Snoop Dogg stood at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame podium in 2017 and said what he needed to say before the applause could carry him away: it had been 21 years since any of them got to hear from Tupac Amaru Shakur, the human being. Not the YouTube clip, not the movie, not the hologram. The human being. That distinction mattered enough to Snoop that he anchored his entire induction speech to it, and the audience felt the weight of the difference immediately. Because the story he was about to tell was not the story of a legend. It was the story of a friend.
The night Tupac passed Snoop his first blunt
Snoop and Tupac were born in the same year, 1971, and their careers arrived in close formation. Tupac released his first single, ‘Trapped,’ from his debut album ‘2Pacalypse Now,’ in late 1991. Not even a year later, Snoop made his own debut alongside Dr. Dre on ‘Deep Cover.’ They finally met in person in 1993 at a wrap party for ‘Poetic Justice’ in Los Angeles, and that night Tupac handed Snoop his first blunt. Snoop was a rolling-papers man before that, and he was direct about the significance: ‘Tupac is the one that got Snoop Dogg smoking blunts.’
Their friendship moved fast. By 1995, Snoop was pushing Suge Knight to get Tupac out of prison and bring him to Death Row Records, which Snoop called, without hesitation, ‘the most un-fuck-witable record label of all time.’ Once Tupac arrived, the dynamic shifted. Snoop described it as joining the Showtime Lakers: Dr. Dre was the coach, Suge was the owner, and the two of them were the stars on the court. They mirrored each other in almost everything. Snoop got a white Rolls Royce with a peanut butter interior; Tupac went out and bought a black one with the same interior. Snoop got a penthouse suite on Wilshire; two weeks later, Tupac had the one directly across the hall.
Parasailing over South America with no idea what parasailing was
Snoop shared a story he said he had never told publicly before. Suge had taken them to South America after Snoop beat a court case and Tupac had gotten out on bail. The two of them went parasailing together, with Suge Knight driving the boat. The problem, Snoop explained, was that neither of them had any idea what parasailing actually was. They sat on the edge of the boat in all their gear, the boat pulled away, and suddenly they were floating up into the sky, ‘scared as a motherfucker, damn near holding hands.’ Suge kept dropping the lever and slamming them into the water. They had no idea what was underneath them.
It was up there, suspended over the ocean, that Tupac started pitching Snoop on a movie idea with Snoop as the lead. Snoop admitted he was not fully listening because he was too focused on getting back down. But the moment stayed with him. ‘He seen me as an actor,’ Snoop said. ‘He saw more potential in me than I saw in myself.’ After Tupac was killed, Snoop started getting movie roles, and he always felt Tupac had something to do with that.
The woman who held Snoop up in the hospital room
When Snoop heard Tupac had been shot in Las Vegas, he flew there immediately. He walked into the hospital room and saw Tupac on the bed surrounded by equipment, and he nearly collapsed. Afeni Shakur, Tupac’s mother, came across the room, held him up, and said, ‘Baby, you got to be strong.’ Snoop went and sat next to Tupac, whispered to him that he loved him and to hold on. He called Afeni’s steadiness in that moment remarkable, a woman who was thinking more about the people around her than herself.
Snoop accepted the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame honor on Tupac’s behalf and closed with a line that required no decoration: ‘Legends always do live forever. They can’t take this away from you, homie.’
In a room full of music history, what Snoop Dogg brought to that stage was something specific: a peanut butter interior, a South American boat, a blunt passed between two young men who had no idea how fast their time together would run out.
