Missionary Is a Museum Exhibit

The 1996 Spin cover stacking Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, 2pac, and Suge Knight in a Queen-like diamond was an almost instant vintage. Friction between Death Row Records co-founders Dre and Suge led the producer to leave the label a month after the issue hit shelves, later to join Jimmy Iovine in a venture called Aftermath Entertainment. A piece of the appeal of Dre’s 1999 sophomore album, 2001, was the sense that he’d painstakingly gotten some of the old band back together. The Shady/Aftermath/G-Unit show at Super Bowl LVI in 2022 excited fans who never got the promised sequel to the Up in Smoke Tour. But you rarely see half of these people in the same room anymore.

Things just ain’t the same for Dre and Snoop, the gangsta-rap godfathers whose rule-breaking crassness and scandalous storytelling helped coax Time Warner to dump its piece of Interscope Records in 1995 under pressure from Senator Bob Dole. Today, the good doc is most present in Forbes roundups and the abundance of Beats headphones in music videos; the dog doesn’t go more than a few months without a moment of whimsical virality. But a trickle of lurid headlines and lawsuits this decade, which followed the 2010s’ reassessment of stories of abuse from Dr. Dre’s past, suggests that his relative wholesome turn is not the entire picture. Dre suffered an aneurysm and three strokes in 2021 during an acrimonious divorce proceeding; a marriage counselor who saw the couple is now suing him for verbal abuse. Dre seems eager to reassert the breadth of his talent and toast to his own legacy. Music gives the fans something to latch onto; they can’t bump mergers and acquisitions in the whip. Meanwhile, Snoop’s just out here doing things: pretending to be an NFT buyer of mild renown, making a splash at the Paris Olympics, investing in Klarna. In 2022, he bought Death Row out from a Blackstone tributary, but none of the six projects he put out that year grazed the top half of the Billboard 200. Missionary, he and Dre’s first album together since 1993’s Doggystyle, finds two men making furtive strides toward the old crossover dominance and re-examining their bygone formulas.

Missionary is a precarious balancing act attempting to please not just people who grew up annoying their parents singing the chorus to Doggystyle’s “Who Am I? (What’s My Name?)” but the listener whose entry point into hip-hop was 50 Cent and Eminem’s tandem reign of terror, not to mention youth who mostly know Snoop as a humorist and weed celebrity. The new music reconciles the gradual readjustment of the rapper and producer’s public perception from bad influences to household names via the arrogance and thankfulness you expect from a stoned uncle. Snoop is more perseverant than threatening here, though the short film accompanying Missionary nods to a bloody, Tarantino-esque Up in Smoke Tour clip as the rapper and producer play two telepathic assassins. The most memorable bars on the album are raunchy toasts to longevity — “I prolly had your auntie on my tour bus,” “Sticcy Situation” muses — and maintaining the adaptability required to beat a murder case and later host sketch-comedy and reality-TV shows. “Skyscrapers” with Method Man braids all the disparate threads of Snoop’s persona together briskly: “Mama, look at me now / Martha on speed dial / Verified in the streets / Rap sheet, got a lot of fans.” Missionary is as much a monument to the pervasive slipperiness of Snoop Dogg as it is to the sorely missed fruitfulness of his working relationship with Dre. He raps like the consummate ’90s West Coast veteran on the swanky G-funk update “Gorgeous,” but the flows in “Skyscrapers” bear surprising resemblance to the brusque short sentences of modern New York drill.

It’s not dimming talent that sowed disinterest in Snoop’s recent catalogue; there’s gems everywhere. It’s the lack of an outside editor, someone to say “no.” His finest work over the last decade has been the product of huddling with a single producer (the 2013 Dām Funk team-up 7 Days of Funk, 2015’s Bush with the Neptunes). Dr. Dre, one of few people Snoop would admit he agonizes to impress, drives a hard bargain and pushes his charges to greater heights, historically existing as much in the Tom Wilson category of producers who work the room as in the Marley Marl lineage of sample wizardry and the Quincy Jones tradition of studio albums as talent showcases. Missionary’s title implies a return to the ominous, ornate G-funk Dre used on Snoop’s first album, but the doc who showed is the one whose music thrives on workout playlists, who made the simultaneously lush and spacious beats on The Marshall Mathers LP, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, and The Documentary. Missionary feels like an object plucked from the alternate universe where Snoop joined the Aftermath fold after the Master P deal.

