the top 50 best songs of 2013 (PART ONE: 50-26)

Part One, songs 50-26! Enjoy, and stay tuned for part two!

album review: 'reincarnated' by snoop lion

Let me tell you a story.

When I was sixteen, after getting my beginner’s permit, I began learning how to drive with a close friend and an instructor. On one chill evening, the instructor asked if he could put some music on while I was driving, and he asked me what genre I’d prefer. At that time, I was on something of an Eminem kick (like every other teenage boy growing up in the mid-2000s), so I said hip-hop and rap would be fine. He asked me which rappers I listened to, and I said Eminem and Dr. Dre and a few other acts in that vein.

His eyes lit up. ‘Kid,’ he said, ‘you haven’t heard nothing yet’, and he slid a newly burnt CD into the car’s stereo. Immediately a smooth, rollicking tone filled the car, music that I had occasionally heard in passing on the radio but had never really been exposed to in any significant way. I was immediately intrigued, and for the next several weeks, whenever we would go out for a drive, we’d put on that music and the ride would go smoothly and easily.

That music was g-funk, courtesy of 213, a group consisting of Nate Dogg (RIP), Warren G, and the legendary Snoop Dogg. It was my first real exposure to hip-hop outside of Eminem’s enclave, and while I had heard Snoop Dogg’s verse on ‘Bitch Please: Part II’ on The Marshall Mathers LP, I gravitated more to Nate Dogg’s authoritative and powerful baritone that carried the majority of those tracks. To me at that time, Snoop Dogg just seemed like another gangsta rapper, and everything I heard from him that got popular in the waning years of the decade reinforced that. It didn’t quite help matters that on his mainstream hits, he always sounded way too laid back and chill to take seriously, and compared to the assertive flow and intricate wordplay of OutKast, I didn’t quite see the appeal of Snoop Dogg.

In fact, it wasn’t until last year that I finally began to understand why Snoop Dogg worked as a performer, his appeal finally crystalizing on his collaboration with Wiz Khalifa and Bruno Mars: he was cool. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized just how many rappers and singers on the scene really weren’t cool in the slightest. I mean, Jay-Z wasn’t really so much cool as coldly dignified and professional, very much owning the label of ‘the new Sinatra’. Kanye and R. Kelly weren’t really cool either – most of the time they were too wrapped in their own egos/insanity to seem all that cool, falling more in line with eccentricity. For a while, Ludacris, Lil Wayne, and T.I. seemed cool, but the workmanlike nature of their music gradually seemed to make some of that coolness slip away (plus, Lil Wayne released Rebirth and that kind of destroyed his ‘coolness’ in one fell swoop). And too many of the gangsta rappers were bound up in their own egos and being ‘hard’ to really come across as cool (hell, most of the time I don’t even think they were having fun).

But Snoop Dogg was cool, and the effortless swagger that seemed to pervade his image was a big breath of fresh air. Now, granted, a lot of my issues with him remained – it was tough to tell when Snoop Dogg was trying or not, and more often than not I got the feeling he wasn’t – but I understood the appeal. People like cool, they respond to cool, they gravitate towards cool. And frankly, I was fully expecting Snoop Dogg to coast on that coolness for the rest of his career.

And then in 2011, Nate Dogg passed away - only days before the release of Snoop Dogg’s newest album. From this point forward, I can only speculate, but I do know that Snoop Dogg and Nate Dogg weren’t just bandmates, but close friends, and if the outpouring of grief from Snoop Dogg over Twitter was any indication, Snoop Dogg wasn’t taking it well. Much like Eminem losing his best friend Proof, the loss of a close, personal friend sent ripples through Snoop Dogg’s life and after he finished touring, he took a trip to Jamaica that would change his life.

In 2012, Snoop Dogg announced that he had converted to Rastafarianism and he was leaving rap to become the reggae act Snoop Lion, which he described as a ‘reincarnation’. And while it was very tempting to join the mockery of this ‘evolution’ like everyone else on the Internet, I have to say I was intrigued. For an artist decades into his career, this was precisely the right way to reinvigorate a fanbase and attract newcomers to his discography. And reggae (along with its cousin funk) was a genre that I’ve always liked, but have had a lot of trouble understanding, mostly due to some unfortunate cultural myopia on one hand and my difficulty deciphering Jamaican accents on the other. So if Snoop Dogg – forgive me, Snoop Lion - was taking steps towards reggae with a full album, it might provide a new entry point for me into a genre I’ve had difficulty understanding. And really, if there was an artist on mainstream radio to approach the laid-back reggae rhythms and deft social commentary, Snoop Dogg would have probably been my first suggestion.

And on a slightly broader note, I also wondered whether or not the introduction of a modernized form of reggae might be good for the pop charts. Keep in mind that in 2012 we were coming off of the hangover of the club boom, and the slightly more organic mainstream indie trend was only beginning to take root. So on that note, I considered the possibility that a reggae/funk revival might add a certain flavor to the charts – and really, while it did get a little overblown throughout the early-to-mid 70s and throughout the mid-90s with the ska revival, I wasn’t going to deny the fact that scrag rhythms and greater diversity of instrumentation couldn’t hurt pop music. After all, a little cultural diversity never hurt anyone, particularly in an era where k-pop was starting to notch mainstream chart hits (by the way, PSY’s new single ‘Gentlemen’ sucks). And besides, in a time where Ke$ha is working to revive the psychedelia and punk energy of the 70s, why shouldn’t some of the other elements of that decade make a revival?

So I was definitely interested in Snoop Lion’s new album Reincarnated, and now that I’ve had a chance to take a look, what do I think?