At a taping of MTV2's roving "$2 Bill tour" in Louisville, Ky., fans have lined up to see this gangsta rapper. The diverse crowd is the sort that MTV manufactures: old and young, black and white, industry and non-industry. Snoop takes the stage in a red football jersey and gray sweats, backed by a live band and backup singers who exhibit the more mature, soulful side of his new album. Snoop never sweats. In his signature style, he calmly ambles to and fro, enunciating rhymes as if conversing with his audience. Then Snoop begins a sentence with, "Now that I've quite drinking and smoking." The audience boos; Snoop sighs. He revises his statement: "OK, OK -- I still drink and smoke." The crowd roars. Among them is a blond girl in a Kangol hat and low-cut sweater, who joins Snoop in a merry chant of "Fuck the police."

At the Snoop Dogg Clothing Co. warehouse in Manhattan's fashion district, head designer Guka Evans showcases the spring line. He lays out several oversized plaid shirts, matching khakis and two basketball-style jerseys. "These are the two Snoop personalities: the West-Coast casual aesthetic, and the more aggressive, athletic feel. During our first season, the retro-West-Coast look was the biggest seller," Evans explains. There's a tank top with "pimp" across the chest and a "Snoop All Stars" top that reads "Hoopdog." Among the rejects is a shirt with "1-8-7" printed on it; it's inspired by Snoop's duet with Dr. Dre, "Deep Cover," about putting "1-8-7 on an undercover cop" (the municipal code for homicide). Designers had the shirt reprinted with "2-1-3," instead, which is the Long Beach area code and the name of Snoop's first rap group. "We didn't think Macy's would be too happy with that one," says CEO Michael Cohen, pointing at the reject with a nervous laugh.

No one was laughing on April 10, when Snoop was driving his brown custom Cadillac ("brown sugar," he calls it) south on Fairfax Avenue in L.A. and a northbound sedan fired nearly a dozen shots in his direction. They missed Snoop, but a bullet grazed one of eight bodyguards trailing him in five surrounding vehicles. An anti-gang LAPD unit heard shots and arrived on the scene; after questioning, Snoop was carted off safely in an armored vehicle. Either because it was utterly in line with the same-old Snoop -- or puzzlingly out of line with the new-and-improved one -- the incident remained relatively low profile, and no arrests were made.

According to Juan, whom Snoop had been visiting that night, the shooting was a product of young boys who tried to approach Snoop and were brushed aside by security. Rumor mills produced a juicier suspect: Suge Knight, gangsta rap's longtime scapegoat. Knight and Snoop have been publicly feuding ever since Snoop left Death Row in 1998, while Knight served a five-year jail sentence for various parole violations. Snoop insults Suge on "Pimp Slapp'd," a track from "Paid tha Cost" that includes cameos by an L.A. gang leader who has since filed a lawsuit against Snoop for sampling his voice.

"I have no hate for Bloods, just one particular fake-ass Blood," says Snoop, referring to Knight. He claims Knight egged him on, plastering his face on the cover of an album titled "Dead Man Walking," even promising a car to the man who'd cut Snoop's hair. After the April shooting, a Web site for Death Row, now called Tha Row Records, featured Snoop, the sound of gunshots, and a whimpering dog.

"Snoop don't threaten me or nobody on my label," Knight told me at a charity Mother's Day brunch he throws annually in Beverly Hills. "I mean, we never see the guy. He don't come out, and if he do come out, the people don't feel him. They don't respect the simple fact of who he is, because every time he come out he gets shot at. And if he do go out, it's like a million police, or, for him to go to the restroom, 20 people gotta walk with him. That's not living."

At a magazine shoot in New York, Snoop insists on featuring a "Fuck Simon" T-shirt (Simon is a nickname for Suge). Uncle June Bugg, busy trying to chat up any woman at close range, doesn't seem to notice; Abbott fires off frantic two-ways; Snoop's bodyguards, slumped in chairs like exasperated parents, can only roll their eyes -- just as they did when Snoop blasted "Pimp Slapp'd" in his Vegas hotel room.

"Artists shouldn't get into feuds if they're just doing it for sales, because they should be able to deal with the repercussions," Knight declares, wiping a bead of sweat from his brow. "They shouldn't listen to the executives because while executives are at home, watching TV or playing golf somewhere, these guys are trying to hang out in clubs, and that's when the feud starts, and it's real life."

Knight puffs on his cigar. "So I think they should be careful what they say, or if they say it, they should mean it and deal with it -- and when you have to deal with it, stop calling the police. If you have a problem, be able to roll by yourself. You shouldn't have to be saying 'we, we, we' all the time. If you cut out all the extra fat, most people would stop talking their mouth so much."

