Dante in the 213
For a week or so I was driving around my pop’s car with only the cassette single of “Regulate” by Warren G in the deck. Each side had the album cut exactly once – a perfect, repeating cycle. As I listened to it over and over again, the song grew out of the rote tale of west-coast gangster life I’d assumed it to be and into something more. Check it out:
The story begins with our protagonists, Warren G and Nate Dogg, cruising the eastside separately. Warren, though the principal of the song (it is on his album), runs into trouble, while Nate Dogg causes a car full of girls to crash on account of how fly he is. Nate Dogg, the king of the gangster-croon, the Sinatra to Snoop Dogg’s Dean Martin, is the tougher, more resourceful man in the narrative. He swoops in, saves the day (fends off the perpetrating dice-rollers) and then delivers Warren to the immobilized girls, relegating Warren to the role of Sammy Davis, Jr. in this contemporary gat-pack.
But this is where the song gets interesting: the third act of this narrative isn’t narrative at all, it’s the duo bragging about the abstract splendor of their well-being and how nice their music is.
It’s only natural the story should end with such ephemera. Trace the steps: The shepherd, Nate Dogg, leads Warren G, our pilgrim, out of hell (getting jacked at a crap game) and into purgatory (he still needs to find some girls). The third verse’s cyclical non-sequiturs “the rhythm is the bass and the bass is the treble” are the heaven the pair are after – a high, blissful experience that we can only assume is what one finds at that fabled eastside motel.
I can still feel that intense draw from the first time I heard Warren G’s opening line: “It was a clear, black night, a clear white moon.” He sets the scene in the style of epic poetry, as if nothing less were to follow. I think these fellas knew what they were up to.