Roots Picnic 2014: Snoop Dogg with Black Thought of The Roots (photographed by Mel D. Cole)
"Gin & Juice" for me, as I suspect is true for a lot of fools, is the track that made me a Snoop Dogg fan. Sure "Deep Cover" was our first introduction, but at that time he was just some new L.A. kid with flow on Dr. Dre's record. Even though they were on the Chronic, "Dre Day" and "Nuthin But A G Thang" were Snoop's real debuts as a solo artist but as Questlove has so eloquently explained in Mo' Meta Blues, that entire moment was both game-changing and profoundly disturbing for many hip-hop heads. It turned the hip-hop aesthetic on its head in a way that was disorienting to the point of culture shock; hip-hop was about taking a found snippet of somebody else's record and flipping it into the perfect loop, making something out of almost nothing. Even for a Detroit kid, literally raised on P-Funk, Dre and Snoops elaborate recreations of Parliament and Funkadelic grooves, pairing ghetto culture with big-studio production values seemed wrong. "Gin and Juice" on the other hand, with its subtle flip of the undeniably funky George Macrae "Get Lifted" sample--but subtly and sophisticatedly interpolated into a whole new melody that was undeniably g-funk, was the moment it became okay for college radio hip-hop jocks like myself to climb on the Snoop bandwagon, it was the first bi-partisan Snoop record, if you will--signalling that he was the player president for the all hip-hop americans, not just Gs that voted for him.
All of which is necessary background to understanding why this epically casual live performance of the cut, backed by The Roots with Questlove--like me, a reformed skeptic--on the "Get Lifted" drums is a unifying moment of historic proportions, at least as much as Snoop and Doug E. Fresh's duet on "Lodi Dodi." We swore that would be the last Picnic performance we posted, and then we swore Action Bronson's belly flop would be the swan song. But Roots Picnic 2014 is the gift that keeps on giving. We could keep posting performances all year but sooner or later we have to turn our cameras on other world events like, you know, Summerstage. So, for real, this is really, really the last Picnic performance we'll be posting in 2014 (we think) and it's a big one. Find an empty singles cup in your house to raise up while you dance around and watch below:
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CREDITS
Kellen Dengler - Director | Cinematographer
Allison Swank - Senior Producer
Daniel Petruzzi - Executive Producer
Videographers:
Emmai Alaquiva
Riley Dengler
Jake Remington
Kevin Ornelas
Alex Gaylon
Riley Graham
Scott Heins
Greg Scott
Njaimeh Njie - Audio Management
Imani Lindsey - Media Management
Chinisha Scott - Production Assistant
Sinat Giwa - Production Assistant
Rory Webb - Production Assistant
Christopher Petricko - Camera Assistant
Post Production by Riley Dengler
