Doggystyle is released

Why it matters

Doggystyle came out November 23, 1993, on Death Row. It is Snoop Doggy Dogg's solo debut after a year of appearing on basically every song on The Chronic. Dre produced. The album sold over 800,000 copies in its first week, which was the largest opening week any artist had ever had for a debut album in any genre, and went four-times platinum within the first year. What Doggystyle did is make Snoop a star in the conventional commercial sense. Snoop on The Chronic had been the guest who kept stealing the host's record. Doggystyle is his own record, with the same producer and most of the same supporting cast, and it confirms that the appeal was Snoop himself, not just the Dre production around him. "Gin and Juice," "Who Am I (What's My Name)?," "Murder Was the Case," "Lodi Dodi" (the Slick Rick interpolation), "Doggy Dogg World." Snoop at twenty-two had a voice and a cadence that nobody had ever heard before in rap: slow, half-sung, conversational, very Long Beach. Three decades later he is still selling out tours on the same voice. You can find him in commercials for, basically, any product. The voice still works. The voice has always worked.