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** Snoop Dogg

THE LAST MEAL

(No Limit/Priority)

**1/2 Master P

GHETTO POSTAGE

(No Limit)

It wasn’t all that long ago that the release of a new Snoop studio album was a bona fide media event guaranteed to monopolize a good week of programming on MTV on its way to a #1 debut on the Billboard sales chart. But times and tastes have changed: Eminem has taken Snoop’s place as Dr. Dre’s unit-shifting golden boy, and Backstreet Boy harmonizing has trumped gangsta rapping in the lucrative suburban teen market. So the Doggfather has to be happy with selling only enough (around 400,000) to hit #9 in The Last Meal’s first week out. What’s worse is how dated Snoop’s fifth studio album all sounds. He’s messing with yesterday’s news when he samples Bill Clinton’s convoluted explication of “sexual relations,” and his obsession with gangsta this and gangsta sounds so 1992. Mostly, though, the problem is how the combination of his trademark buttered-popcorn delivery and Dre’s Cali g-funk grooves seems too comfortable and familiar for its own good, even with the addition of Snoop’s new pal Kokane, whose playfully high voRce brings some Flavor Flav–style comic relief to roughly half the disc’s tracks.

Snoop’s gradual downfall seems to have begun when he left Dre and LA to sign on with Master P’s New Orleans–based No Limit army, a move that marked him as a hired gun of sorts. His presence did boost No Limit’s profile and give legitimacy to P’s renegade operation. Now, No Limit’s glory days — in 1999 it seemed the label had two or three albums in the Top 10 for six or eight months running — have also passed, and in 2001 Master P, like Snoop, sounds a little out of date. In the wake of Eminem’s brutal hümophobia and misogyny, P’s nigga and ’ho’ talk seems almost quaint. But Master P still acts like a man on a mission — “Oh say to the crooked cops that search and seize me and my homies/And there’s No Limit till we free/Those who hate us can’t stop me,” sings a chorus of No Limit soldierettes to the tune of “The Star Spangled Banner” at the start of Ghetto Postage — and that invests the album with a sense of urgency that Snoop long ago lost. The No Limit production style — spare, quirky, lo-fi, and built around little more than cheesy beatbox handclaps and hi-hat grooves, with maybe a simple piano or synth line to carry a melody of sorts — remains effective, perhaps because in a genre of excesses it’s so utilitarian. Indeed, the single, “Souljas,” amounts to an “I don’t know but I’ve been told . . . ” military march set to the barest of hip-hop grooves.

— Matt Ashare