Dre thinks in stadiums and product placements. So Missionary applies his tendencies toward intricate tunefulness to a wide-ranging set of sounds whose median is fleet, percussive tracks like “Outta Da Blue,” a mountain of clattering drum hits nodding to Busta Rhymes’s “Dangerous,” Schoolly D’s “Saturday Night,” and M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” all at once. The sample selection is feisty: “Last Dance With Mary Jane” takes Tom Petty up on an offer in the Dre-and-Jimmy docuseries The Defiant Ones to make a hit out of his 1993 non-album weed banger; “Another Part of Me” is a Police cover delivered the way a 2003 OutKast might approach. As Dre howls “Make some noise if you don’t give a fuck” while someone plucks out the Andy Summers riff from “Message in a Bottle,” you wonder where the intended audience might be that finds this edgy.

Snoop can mind the twists. But a feeling that the duo returned to its stomping grounds to reclaim a very specific portion of its legacy dwindles with every push for crossover appeal. “Hard Knocks” restores the feeling until a youth chorus appears rapping en Hamiltonian masse about “motherfuckers” and “pissy hallways” in homage to Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2,” eliciting a chuckle. The album is a frothy showcase for the gifts of the ICU — the collective that worked with Dre on 2015’s Compton, Eminem’s The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce), GTA Online’s “The Contract” soundtrack, and more — that brings pronounced Aftermath-era energy to a Death Row reunion. Yet Missionary strains to reconcile fan service to different eras, yielding a track list that feels uneven.

The songs that grate at least stick around for thrilling second and third verses, revealing a rapper as unafraid to pour himself into a quirky concept as he is attentive to a fishy social-media trend. The most obnoxious sample flips are flexes from Dre, who’ll have you know actual Sting plays on the Police remake. The better ones are testament to Dre’s MPC gifts. Their plentiful nods to hip-hop classics match the joy and disbelief of the disrespectful, autobiographical testimonies Snoop offers. Missionary revives Dr. Dre’s idea of a mainstream rap blockbuster, with his everlastingly versatile student using the spectacle as a noisy reminder that he’s one of the nicest ever to touch a mic when he applies himself. But the pop gestures and Swizz Beatz-y slaps make for an album that, like its title, skews more straightforward than its freaky lineage required.

Missionary’s concerted push for cross-pollinating radio markets while delivering the beefy, energetic music populating video-game soundtracks feels a bit self-conscious for a duo that earned these achievements a generation ago through sheer unruly magnetism. The success of Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” and GNX are proof Cali rap can still draw in disparate demographics. He gleaned this from watching his predecessors hold a mirror to the murderous face of the country. The giants of the ’90s dragged nationwide sensibilities westward: Their songs were undeniably tuneful descendants to already infectious funk ancestors; lyrics surveyed the grisly state of the decade and advised the listener to get theirs while they can because it’s a dog-eat-dog world. Missionary says it’s incredible that these two are still kicking, and, by the way, they’re moguls with businesses to tend to. So here’s something you want (the dream collab heads wishcasted since the message-board dawn of the rap internet) for something they want (the eyes of advertising-averse patient-zero millennials and junior Gen-Xers who might like a Gin & Juice shot). When the pair stops fishing for casuals, focusing on impressing each other and the musicians in orbit, the album’s pedigree flashes. Missionary is a museum exhibit of disparate eras in winding careers. Some scenes show the world-beating defiance this empire is built on; others, the gleeful package and sale of gangster authenticity in the ensuing years, the wedge which helped Snoop, Dre, and others like them — Jay-Z, VH1-era T.I. — pivot to television and business conglomerates. But what would the album that didn’t give a fuck what anyone thought look like?

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