G-Funk was quietly birthed in the borderlands between Los Angeles and San Bernardino County. Dre and Compton receive most of the credit, but the sub-genre’s co-inventors Above the Law, first re-imagined Parliament’s florescent mothership symphonies out the streets of Pomona (a bedroom community 30 miles east of L.A. — whose name is pronounced with six syllables — as decreed by San Gabriel Valley romanticist Suga Free).
History is uneven and easy to undermine. No matter who claims its birthright, West Coast rap has always been shaped by outsiders. 2Pac was the erstwhile MC New York. Kurupt originally repped Philly. The Lady of Rage boasted Jersey roots. Domino was from St. Louis. Xzibit hailed from Detroit via New Mexico. While Eminem and Devin the Dude stole the show on arguably the most definitive West Coast rap album of the last 20 years. The Freestyle Fellowship even wrote a whole anti-carpetbagger anthem.
So no one should be the least bit surprised that G-Funk’s most recent inheritor comes from the original home of the Hell’s Angels. San Bernardino, aka San Berdoo or “The Dino,” which in the last two decades has seen a substantial share of migration from the Los Angeles inner city. But unlike the white flight of the 60s and 70s, the unofficial capital of the Inland Empire has become to the home to thousands of African-American and Latinx families who cashed out on comparatively expensive South Central real estate and rode the 10 east to the exurbs.
The world of rundown strip malls and liquor stores that Doggystyleee presents in his videos occasionally looks more like the South Central of old than the South Central of the present. That’s not to say that Crips, Bloods, Hoovers, and Treces don’t still run the streets, or that intense poverty isn’t prevalent, but there is also substantial economic redevelopment and the strain of thought ushered in by Nip — that a hood renaissance can potentially occur without the soul-stripping impact of gentrification. The outcome remains to be seen, but for now, it is absolutely bizarre to see pale hypebeasts bumbling off a Chick-Fil-A on Fig, sorority blonde joggers trotting next to the Jungles, and artisanal Bloody Mary bars on Market Street in Inglewood. Yet there are ample black and Latinx owned businesses that would offer hope to the contrary. Either way, as a late great East Coast rapper once said on a song that sampled The Chronic: things done changed.
Some things remain eternal. This is the entire thesis of Doggystyleee’ music. That “Let Me Ride” is a drive that perpetually goes in circles. That G-Funk is a tradition to be celebrated and sustained, as innate to Southern California as sunshine, traffic, and smog. After all, it’s been 27 years since Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg perfected perfection, which means “Nuthin But a G Thing” is as old to us as the first single from The Fabulous Dramatics was to them in ’92.
Nostalgia typically moves in 20 year cycles because artists often unconsciously absorb what they listened to in their amniotic developmental stages. In the case of Doggystyleee, it’s pretty clear that he listened to a whole lot of Dre and Snoop, Ice Cube and Pac, DPG Bad Azz, and Tha Eastsidaz. In the lone interview he’s given, he talks about how his parents bumped all those artists when he was a kid, but it was already obvious.
Here is a 25 year-old rapper spitting lead-in-the-enemy screeds over the 20-year old beat to “G’d Up.” Released in the wake of Doggystyleeee getting jumped, “Retaliation” dropped in February and sparked his rise. There are chain link fences, beanies and a “gyeah” that sounds like he’s the missing link between YG and Compton’s Most Wanted. Cortez sneakers and somber palm trees. It is West Coast rap that sounds like the platonic notion of West Coast rap. In a sense, it’s a 64′ Chevy version of Griselda, openly lamenting the bygone era of Battlecat and Dre, Jellyroll and Soopafly — conceived in areas a long train ride away from where you’d ostensibly expect it to come from. His voice reminds you of Snoop crossed with Kurupt and maybe a little Brotha Lynch Hung, a slow-rolling whiplash flow with a permanently embedded sneer. A new chapter to an old testament.
If the most popular era for West Coast rap was the 90s, we often overlook the fact that most of its stars were completely regional. Subtract Death Row and Dre (and Nate Dogg and Warren G who benefited from their affiliation) and you get Quik and Suga Free, Mack 10 and MC Eiht, Above the Law and WC. Ice Cube became an internationally celebrated movie star, but east of St. Louis, you never heard artists like Bad Azz and Kam, Yo-Yo or King Tee. Not to forget one-off classic singles from Chico and Coolwadda and Shade Sheist. Doggystyleee doesn’t need to compete with Travis Scott fans, he just needs to target the hundreds of thousands of K-Day listeners.
If you grew up on that music, then Doggystyleee is probably for you. I mean, his name is Doggystyleeee, which he claims doesn’t come from the Snoop album, but at this point, the Snoop album is as canonical as the sex position that inspired the title. He’s obviously not the first to tap into G-Funk revival. For all practical considerations, it never really left the West Coast conversation in the same way that boom-bap will always be integral to a certain type of East Coast rap. It’s easy to dismiss it as comfort food rap, and maybe there’s validity to that criticism. But it’s clear that Doggystyleee is carrying on a revered tradition, tying a marine blue rag to his forehead like ‘Pac, creasing his khakis, and C-walking like Crazy Toones was his DJ (RIP).
There is a sentimental tenderness to the savage life rapped about. There are brawls at parks where the participants dap each other up after throwing down. You can’t help but be reminded of a young Snoop in the way he rocks Pendleton shirts and an afro-pick in his air. The synthesizers whine and hiss, following what now seems like an ancestral path. But lest he only come off as a paint-by-numbers revivalist, he’s capable of dropping songs like “Bad Bitch” which plays out like post-YG, Sam’s Hofbrau Haus strip club rap. But no matter in what direction he goes, there is the sense that Doggystylee can’t shake the styles that forged him, the accent he acquired, the sensibilities and secret language that can be comprehended by all, but understood only if you were steeped in it from birth — as though he already knew which way to tilt the steering wheel of the ’64 before he even knew how to drive.
