The Day Snoop Took Over

Artists are supposed to be selling their catalogs this year but apparently no one told SNOOP DOGG. In a seller's market, he's buying. He's the new owner of his old label home, DEATH ROW RECORDS. He appears, for now, to have bought an unfurnished home, having acquired the Death Row brand but not its iconic catalog of music for an undisclosed price from MNRK MUSIC GROUP. But Variety and Billboard report that a music acquisition is expected to follow quickly. Variety's JEM ASWAD says Snoop will wind up with "some of the label’s music rights—his own and unspecified other artists." His own presumably means his first two albums, which alone would fetch a princely sum in the current catalog market. Death Row was also, of course, home to DR. DRE's THE CHRONIC and TUPAC SHAKUR's ALL EYEZ ON ME, among other hip-hop classics. But the label has traded hands multiple times over the past 13 years—a Canadian company called WIDEAWAKE ENTERTAINMENT picked it up at auction for $18 million in 2009 and HASBRO, the toy company, owned it for a short time—and some of its music rights have floated out the door along the way. Music rights are never simple.

The brand, of course, is as checkered as its catalog is golden. One of its co-founders is famously serving 28 years for manslaughter, and its original financial backer was in prison for attempted murder and drug trafficking until PRESIDENT TRUMP commuted his sentence, reportedly after some secret lobbying by Snoop. But oh those records. And who would you rather have in control of them: a private eguity firm, an investment fund or the guy who made DOGGYSTYLE? He's got plenty of media and business experience, too, and if there's a better time and place to plant the first seeds of whatever he has in mind, I can't think of a better time or place than the "evil, wicked, satanic" halftime show of Sunday's SUPER BOWL, where he and Dr. Dre will be sharing a stage.

Rest in Peace

BETTY DAVIS, the 1970s funk queen who wrote for the Commodores and the Chambers Brothers, was married to Miles Davis just long enough to turn him on to psychedelic rock, released three albums of raw, unbridled, sexually and musically liberated soul so far ahead of their time that we might not be there yet, and then, having failed to find an audience for her music, walked away. Completely disappeared. Given the chance to get back onstage, or even just show her face again, after crate diggers rediscovered her decades later, she declined, saying, "I want to leave them with what they had." Or maybe she'd never wanted to be onstage in the first place? "I wanted to be a songwriter," she once said, "because I figured you could make your money and you could live very quietly." "Quietly" is the one thing she didn't do very well during her supernova years onstage. She participated in a 2018 documentary that told her story but barely appeared onscreen. It's "that rare documentary," EMILY LORDI wrote in the New Yorker, "that makes its subject more, not less, elusive." May she have found the quiet she always sought... Provocative German opera director HANS NEUENFELS... Up-and-coming British rapper DIMZORDIMMA, who was stabbed to death with a machete in a tower block Monday night... DAN LACEY, a Minnesota artist who started going to Paisley Park every day to paint portraits of Prince after the musician's death. He was beloved by fans as a "self-appointed caretaker of mementos" they left outside the property.