Two Dope Boys In a Cadillac: Snoop Dogg and Madlib

Harold Stallworth is infatuated with Donald Goines’ novels.

“The creative geography has collapsed over the last few years in Los Angeles.” This is a sentence I wish I could take credit for, but it’s an observation that only a California native, such as this publication’s editor, who lived through an era where Xzibit’s At The Speed of Life and Tupac’s The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, poignant albums that have more in common than they have in contention, were marketed and received like entirely different genres of music. In 2014, a collaboration between the likes of Snoop Dogg and Madlib, a union of rhythm and gangster and blunted soul, is no longer noteworthy in itself. But “Cadillacs,” the standout record from Snoop’s third installment of his DJ Drama-hosted That’s My Work mixtape series, lives up to the names glaring on the marquee.

Snoop insists that if one indeed chooses to bang, snitching and bitching are non-ciphers; Madlib plays the bass like a race card. What more could you possibly ask from a pair of unassailable West Coast rap stalwarts?