Snoop Dogg on Freestyling Songs for Doggystyle & The East Coast vs. West Coast Rivalry

Can I ask you how you create a song? Like how when you're putting something like that together, do you write it out on paper? Do you just say it until you remember it? Like Jay-Z apparently doesn't write anything, right? Right. Just keeps it all in his head. Do you do that? Do you write it? When I first started out, my first album Doggy Style, I got two songs where I just freestyled. One is called Jee's and Hustler's, and one is called The Shiznit. Those two songs, I just went there and just freestyled, whatever came out of my mind and my head at the day. I've been good at that for a long time, but a lot of times I like to make sure that I'm pinpointing a specific topic, a specific cadence, and a specific style that I'm trying to perfect when I'm making a song. I'm not just trying to make a record for the day. I'm trying to make something that's going to be here tomorrow and the next day and the next year. So when you said you freestyle it, you mean like when you walked in, you really didn't know what you were going to sing when you were recording it? Well, the song The Shiznit was supposed to be a mic check. I was supposed to go in there and just check the mic. Mic check one, two, mic check, and Dre put the beat on. Mic check, check one, two, one, two. Hopping, stopping, hopping like a rabbit. When I take the knee in the roach, you know I gots to have it. I stay back in the cup, retain myself. I'm thinking about the shit and I'm thinking, well, how can I make my grip? And how can I make that nigga straight, slip? Said trip got to get him through his grip as I dip around the corner. Now I'm on another mission, wishing upon a star. It's Snoop Doggy dog with the caviar in the back of the limo, no dem office is the real. I'm breaking niggas down like Evander Holyfield. She'll took the next episode. I make money and I really don't love holes. To tell you the truth, I swoop in the coop. I used to love, man, come on, man, we're probably a joke. That was all a freestyle, just going in that motherfucking, just spit from the dome and it just came out and Dr. Dre just made it work. Made it work. But every song is different. You know, because sometimes a song would come to me from just like hearing some shit or just being out somewhere and be like, damn, I want to make a song about whatever I just went through or whatever I'm going through or whatever is the moment. It's always a different experience every time we make a song. So sometimes it's something that you actually write out. A lot of times. The song Murder was the case. I wrote that song because I was thinking about life after death. The song was initially called Dave, D-A-V-E, Death After Visualizing Eternity. And it was crazy that I was thinking of shit like that and I had made a song called Murder was the Case. That was about me losing my life. But before I lost my life, I did a cut a deal with the devil. But then God came back and gave me another chance. That was in my mind. But when I wrote it, it just became some gangster shit. But that was the premise behind it. And it was just in my head like, I want to write a song like this. And then three months later, I called a murder case in real life. Well, yes. So my pen was actually writing reality. So I had to pull back from certain things and say, maybe life should start writing about life and living instead of always writing about dying and death. Whoa. Deep. Just think about my peers. Me, Tupac, Mihi. Like just think about our records. The last records that they made. It was a lot of death. It had some life in it too, but it had a lot of death in it. Yeah. That East Coast West Coast shit. It became a real divide in the country with hip hop, right? Yeah, it was because you didn't want to be on the wrong side. And you didn't want to like, for example, if you had friends, right, that was leaning more towards the East Coast. And you had a friend that really wanted to hear West Coast music. Y'all might have been at your friendship based off of that. Really? It was that serious. Yeah. How did it went? It kind of isn't that way anymore though, right? Mm-mm. What it was. That's good. Isn't that like a good sign for the future? That's a great sign. There's people working together from all parts of the world. Because like in the 90s, that was a real problem. That was a real divide. The divide was the we couldn't control the media like we can now. So even back then, East Coast and West Coast used to hang with each other and kick it and love each other. But we didn't control the media platform. So we didn't have an Instagram or Facebook and none of that shit where we can slap up a picture of me and Nas and Jay-Z and this person hanging out. We didn't have that. All you had was the media saying, the East Coast and the West Coast don't like each other. Which side you choosing? Yeah. And that's just that. Yeah. And it's their job just to sell newspapers. Right. And then once lives were lost and you could blame, you can naturally say, Tupac, okay, did somebody have something to do with that from the East Coast? We don't know. Biggie, he got killed on the West Coast. That put speculation that maybe somebody from the West Coast had something to do with it. So it just kept fueling to the fire until you had people like Puffy, myself, Steve Harvey, who were man enough to say, look, we need to put an end to this and let people know that we don't advocate that. We really love each other. We're a family and we started building bridges and started doing things together and being seen together and controlling our own narrative as far as what we was putting in the public side. Watch the entire episode for free only on Spotify.