Album Cover via Snoop Dogg/Instagram
Evan Nabavian‘s YouTube algorithm is chaotic good.
Snoop Dogg first revealed the existence of Missionary on Stephen A. Smith’s podcast in 2022. He said (and I’m paraphrasing) that he and Dre had cemented their legacies many times over: Snoop’s contributions to the metaverse, Snoop’s VH1 cooking show with Martha Stewart, Dre’s decade-long tease of Detox that culminated in a Dr. Pepper commercial, Dre’s numerous late-era collaborations with Skylar Grey, et cetera. But even so, they had never given their seminal work a proper follow-up, so Snoop announced that they would finally retread sacred ground. They were making a sequel to Doggystyle. I immediately recognized the importance of this moment and I got to work. I forged some press credentials (apologies to Elliott Wilson) and I set about interviewing the authors of Missionary. What follows is the making of the album from the people who were there.