Keen observers of the former Snoop Dogg's career may note that Reincarnated – on which he reinvents himself as Snoop Lion, Rastafarian purveyor of spiritual reggae – is not the first time the rapper has expressed dissatisfaction with hip-hop and attempted to change musical direction. We can but speculate what became of the band he announced in 2006, enticingly described as R&B "with a twist … we're basically a male chauvinist group". But his new move has certainly proved his most controversial; no mean feat given that that R&B group was called Nine Inch Dicks. No sooner was Reincarnated in the can than word came from Jamaica that his commitment to Rastafarianism was being questioned. Bunny Wailer, who was slated to appear on the album, described it as "outright fraudulent", while the Rastafari Millennium Council has threatened to sue him unless he packs it in and changes his name back. That might be what happens when you undergo your religious conversion while making a documentary in Jamaica with Vice magazine.
As anyone who's read the remarkable profile piece in John Jeremiah Sullivan's book Pulphead knows, Bunny Wailer is rather a prickly character: he's currently suing Adidas for $100m for using an image that looked like him on a T-shirt. You can understand his suspicions: in a recent interview with the Guardian, Snoop appeared to refer to Rastafarianism as a branding exercise, and spent substantially less time discussing the wickedness and politricks of Babylon's downpressers than how much he liked women with big bums.
A glance at Reincarnated's credits might also give you pause, and not merely because they appear to claim that it took 16 people to write the lyrics of a song called Smoke the Weed: "Smoke the weed every day, don't smoke the seeds, no way … smoke the weed, hey-hey." Guest stars include Chris Brown, not perhaps the first name that springs to mind as the ideal companion on a journey of profound spiritual discovery. Neither is Miley Cyrus, although there's a chance Snoop Lion simply misheard her Christian name and thought she was one of the umpteen children of the late Bob himself: as you listen to Reincarnated, you can see how it would be easy to mishear things, given that almost everyone involved persists in putting on a Jamaican accent, regardless of where they're from, or indeed whether or not they can actually do a convincing Jamaican accent. Then there is Drake, who makes an appearance on a song of anti-materialistic bent called No Guns Allowed. "Money makes a man and that's a crime," it opens, Drake's own commitment to a life devoid of the vulgar trappings of conspicuous consumption having been demonstrated recently when he threw $50,000 in cash over dancers in a North Carolina strip club. "We even got the drummer from the Police on there," Snoop proudly told Vice's documentary crew. Hang on, you went to Jamaica to make a reggae album and you ended up employing the drummer from the Police? Who else have you got on there? One of Typically Tropical?
"Are we really making a roots reggae record?" asks collaborator Angela Hunte in wonderment during the Reincarnated documentary, to which the answer seems a pretty unequivocal: "No, you're not". That's partly because the lyrics lack the ferocity and fervent belief that makes roots reggae gripping and moving even if you think the ideas that inform it are a load of codswallop. There's an intriguing moment on Tired of Running where he seems to do the one thing gangster rappers never do and accept some culpability for glorifying violence, and there's the odd nod in the direction of Marley ("No one can stop the time"), but for the most part, Snoop's brand of Rastafarianism tends more to a yeah-mon, spliff-smoking cartoon than the hellfire-and-brimstone, Babylon-shall-fall variety.
Still, at its best, Major Lazer's production is fantastic. On Here Comes the King and No Guns Allowed, they spike the pop melodies of Hunte – responsible not only for the original of Jay-Z's Empire State of Mind, but contributions to the oeuvre of Britney Spears and the solo album by the woman out of Aqua – with sudden bursts of cavernous, dubby echo: there's a thrilling tension between the tunes' sweetness and the dark, heaving rhythm tracks behind them. At worst, there's The Good Good, which sounds like the pallid acoustic surfer pop of Jack Johnson, and Fruit Juice, which features Mr Vegas and a plethora of dancehall effects, and yet still sounds like something off the CBeebies series Rastamouse: "Natural berries are so good for the system – some tart, some sweet, mi just can't resist 'em." Somewhere in the middle are So Long and Tired of Running's straightforward pastiches of 80s pop-reggae, and Get Away, which sounds like 2013 pop-rave given a vaguely dancehall makeover.
As a pop-reggae album it's patchily OK; as an addition to the canon of righteous Rastafarian spiritual music, it's profoundly unconvincing and a bit insulting. If you were Bunny Wailer, you too might get a bit cross about the reductive, cartoonish depiction of your religious beliefs. Then again, Snoop might argue, that's par for the course: he's been in the business of perpetuating cartoonish stereotypes from the start. People love them, and him, maybe more than they love his music, which has been patchy for decades. Taking that into account, they might love this. And if they don't, he can always go back to the Nine Inch Dicks.http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/4/17/1366217247583/Snoop-Lion-010.jpg
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