Snoop Dogg has all but shed his gangsta image in recent years — from running a youth football league and hanging out with Martha Stewart to having a children’s show and even making a gospel album — and these days, he’s more comfortable as a husband and father.
This couldn’t have been more evident than on Wednesday (June 14), when the rapper took to Instagram to dedicate a series of posts to his wife Shante Taylor on their 26th wedding anniversary.
The Long Beach native and his special lady were high school sweethearts and got married in 1997 not too long after the release of the rapper’s second album, Tha Doggfather.
In the first post, Snoop Dogg and Shante are pictured all smiles while sporting all black outfits. “Happy anniversary. @bosslady_ent 26 years and still rollin,” he wrote.
In a second post, Snoop posted a compilation video of a few heartwarming moments between him and his wife with The Dells’ 1968 classic, “The Love We Had (Stays on My Mind),” soundtracking the moment. Following that, the rapper shared another video of the pair attending a fancy affair with matching furs.
In a voiceover, Snoop can be heard explaining some of the “turmoil” he put his wife through early on in their marriage, and how decided to make it right because she was the “woman who loved him and had his kids.”
In other related news, while Snoop Dogg was scheduled to be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame this year, the rapper has now pulled out of 2023’s class due to “personal reasons.”
According to Billboard, the Doggystyle rapper is still open to being honored but now intends on joining the class of 2024. He isn’t the only person to pull out of the event as Sade will also not be attending the event, and like Snoop, she has expressed her interest in joining a future class.
The exact cause of Snoop Dogg’s withdrawal is unclear as of now. The Doggystyle rapper did, however, express his excitement in an Instagram post soon after the inductees were announced in January.
Speaking of his songwriting talents, Snoop recently revealed that he had to up his pen game on his mega hit “Drop It Like It’s Hot” in order to compete with the track’s producer and guest star Pharrell Williams.
“[Pharrell’s] in the back with the keyboards, it’s just him and the engineer,” Snoop said of his session with Skateboard P in an exclusive clip of his Audible book From the Streets, to the Suites obtained by Billboard. “He ain’t even got the beat all the way made. This how this n-gga get down, he don’t say words, he just [imitates Pharrell’s vocalizations], so it’s my job to make that shit make sense!”
When the West Coast icon heard Pharrell’s verse for the 2004 hit, it prompted him to up his game: “This n-gga done took the bar all the way … I cannot let Pharrell out-rap me on my muthafuckin’ song!”