We're waiting on Snoop at a small house in the Valley, where he'll shoot a segment for one of his final Jimmy Kimmel appearances. Crew members are discussing last night's show, which featured Snoop and the rapper he toured with this summer, the enormously successful performer credited with the recent East-Coast rebirth of gangsta rap: 50 Cent. "Is Snoop a real gangster?" one staffer asks me. Before I can respond, another staffer interjects. "You know who's a real gangster? That 50 Cent." All nod in reverent silence.

Several bodyguards arrive at the house; others arrive later with Snoop, who's running on what Abbott calls "Snoop time." One bodyguard regales me with stories of his trip to Brazil, where Snoop was shooting the video for "Beautiful." The video has a different aesthetic from Snoop's previous video, which served up gangsta delights: blue bandannas, low-riders, and an abusive LAPD officer. The bandanna, however, was worn by a Snoop doll; the low-rider was an outrageous Snoop DeVille; and the officer a comic dwarf. If 50 Cent's aesthetic is "real," used as an un-ironic epithet even in a post-postmodern era ("50 is real, so he does real things," reads his Web site), Snoop's is so deliberately artificial it's camp.

Lil' Half Dead arrives with Snoop. He's fresh out of jail and says he sometimes has to drive around the block before entering his own home, because he'll always have enemies.

"No one, including Snoop, wants to live the kind of life it would take to truly be safe. He'd have to never bring old homies around, because it's usually the friends who end up starting all the drama," Palladino had told me, recalling a scenario early in Snoop's career when Snoop, arrested for firing road-rage shots at a police officer who took down his license plate number, was released upon discovery that Snoop's friend -- driving Snoop's car -- was the one who'd fired the shots. "I told Snoop, 'With friends like that, you don't need enemies.'"

Later that day, when I ask Snoop what he'd change about the music industry, he turns melancholy. "The untimely deaths," he says, stone-faced. One such death is that of Snoop's friend Tupac Shakur, a gangsta rapper who was one-part political poet and one-part gangsta posturing. This latter part earned him the enemies who were his tragic undoing. Unidentified gunmen murdered Tupac in Las Vegas in 1996, but he still sells records, containing songs recorded before his death; he still appears, saintly as ever, in nostalgia-ridden music videos. He's the embodiment of Robert Warshow's famous essay about the gangster archetype in American culture, which claims that because the genre must culminate in a fatal climax, one can only be a true gangster in art or in death.

"If you want to leave it all behind, you have to sever ties with the past, really," says Palladino. "Suge couldn't do it, and he still won't. How can you do that when you're under enormous pressure to stay true to the streets?"

Russell Simmons, chairman of Def Jam Records and one of hip-hop's most high-profile spokesmen, says it can be done. Recalling a recent vacation he took to St. Bart's with platinum rapper Jay-Z, Simmons is wistful. "Here's a kid from the projects on my boat, loving life. He doesn't want to be involved in shoot-ups. He's grown past that." Simmons claims that even today's most successful live gangster, 50 Cent, can also grow past it, and still maintain his fan base. "Hip-hop is defined by change," he insists.

Back in the Valley, Snoop is ready to be filmed. With his Long Beach buddies milling about, Snoop shoots a short skit in which he's having a garage sale, peddling bongs, hash brownies, and other such stoner paraphernalia. Actual neighbors line up to buy them. Then they watch in awe as Snoop, lost in a whirl of bodyguards, zips back to Hollywood.

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