death row records
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Keefe D continues to claim his innocence. He says former head of security at Death Row Records Reggie Wright Jr. organized the 2Pac’s murder.
The former South Side Compton Crips shot caller is finally coming forward since being arrested in 2023. This week he participated in an interview with ABC News. During the sit down he doubled down on his original claim that he did not have a role in the murder of Tupac Shakur on Sep. 13, 1996 in Las Vegas. “I did not do it,” he proclaimed before he dismissed the state’s case against him. “They don’t have nothing. And they know they don’t have nothing. They can’t even place me out here. They don’t have no gun, no car, no Keefe D, no nothing.”
He went on to point the finger of blame at Reggie Wright Jr., former Compton police officer and Death Row Records executive. “It’s heartbreaking they keep dragging in my name. I didn’t have anything to do with that. One of the worst days of my life when I heard that that happened,” he added. Keefe D says orchestrated the infamous hit via his team of security personnel and “mercenaries.”
When asked about his 2019 book Compton Street Legend he dismissed it and explained that the author, Yusuf Jah, took his story and just ran with it. “I’ve never read the book,” he said. “I just gave him details of my life. And he went and did his little investigation and wrote the book on his own.” Keefe D also explained that he was paid to say he was in the car that killed Tupac Shakur in the multiple interviews he participated in following the release of his memoir.
Reggie Wright Jr. has continued to deny claims he had anything to do with Tupac’s murder. You can see Keefe D’s interview below.
Snoop Dogg and the label that pays him have signed new deals with Reservoir Media, covering the legendary rapper and entrepreneur’s domestic publishing for his entire catalog and future works, as well as the publishing catalog of Death Row Records, which Snoop scooped up in 2022.
Born Calvin Broadus Jr. in the LBC, Snoop glided into fame in 1992 after featuring on Dr. Dre’s debut single, “Deep Cover,” before making several star-affirming turns on Dre’s game-changing album The Chronic (“Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang,” “Let Me Ride”). A year later, he released his own multi-platinum album, Doggystyle, via Death Row, featuring West Coast hip-hop classics like “Gin and Juice” and “What’s My Name?” He has released 19 solo albums, with his 20th, Missionary, currently in production with Dre. His lengthy list of hits over the years includes “Drop It Like It’s Hot” and “Beautiful” plus collabs like “The Next Episode” with Dre, “California Gurls” with Katy Perry and “Young, Wild & Free” with Wiz Khalifa, to name a few.
In addition to 16 Grammy nominations and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Snoop has built a broad business portfolio, acted in dozens of films, including Soul Plane and this year’s The Garfield Movie, and is a prolific signer of product endorsement deals. Recently, his commentary and enthusiasm charmed NBC viewers at the Paris 2024 Olympics, and last night (Sept. 23) he made his debut as a coach on NBC’s The Voice.
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After acquiring Death Row Records, the label that released his debut album along with early works by Dr. Dre and 2Pac, Snoop established a publishing arm for the label. The Reservoir deal includes hits like “Hail Mary” and “I Ain’t Mad At Cha” by 2Pac, ensuring that Death Row’s legacy continues under Snoop’s leadership.
Financial details of the arrangement were not disclosed.
Reservoir executives expressed excitement about working with Snoop and supporting his legacy. Golnar Khosrowshahi, Reservoir’s CEO, highlighted the significance of the partnership in preserving Death Row’s influence, adding “Snoop has come full circle with Death Row, showcasing his ongoing dedication to upholding its rich history – something Reservoir has proven as a core value and area of expertise across our business.”
Donna Caseine, Reservoir’s executive vp and global creative director, lauded Snoop’s impact on hip-hop and popular culture over the past three decades: “Legendary artists only need one name. Snoop is part of that echelon. From music, to brands, television, and film, his acumen represents excellence,” she said. “For the last three decades he has been a pillar of hip-hop music and popular culture. He helped write Death Row Records into music’s history books.”
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A new report reveals how much Donald Trump despised Snoop Dogg, particularly in the final days of his time as president.
According to reports, part of Donald Trump’s last days and hours in the White House were devoted to a white-hot fury at Snoop Dogg over the artist’s past criticisms of him. Numerous sources detailed Trump’s reaction as he was briefed on a petition for a presidential pardon for Death Row Records co-founder Michael “Harry-O” Harris on January 18, 2021. It was the same day that Trump taped his farewell address before President Joe Biden took office.
“Snoop brought this case to me, and I brought Alice Johnson [who was pardoned by Trump] on board to help me with it, and she brought it to the West Wing,” activist Weldon Angelos (who also had been previously granted clemency by Trump) said in the interview. “In the past, the president has given her the ability to select cases. And she doesn’t get [clemency for] all of them … but with Mr. Harris, she is not taking no for an answer.” When presented with the petition, officials close to him reminded him of the “Gin & Juice” rapper’s previous insults of him including one line from 2018: “If you like that n—a, you m———-n’ racist. F–k you and f–k him. Now what?”
