Snoop Dogg Says Dionne Warwick Had Him 'Out-Gangstered'

Appearing alongside a slew of artists in the new CNN documentary Dionne Warwick: Don’t Make Me Over, Snoop Dogg recounted a formative run-in he had with Warwick in the early 1990s where he was summoned, along with Suge Knight and several other prominent rappers, to her home to talk about some lyrics she saw as misogynistic.

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“We were kind of, like, scared and shook up,” Snoop admitted, recalling that even though they were expected to arrive at 7 a.m. on the dot, they were so intimidated that they showed up at 6:52am just to err on side of caution. “We’re powerful right now, but she’s been powerful forever. Thirty-some years in the game, in the big home with a lot of money and success.”

Warwick apparently insisted they call her a "bitch" to her face, since they had so liberally thrown around the word in their own music. "She was checking me at a time when I thought we couldn’t be checked," Snoop remembered. "We were the most gangsta as you could be, but that day at Dionne Warwick’s house, I believe we got out-gangstered that day."

“I think what it was was that they needed to hear me,” Warwick explained, remembering some of the wisdom she imparted to group of young rappers. "You guys are all going to grow up. You’re going to have families. You’re going to have children. You’re going to have little girls and one day that little girl is going to look at you and say, ‘Daddy, did you really say that? Is that really you?’ What are you going to say?”

Warwick has reminisced about the fateful meeting after having previously recounted the anecdote in an April 2021 interview with True Exclusives. “We sat in my living room and I started the conversation. I said, ‘Well, I called you all here together because I need to know something about you.’ And we conversed about everything and I let them know, first of all, I would never call this meeting if I didn’t care about them.”

Fortunately, it was a message that Snoop heard loud and clear, citing Warwick's wake up call as one of the reasons he shifted his focus to making "records of joy" that were about uplifting people instead of dwelling on the violence and death that had previously dominated his music. “Dionne, I hope I became the jewel that you saw when I was the little, dirty rock that was in your house,” Snoop said. “I hope I’m making you proud.”

Photo via Getty/Emma McIntyre