Snoop is playing Hilton Head on Sunday in a bizarre mash up where the Universe of Highly Implausible Things crosses over with the Universe of Things I WISHED FREAKING HAPPENED DURING ANY OF THE PAST FOUR YEARS I LIVED DOWN THERE AND WAS BORED OUT OF MY MIND.
Last year, we ran four weeks of Ted Leo in advance of his show on Hilton Head in an effort to drum up support and broader interest outside the small hermetic world of a few local newspaper writers. We put together something similar for Snoop, since an interview with him wasn’t going to happen.
To understand this fully, come at it from the perspective of a 75-year-old woman who just picked up her newspaper from her Sun City driveway and wants to read about the upcoming Flag Day festival before her morning golf game. The Guide: The best publication that has absolutely no audience:
The Guide”s Snoopipedia, Week 1: The history of izzle-speak
Izzle-speak is a linguistic trend synonymous with the hip-hop artist and actor Snoop Dogg. While not the creator of izzle-speak, Snoop is given primary credit for injectizzling it into our collective lexicizzle. (His previous contributions to modern language include the phrases “Drop it like it’s hot,” “gang of Tanqueray” and “You don’t love me, you just love my doggy style.”)
A well-researched 2004 “On Language” column from the New York Times attributes the phrase’s origins to Bay Area rappers in the late 1980s. But, the article continues, there’s no doubt Snoop turned izzle-speak into the vernacular commodity that wannabe rappers rely on as much as wannabe intellectuals depend on the prefix “uber.”
And yet, in an interview with MTV earlier in the decade, Snoop also first declared that, forizzle, it was ovizzle, adding “izzle” to anythizzle that comes alizong. When the New York Tizimes is using it in headlizzles and Fran Drescher in Old Nizavy ads, you know it’s jumped the shizzle. See?
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