Snoop Dogg: Tha Last Meal

After a disastrous embrace of Master P's No Limit formula on 1998's Da Game Is To Be Sold, Not To Be Told—one of the least-loved multi-platinum albums since Hammer's 2 Legit 2 Quit—Snoop Dogg helped spark the West Coast rap revival with 1999's Top Dogg. Trading in the endlessly shouted choruses and sledgehammer production of P's Beats By The Pound collective for Dr. Dre-inspired next-generation G-funk, Dogg sounded more relaxed and confident than he had in years, and the result was his best album since 1993's Doggystyle. Dogg has been at the center of the West Coast's comeback ever since, popping up throughout Dr. Dre's masterful 2001 and going platinum with an album of meat-and-potatoes G-funk alongside Tha Eastsidaz. His fifth album, Tha Last Meal, is his most G-funk-intensive since Doggystyle, a deliberate throwback to the early '90s, from its ugly cover art to the "Dre Day"-style synth squeals of its final track. References to Parliament-Funkadelic abound, both sonically and lyrically, while Kokaine lends his George Clinton-esque croon to seven songs, most notably "Hennesey N Bhuddah," a Dr. Dre concoction that swaggers with the easy grace of a lost single from the Doggystyle days. That track starts Tha Last Meal off on a high note, but it's immediately followed by its most glaring misstep, "Snoop Dogg (What's My Name Pt. 2)," a gimmicky, overproduced collaboration with Timbaland that's too busy and cluttered for its own good. The rest of the album hovers somewhere between the two extremes, with strong tracks ("Go Away," "Loosen Control") alternating with songs like "Stacey Addams," which suffer from lazy lyrics and excessively subdued production. Where Dr. Dre's 2001 resonated with an undercurrent of sadness and regret rooted in the knowledge that all the intoxicants in the world couldn't undo the death, betrayal, and loss of the Death Row era, Tha Last Meal feels comparably devoid of subtext, save for its conciliatory closing track. Snoop Dogg has flow to spare, but he's always been a fairly facile rapper, content to play the role of the cartoon hedonist. That's both a strength and his most glaring weakness: Tha Last Meal may exhibit no artistic or lyrical growth, let alone maturity, but few artists coast on their free-flowing, larger-than-life charisma quite as enjoyably as he does.