At the magazine shoot, an onlooker attempts to explain the Suge-Snoop enmity. "Snoop's a Crip," she says, pronouncing the word with awe. It's the routine performed for a gangsta-curious public: Is he or isn't he?

"Snoop was a rapper. He wasn't into gangbanging -- it was nothing like that," says Snoop's first bodyguard, McKinley "Malik" Lee. "He sold weed, he went to jail a few times, but he wasn't some big gangster. Snoop was a character. He was comical, a ladies man, a player. He wasn't anything like the music. Matter of fact, I couldn't understand why he chose to take his music that way."

Growing up on 21st Street in Long Beach, Snoop sang in the church choir and listened to music he still loves: Al Green, the Dramatics, Curtis Mayfield. At Long Beach Polytechnic high school, recalls longtime friend Nate Dogg, "I'd beat on the desk and Snoop would freestyle." Snoop, Nate, and Warren G formed the rap group 213 and eventually got successful producer (and Warren's older stepbrother) Dr. Dre to give their demo a listen.

"Snoop was funny and he made me laugh, but the guys he hung out with -- I didn't like them at all. So I told him I wouldn't go out with him at first," Shante recalls. A month later, she says, Snoop was back at her door a changed man, no longer hanging around the Rolling 20 Crips. His music, though, was awash in Crip talk, which was enough to turn debut video shoots into anti-Snoop mini-riots, especially -- as was once reportedly the case -- when they were filmed in Blood neighborhoods and Snoop wore Crip-style blue.

"The people he grew up with knew the reality -- that he wasn't Cripping like that -- but others didn't," says Lee. "You reap what you sow. You speak it into existence." After Snoop's debut on "The Chronic" made him famous, Death Row installed him and Lee in small apartments that Knight owned in the working-class Palms district of L.A. It was an attempt to keep Snoop from harm's way -- and it failed. Here's the popular account of what happened in August 1993 at a park near that apartment: Gangsta rapper Snoop Dogg showed authentic Crip colors when he and his bodyguard feuded with a 20-year-old rival named Philip Woldemariam, who was killed. Snoop landed on the cover of major music magazines. Death Row happily surrendered to the marketing frenzy, recording a video for the eerily appropriate Snoop single "Murder was the Case." "Doggystyle" flew from record stores.

The account given by Paul Palladino, the private investigator who got Snoop and Lee acquitted, is far less glamorous. "It wasn't a gang dispute -- the case was much more complicated than that," he explains. While Snoop and Lee were inside Snoop's apartment, which was known to house the rap star, Woldemariam and friends -- drug dealers with a paranoid theory that Snoop would usurp their business -- threw gang signs at a coterie of Snoop's friends who were loitering in front of Snoop's building. Later that day, when Snoop was driving his SUV to the studio with Lee beside him, Woldemariam and crew flagged the car down, approached its passenger side, and pulled a gun; in self-defense, Lee fired and Woldemariam was killed. Ironically, Snoop's lyrics, which had created his gangsta identity, were cited at hearings as proof of this very identity.

"Everybody on the streets was saying it was gangster this and gangster that, but it had nothing to do with gangs," says Lee. "If that trial wouldn't have happened, though, Snoop's album wouldn't have dropped the way it did. 'Murder was the Case' was recorded two years before the shooting ever happened."

Lee claims that the April shooting was prompted by Snoop's presence in the very neighborhood of "the deceased," where Snoop still has enemies. "Of course there's still beef! A life was taken, and to people in the streets, Snoop Dogg did it. If there was peace made, it's one thing, but there was never any closure -- it was never spoken on righteously. Snoop needs to call a meeting, a press conference, and say that that murder wasn't about gangs, say to the family, 'Hey, we didn't even know who your son was.'"

But in Snoop's vision of the universe, he's moved passively along by a larger-than-life force. "I'm a child of God and I walk in the right way, so I'm not worried. If something is gonna happen, God's gonna make it happen," says Snoop, asked if he felt afraid in 1995, when he and his bodyguards fled from gunshots at a video shoot in New York -- or if he feels afraid now.

"When the [April] shooting happened," says Shante, "I got kinda down -- like 'How come we have to live like this?' It's like, he had a dream and he wanted to fulfill it and it's fulfilled -- so what do you do now? I just pray." She remembers the day after the shooting, when Corde came home from private school upset. "He said, 'Mom, why does everyone keep asking me if Dad's OK?'"

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