Little clouds of marijuana smoke had already settled over the AVA at Casino del Sol Thursday night, heavily perfuming the air by the time rapper Snoop Dogg took the stage.
He was an hour late for his 8 p.m. gig, which didn't seem to bother the audience nearly filling the southside amphitheater, even it made some of the security officers a little nervous. Apparently Snoop Dogg didn't arrive to the venue until moments before going on stage.
But better late than not ever.
For an hour Thursday night, the rapper whose 20-plus-year career helped define today's hip-hop and rap genres, cruised through hits from his early days ("Who Am I (What's My Name)?," "Gin and Juice") and delved into a treasure trove of sexually-explicit lyrics and odes to marijuana.
"How many of you have smoking with the Dogg on your bucket list?" he asked in his smooth baritone, and the crowd cheered. "We got to get this legalized. When it's time to vote, you all got to vote so we can legalize this."
To emphasize the point, he blasted into one of his many songs on the topic, 'Smoke Weed Everyday," before encouraging the audience to sign petitions to get the measure on the next election ballot.
The 44-year-old California rapper, who dropped an f-bomb every other word, also paid tribute to fallen rappers Notorious BIG, Tupac Shakur, Nate Dogg and Eazy-E.
Snoop Dogg ended the night with the marijuana movement's national anthem, "Young, Wild & Free"— also known as the "So What We Get Drunk" song — that he recorded a few years ago with fellow rapper and marijuana enthusiast Wiz Khalifa.
"I want to end on a positive note," he added, then screamed into the mike: "Smoke weed, motherf------!"
