I’m in Provence for my annual jaunt to the land of bulls, Pernod and lavender. All over our small French village, fever for the Jeux Olympiques ‘24 builds: the Olympic rings hang in the window of the Pharmacie and the Papeterie, in the Cafe du Commerce on the Rue General de Galle the television blares all day with adverts for the opening ceremony set to Celine Dion’s I’m Alive, the Mistral blows the Olympic buntinghung over the Mairie high into the cloudless sky. So far, so normale.
One thing, however, seems rather off. Snoop Dogg, the American rapper and notorious connoisseur of large joints, will be carrying the Olympic torch through the streets of Seine Saint Denis on Friday ahead of the grand opening ceremony that evening. Sorry, what? His fellow torch bearers are decidedly French: actress, comedian and model Laetitia Casta, rapper MC Solaar and journalist and Saint-Denis local Mohamed Bouhafsi. Yes, Ukrainian pole vaulter Sergey Bubka is also carrying the torch but he’s an accomplished sportsman. But what is the Dogg Father doing in the line up? As neither a sportsman, a Frenchman or a standard-bearer for French culture, I’m rather confused.
For readers of these pages unfamiliar with Snoop Dogg’s oeuvre, voila a potted version. Born in California’s notoriously dangerous Compton neighbourhood, Snoop Dogg (real name: Calvin Broadus, 52), came to prominence for a distinctive brand of G-Funk that emerged out of Gangsta rap. His debut LP, Doggystyle, released in 1993, secured his position as one of the leading lights of his generation of rappers. Under the vigilance of fellow rapper Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg produced hits such as ‘Bitch Please’, ‘Gin and Juice’ and – my personal favourite in relation to his Olympic torch duties– ‘Drop It Like It’s Hot’. But his corpus extends beyond music. Variously a director of pornographic films, sometime chef and Martha Stewart collaborator and youth-sport philanthropist, Snoop Dogg has shown himself to be a polymath of the highest order. His most recent incarnation is as a sports presenter for American network NBC, for which he will front nightly coverage of the Olympics live from the Trocadero. If his coverage of the Tokyo Olympics was anything to go by, viewers can expect a decidedly wildcard take on events. I, for one, can’t wait.
French opinion on Snoop Dogg’s high profile at their national moment of glory – or, redemption, given recent electoral events – is rather less generous. When his appearance was announced two days ago, newspaper Le Parisien ran with the headline ‘MC Solaar, Laetita Casta et… Snoop Dogg’ while regional news outlet Ouest France describes the rapper’s high profile as ‘un peu special et pour le moins inedit’, for which read utterly bonkers. On X, Snoop Dogg’s video of himself standing outside the Hotel de Ville dressed in the Ralph Lauren American Olympic uniform has been liked 43 thousand times proving that NBC and the Olympic committee are onto something.
But the location of the Olympic village in Paris’s famously deprived quartier of Seine Saint-Denis provides some clues to the rapper’s high profile at the games. At the cornerstone of the French Olympic bid was the promise of regeneration of an area that has proved to be the epicentre of a vast amount of political unrest: witness the riots in nearby Clichy-Sous-Bois in 2005 for which Chirac called a state of national emergency, and, more recently, the 2023 riots following the shooting of Arab teenager Nahel Merzouk. Investment in Seine Saint-Denis stands at 4.5 billion euros, with the creation of a new aquatic park and the promise of improved social housing for an area where nearly a third of the population live in poverty and social housing stands at 40 per cent.
Finding a celebrity – French or otherwise – who can project the image of triumph from the crucible of urban deprivation was never going to be easy, but, as the Olympic committee must have figured, it had to be someone starry enough to unite the disparate factions of the Olympic demographic, from the ‘bobos’ to the disenfranchised inhabitants of the HLMs. The facts of Snoop Dogg’s enormous success are intimately connected to place; in his case Compton, but a loyalty that is somewhat translatable to the Parisians of Seine Saint-Denis. Slowly, I have come to see that his appearance is nothing short of a masterstroke. Certainly, far better than Bradley Cooper, who apparently turned down the chance to carry the flame.
Ultimately, nothing about Snoop Dogg should surprise us. He may engage in some local rap with his fellow musician MC Solaar, he may just choose to be a walking symbol of Franco-American amity or he may simply light his spliff from the Olympic torch. Whatever happens, it’s bound to be the ‘Shiznit’.
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