Snoop Dogg certainly kept the Fever crowd waiting Wednesday night, but as soon as he took the stage shortly before 11, the packed house forgave him his tardiness. The generation-spanning rapper, and vocal USC fan, stepped into the limelight wearing an extra-large No. 3 Notre Dame football jersey with a large diamond necklace, and for the next 50 minutes few of the 1,200 in attendance had a care in the world.
While tickets for the show claimed it began at 8 p.m., the opening act of up-and-coming rapper Delano, a member of Snoop's Doggy Style Records, began around 8:45 p.m., and lasted a little more than half an hour. The sold-out crowd then waited, and waited, and waited some more while Club Fever pumped in some of Snoop's biggest hits, including "California Gurls" by Katy Perry.
Though the bars at Fever ran out of pitchers before 7:30, and by 10 p.m. no fan could move in any direction without bumping into two strangers, no one considered leaving. Rather, the crowd of South Bend's young and middle-aged adults, Notre Dame students and even Notre Dame alumni from as far as Chicago simply grew more and more excited.
Finally, amid rumors that if he did not take the stage by 11, Snoop would be fined $10,000, the Doggfather grabbed the microphone with only three minutes to spare. He then launched into some of his live performance antics, begging the crowd to shout his name louder with each verse of each song. If Snoop Dogg knows how to do anything better than produce massively-successful raps, it is throwing the crowd into a frenzy. Each song involved participation, even if it was only Snoop urging the crowd to wave its arms to his beat, to which the crowd eagerly obliged.
He played some of his more recent hits as well as some of his classics from the 90s. The classics, such as "Who Am I (What's My Name)?" struck a chord with the older half of the crowd and hits from the latter half of the past decade, "I Wanna Rock," "Sensual Seduction" and "Drop It Like It's Hot," sent the college-aged groups into a possibly drug-assisted euphoria.
Snoop introduced "Drop It Like It's Hot," a 2004 hit, with an old-school touch, rapping the first verse of "Jump Around" by House of Pain. As Snoop said to a loud roar, "Now that I know y'all can get up, now I want you to … drop it like it's hot."
Another highlight of the night occurred when Snoop paid tribute to his former friend and music partner Tupac Shakur. The rapper was infamously killed during the East Coast-West Coast rap rivalry in 1996.
In such a short performance, Snoop managed to play nearly every one of hisbiggest hits. To the disappointment of the crowd, he left out his newest single, "Wet." "Wet," originally written as a wedding gift for Prince William intended to be the anthem of his bachelor party, is the second single off Snoop's upcoming album, "Doggumentary." Snoop teased the audience with references to the new song, only to dive into "Sensual Seduction." What a let down.
Aside from making the crowd wait an unnecessary two hours and leaving out his newest song, Snoop didn't miss a beat, and kept the crowd buzzing throughout his performance. Apparently, he enjoyed the show as much as his fans did, saying as he left, "I'll be back to South Bend, Indiana, any time you [four-syllable profanity] want me back."
