I'm here today to talk with Snoop about his recent transformation into the reggae artist known as Snoop Lion, a persona reboot that includes a new album called Reincarnated as well as a feature-length documentary, also called Reincarnated, which premiered this fall at the Toronto International Film Festival and is part promotional tool, part Snoop hagiography, part Jamaican travelogue, and all weed porn. The majority of the film features Snoop communing with Jamaican elders whose ancient tangles of sun-poisoned dreadlocks actually look like weed. Snoop smokes with them in the studio. He smokes with them in the jungle. He smokes with reggae legend Bunny Wailer (pronounce it wee-lah for the full effect), who is never seen without his own pipe, made from nothing more than a straw and a hollowed-out carrot.

The album and the movie are part of what Snoop is calling a spiritual rebirth. Because while there are certain things about the man born Calvin Broadus that will never change—his love for smoking up, his mellow flow—he's clearly not the kid he was twenty years ago, when he rose to prominence out of Long Beach, California, as Dr. Dre's protégé and became a pivotal figure in the Death Row/Bad Boy hip-hop battles of the 1990s. Snoop is now 41 years old, and when I ask him if he ever imagined he'd live this long, his answer comes fast.

"Nah," he says. "You always think 21 is your number in the hood, you know? Twenty-one. I've doubled up. As you become a man, you start having kids and living. You put the guns away, and your music becomes Hey, I'm with my kid and I'm living now... as opposed to_ Fuck that—I'll shoot you on sight_."

In recent years, Snoop has come to believe that his old music was a self-fulfilling prophecy, an ill omen. "If I focus on death," he tells me, "it's going to come closer than what it's supposed to be. You'll become it. I'll say it to my friends: Write songs about being shot at and then the shit happens. And I don't want to dwell on it long, but I wrote a song called 'Murder Was the Case,' and I never had a murder case in my life. But when that song came out, I had a real murder case." (As it happens, Snoop's life-imitates-rap time line is a bit fuzzy. He was charged with murder in August 1993 after his bodyguard shot a man named Phillip Woldermarian; both men were later acquitted. "Murder Was the Case" was recorded afterward and came out in 1994.)

The Snoop Lion thing is about exploring a more positive sound, one he never could have attempted when he was hanging around gang members and in and out of jail on minor drug-related sentences back in the early 1990s. Instead of writing songs about smoking weed and killing people, the newer, more mature Snoop is all about smoking weed and then smoking, like, more weed.

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Like most rappers, Snoop is a master raconteur, the world's mellowest loudmouth, and many of the questions I ask him over lunch spark long and fantastic stories about wild nights back in the day. Like the time in 1992 when he was marooned outside a hot downtown L.A. nightclub, trying in vain to get inside. "And motherfucking 'Deep Cover' "—Snoop's first hit—"was playing louder than a motherfucker in there: boom, boom, boom. And there was a nigga in the club, and he told security, 'Nigga, you don't know who that is?' Security said, 'No.' They said, 'Nigga, that's the nigga who's singing on that song right there!' Yeah. And guess what, kid? I didn't get in!"