortations of “Jah! Rastafari!”, wore a  tam hat and Bob Marley-logo zip-up, and smoked bushels of ganja. Has Snoop gone Rasta?)

Snoop took the stage with a sizable entourage and immediately ran through hits, from 1994’s Doggystyle and beyond: “P.I.M.P.”, “187,” “Gin and Juice,” a bit of “Lodi Dodi.” He was backed by a bassist, keyboardist, drummer, and DJ, plus a slew of backup MCs and three Fly Girl-style female dancers. At one point, these three gave Snoop a lap dance while he smoked from an endless stash of long, skinny joints and basked in the crowd’s unflagging adoration. Old-school favorites “Nothing But a G Thang” and “Ain’t No Fun” were received with all-inclusive singalongs, the latter augmented by a couple dozen female crowdmembers brought onstage. Throughout the set, Nasty Dogg, aka a dude in a plush dog costume and football jersey, either held aloft a oversized novelty joint or swung an oversized novelty penis attached to his crotch.

The band nodded to Snoop’s notable album guest slots with “I Wanna F*ck You,” his 2009 megahit with Akon, and “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” his 2004 megahit with Pharrel. This last hewed closest to Snoop’s underlying musical aesthetic: minimalist funk, lean and hard and bouncy. A palette so spare is easy to embellish, hence the Lady Gaga/Yaz disco-pop amalgam in “Boom,” his 2011 megahit with T-Pain. With a foray into Irish-America hip-hop anomaly House of Pain’s “Jump Around,” Snoop made it clear he’s willing and able to go just about anywhere.

Including the teen-pop landscape, the fertile field that the crowd was waiting to wade into. And it happened: At the close of his set, after the entire audience chanted Snoop’s name to “What’s My Name,” Snoop invited onstage Wiz Khalifa, the Pittsburgh pop-hop sensation who earlier slayed the BofA stage. “What’s up my nephew?” asked Snoop to the skinny-pantsed rap-singer. The crowd went berserk as the pair went into “Young, Wild and Free,” their 2012 megahit. The chorus: “So what we get drunk/So what we smoke weed/So what we go out/That’s how it’s s’posed to be.”

To this the audience clearly related. Real-life Wiz was a lot more authentic than hologram Tupac, who Snoop performed with three weeks ago at Coachella. The crowd—mostly young, certainly wild, questionably free—ate it up.

(In an interesting twist, Mean Creek, who opened the BofA Stage yesterday afternoon, won over their sparse crowd with a very different sort of song with a similar theme called “Young and Wild.”)

“I want y’all to keep peace, love and soul in your life,” Snoop told the crowd as the song wound down and the lights came up. “That’s what being young, wild and free is all about!”