Brimmer Morrison
Contributing Writer
Lately, the old heads of the West Coast have been fairly quiet. A whole bunch are making ads, producing their own wine and getting money. Shared on SnoopDogg TV on Oct. 20, the official music video for the song “Big Subwoofer” was a possible new beginning musically for the group of rappers who are all West Coast veterans in the industry. All of them have been around and popular since the mid 1980s, but they are much older now and their music has faded since their prime. A few songs here and there have slapped pretty hard, but in much of their new music, the sound of the West Coast during the 1990s and the 2000s has faded and aged, making all of these artists’ recent music sound like they are trying to act like the young thugs they used to be back in the day. With the formation of Mount Westmore, a hip hop supergroup composed of Snoop Dogg, E-40, Too $hort and Ice Cube, a new bond has formed between these four that might lead to the longevity of the West Coast sound as well as their own careers. So, not only is it revolutionary in the rap industry to have vetted artists come together later in their careers for a sustained amount of time, but the song and video they made bumps.
The music video for “Big Subwoofer” displays West Coast specific afro-futurism with all the rappers in what I want to call a “Space Donk.” Look up what a Donk is on your own time. They are all traveling to “Planet Snoopiter” where all the alien women on the planet are dressed and painted as characters from the movie “Avatar” and twerking. Right when they pull off, they deploy massive subwoofers from the side of their ship and the beat drops. The rappers themselves were dressed in Star Wars outfits: Snoop Dogg in pimped out Stormtrooper armor, Too $hort in a rougher Han Solo outfit, E-40 looks like Lando Calrissian if he owned a strip club and Ice Cube is in an all black pilot’s outfit with fingerless gloves. All of their guns were also phasers and lasers, not actual guns. The well-made music video gets at the goofy but legendary sounds and ideologies of California hip hop. Although Snoop Dog had a short verse, all the rappers showed out with their unique flares, each hitting the track with mature bars about taxes, multitasking, partying safely, feeding friends and family and of course massive bass that shakes people’s bodies and every window in the nearest vicinity.