If Wiz Khalifa was a bit out of his element last summer with emo-rockers Fall Out Boy, he couldn’t be any more in the comfort zone than he is now on The High Road Tour with Snoop Dogg.
With: Kevin Gates, Jhene Aiko, Casey Veggies and DJ Drama.
Where: First Niagara Pavilion, Burgettstown.
When: 7 p.m. Wednesday.
Tickets: $26-$85.75; ticketmaster.com.
It was obvious to everyone when Khalifa came along in the mid-’00s that the Pittsburgh rapper was aligned musically, and united in his love of marijuana, with the West Coast rap legend.
“I remember hearing Snoop’s music in ’93, when it first came out,” Khalifa said in a recent teleconference, “and it was when West Coast rap was really hard-core, or looked at as hardcore, but it was something that I gravitated toward just because of the generally smooth sound of it. It didn’t really come off as gangster rap to me.”
Khalifa, who is 28, would have been all of 6 at the time, but just two years away from his first attempts to rap and six years from his first recording, happening before he even got to Taylor Allderdice.
“Since then,” he said of the 44-year-old Snoop Dogg, “he’s been able to just move through the times, like him signing with No Limit in the late ’90s, and then either having songs like ‘Beautiful’ with Pharrell, to reinvent and to re-create and to really establish himself. There’s nobody else in the game like Snoop, so just having that history and being able to grow up listening to his music, and then being able to meet him and be an acquaintance of his is really cool, but the fact that he’s still going and still adding to his legacy is super dope.”
Khalifa did his first joint with Snoop, musical and otherwise, in January 2011, a month before his first big single, “Black and Yellow,” became a hit and two months before the release of his major-label debut “Rolling Papers.” The song was the dreamy, shimmery single “That Good,” a love song to “that purp, that bomb, that kush” that had the veteran rapper declaring, “Snoop and Wiz, the new Cheech and Chong, we up in smoke.”
“The way it went was I just showed up to his crib,” Khalifa said. “We wanted to make some music, and I have producers who I’ve always worked with and I’ve been comfortable picking selections of beats with because they know what I love. And Snoop being awesome, he was just like, pick a beat out, and I picked one of the beats. I never really heard it before, I just went to a folder that I had in my email, and I picked a beat. I put it on, I played it, and it took me about 10 or 15 seconds, and I wrote the hook.
“And then I went and laid the hook, and he told me that it sounded like Nate Dogg singing the hook, so that really made me super confident, and then he wrote his verse. Of course, he wrote it faster than I wrote mine, but he wrote his verse in 12 seconds, went in there and rapped it.”
“That Good” would become part of the soundtrack to their “Up in Smoke”-inspired comedy “Mac and Devin Go to High School.” Flowing along on rich, mellow grooves, the soundtrack, highlighted by the hit single “Young, Wild and Free,” was more well-received than the film, prompting AV Club to say, “Wiz sounds invigorated by working with his idol; he doesn’t kowtow and he’s never lacking for innovative ways to rap about getting high.”
Rather than seizing on that opportunity, Khalifa hit the road on the Under the Influence of Music Tour with Mac Miller in 2012, followed by A$AP Rocky in 2013, Young Jeezy in 2014 and then Fall Out Boy.
“It was my feeling that we should have gotten on the road for a long time,” he said of Snoop, “but at the end of last year, being that I did a rock ’n’ roll tour with Fall Out Boy, I wanted to do something that was more oriented toward my core audience, and doing something with Snoop just felt like the perfect opportunity.”
Khalifa comes to the party still riding the success of the biggest single of his career — the chart-topping “See You Again” — and the tossed-off collection “Khalifa.” Snoop just released his 14th album, “Coolaid,” which has Wiz on two tracks, including the lead single “Kush Ups,” another ethereal weed anthem in space.
On The High Road Tour, they switch off songs and then take the stage together — long, tall, dreadlocked and looking like family.
“Me and Snoop are really cool,” Khalifa said. “We’re more like brothers than a business relationship,” adding “we’re going to really have a dope experience behind the scenes as well as on stage.”
No doubt. The next move for Wiz will be a new studio album, “Rolling Papers 2,” led by super-chill single “More and More,” which has him singing, “I wish it was leeee-gal/to get high.”
Asked how this sequel related to the original “Rolling Papers,” he said, “I wouldn’t really say I’m revisiting anything. I just think that ‘Rolling Papers’ was such a good moment in my life, and musically I was in such a good place, that to just remind people of that project and what could be new from it, I think that’s what makes it most exciting.”
Scott Mervis: smervis@post-gazette.com; 412-263-2576. Twitter: @scottmervis_pg
First Published: August 7, 2016, 4:00 a.m.