The prompts refueled Trump’s rage. “Well, f*ck him,” he snapped according to a source, who also noted that he told aides to reject the petition and trash the paperwork to get back at Snoop Dogg. That led to a scramble to assuage his hurt feelings, which led to Angelos recalling a message the rapper had taped for a documentary applauding Trump’s criminal justice reform efforts. The footage was shown to Trump, who relented and added Harris’ name to the lengthy list of those given clemency on January 19, 2021, which also included Kodak Black.
The news comes after a recent London Sunday Times interview where Snoop Dogg stated, “I have nothing but love and respect for Donald Trump.” That remark earned the veteran MC some backlash and questions as to why. As for the former president, his team has taken great pains to include that comment as proof of how beloved Trump is within the Black community as he’s campaigning to return to the White House.
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Source: Gotta Have Rock and Roll / Gotta Have Rock and Roll
Back during Hip-Hop’s golden era, rappers rocking iced out pieces of their record label’s logo was all the rage as it was considered a badge of honor of sorts. Now some classic diamond pendants are about to hit the auction block and could fetch up to seven digits.
According to Hypebeast, Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg’s Death Row Record pendants are up for auction on GottaHaveRockandRoll and are expected to sell for roughly up to $1 million as they are indeed a part of Hip-Hop history. Heck, the robbery of a Death Row pendant is what led to the infamous brawl in Las Vegas that ultimately led to the shooting of Tupac Shakur on Sept. 7, 1996.
Per Hypebeast:
Up for auction at Gotta Have Rock and Roll, the diamond-encrusted pendants were commissioned by Death Row founder Suge Knight and would loan the 14k “Fully Iced” joints for the label’s biggest artists like Snoop and Pac. The pair is expected to fetch somewhere between $500,000 USD to $1 million USD, while the pendants that are partially encrusted could go for $200,000 USD to $500,000 USD.
The pendants come from Death Row’s former head of security Reggie Wright Jr., who is also putting up Pac’s 1996 SNL performance envelope and a personalized ticket, which could sell for $8,000 USD to $12,000 USD.
The bidding has already begun and will come to a close on November 10, in time for the auction house’s celebration of hip-hop’s 50th anniversary.
You have to wonder who’ll be dishing out that kind of cash to own a piece of Hip-Hop history and whether they’ll be placing it in a display case or putting it around their own neck. Either way, these are definitely collectors items at the end of the day so expect someone to put down a King Kong sized grip to own it.
Would you put up that kind of cash to own a diamond OG Death Row piece? Let us know in the comments section below.
Snoop Dogg kept his word. Less than a month after pledging to bring the Death Row Records catalog back to traditional streaming services “real soon,” the rapper-entrepreneur did just that on Thursday night (March 9). “Yessir. Heard you,” he tweeted along with a six-second hype clip. “Death Row Records catalog is back streaming everywhere tonight.”
Death Row released Snoop Dogg’s first two albums: the seven-times platinum Doggystyle in 1993 and the two-times platinum Tha Doggfather in 1996. Other album releases now back on Spotify, Apple Music and other services include 2Pac’s All Eyez on Me and The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, as well as the label’s comprehensive Greatest Hits album, Lady of Rage’s Necessary Roughness and Kurupt’s Against the Grain, among many others.
The label’s other stone-cold classic, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, returned to DSPs in early February after it was reunited with Interscope Records after Dre sold his music assets to UMG and Shamrock Holdings for an estimated $200 million.
Snoop (real name Calvin Broadus) acquired the Death Row catalog and brand, along with its trademark, name and logo, from MNRK Music Group in February 2022, and almost immediately pulled the legendary catalog off streaming services, telling REVOLT it was because “those platforms don’t pay.” In December, Snoop quietly sold a stake in the label’s catalog to gamma, a new full-service music company led by former Apple Music executive Larry Jackson. Their first course of action was to release the catalog — without mentioning their partnership — exclusively on TikTok to give fans the ability to create their own videos using clips from classic albums like Doggystyle. The deal was touted as the “first-ever catalog reissue to release exclusively through SoundOn,” the distribution and marketing service that TikTok launched in 2022.
“Since I took Death Row off streaming almost a year ago, not a day goes by without people asking me to put it back up,” Snoop said at the time of the TikTok announcement.
Founded in 1992 by Dr. Dre, Suge Knight, The D.O.C. and Dick Griffey, Death Row’s fortunes began to falter late in that decade following the murder of 2Pac, the departures of Dre and Snoop and the imprisonment of Knight. In 2006, the label declared bankruptcy following a slew of legal troubles, including a lawsuit brought by “silent” Death Row co-founder Lydia Harris that resulted in a $107 million judgment being awarded in Harris’ favor.
Death Row was eventually sold to Toronto-based development company WIDEawake Entertainment Group at auction for $18 million in 2009. When WIDEawake declared bankruptcy in 2012, Death Row was acquired by eOne (then known as Entertainment One). In 2019, eOne was acquired by Hasbro. Last April, Blackstone purchased eOne Music (which was rebranded as MNRK Music Group in September) for $385 million. The acquisition included Death Row, which was then sold to Snoop.
The catalog of Death Row Records, which includes canonical rap albums like 2Pac‘s All Eyez On Me and Snoop Dogg‘s Doggystyle, is now available on TikTok.
Snoop Dogg acquired the Death Row catalog last year and pulled it from streaming services, though Dr. Dre‘s The Chronic returned to platforms earlier this month, licensed to Interscope Records, in honor of the album’s 30th anniversary. The SoundOn deal marks the remainder of the Death Row catalog’s first official online release since it was pulled from streamers in February 2022.
“Since I took Death Row off streaming almost a year ago, not a day goes by without people asking me to put it back up,” Snoop Dogg said in a statement. “As the Super Bowl rolled around, I knew fans would be looking for the music from our iconic performance in 2022, so I wanted to reintroduce the most historic catalog to the people.” He added that Death Row releases “will be back on streaming services real soon.”
TikTok is touting the exclusive partnership, which launched on Sunday (Feb. 12) and continues for the rest of the week, as the “first-ever catalog reissue to release exclusively through SoundOn,” the distribution and marketing service the company launched in 2022. (SoundOn will distribute Death Row music to ByteDance platforms only, not to streaming services, once the exclusivity window ends next week.)
SoundOn was initially conceived to help “new and undiscovered artists,” according to TikTok global head of music Ole Obermann.
“We were hearing from a lot of artists that they loved being on TikTok and trying to build their community and hopefully reach really big audiences, but they were pretty overwhelmed, they didn’t really understand how to get onto TikTok, get music onto TikTok, get an account set up on TikTok, figure out how to position themselves in the right way,” Obermann told Billboard last year. “So what we came up with was, let’s have a special entrance into the platform that’s only available to these new and undiscovered artists, and then we’re gonna have a chance to work much more closely with them if this is the route they choose to come in. The goal is, really, that we find the promising artist and we walk them from the backstage door right onto the main stage and they’re there, they’re performing, it’s an incredible show and they’ve found their audience.”
Artists who have worked with SoundOn include Muni Long and Nicky Youre. It was initially only available in the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil and Indonesia but launched in Australia earlier this month.
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Dionne Warwick is currently best known as a hilarious public figure on Twitter but before that, she dominated the charts dating back to the 1950s and just before the turn of the century. In a new documentary, fans learn that the “Walk On By” star checked Snoop Dogg and his Death Row crew for their language back in the 1990s.
As reported by CNN, a new documentary, Dionne Warwick: Don’t Make Me Over, features clips from some of the many stars and celebrities who’ve encountered the legendary Ms. Warwick along her musical journey, her influential vocal style, and other tidbits. Snoop Dogg appears in the documentary and shared a tale of how Warwick gathered him, Death Row Records president Suge Knight, and others at her home for an early morning discussion.
“We were kind of like scared and shook up,” Snoop Dogg said. “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.”
Snoop says Warwick wasn’t trying to get them to change their creative energy but did warn against the use of derogatory language against women and decrying violence. It was, as expected, a superstar trying to impart wisdom to rising stars in their own right.
“She was checking me at a time when I thought we couldn’t be checked,” Snoop shared. “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.”
Dionne Warwick: Don’t Make Me Over was developed by CNN and premiered on Jan. 1 via the network.
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Snoop Dogg is embracing a new chapter in the journey of Death Row as he and the vaunted label launch a new strain of cannabis.
The launch of Death Row Cannabis was announced on social media Thursday (Dec. 29). In an Instagram post, the classic Death Row logo created by graffiti artist Eric Haze was animated by artist Mylaramen, this time with the prisoner having one hand freed up to take a pull on a heavy joint as his hood is pulled back further. The striking visuals were accompanied by a soundtrack by producer and longtime Death Row Records collaborator DJ Battlecat.
“Promising to return Death Row to its former glory, all elements of the former label are being refitted for today’s audience and their evolving tastes,” said the company in a press release. The launch also provided the public with a look at the first drop which will come in limited-edition metallic bags carrying the Death Row Cannabis logo featuring that same prisoner smoking up with a free hand. The cannabis strains that are anticipated to be in the initial drop include familiar ones such as the Runtz strain and Strawberry Gary.
As reported by High Times, the main cultivator behind the new cannabis brand is AK, who was hand-selected by Snoop Dogg himself.” AK is responsible for being a legacy cultivator of many premium brands of cannabis, launching the SMKRS platform. He is also the Vice President of Cultivation for TRP LLC, the cannabis retail and distribution company which is also a majority owner of the Cookies dispensary stores across the United States. This includes their growing facilities in Florida. The first drop is slated to occur Jan. 2, 2023, at Cookies California locations in Brentwood, San Diego and San Bernardino. Other locations and other states will be announced afterward.
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