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Video: Kerry’s High-Level Summit With Snoop Dogg

It’s not every day that a rapper with a well-publicized love of guns, girls and ganja hangs out with our nation’s top diplomat. Earlier this month, though, that’s exactly what happened.  In what has to be seen as a top contender for the strangest video of the year, Calvin Cordozar Broadus — the rapper better known ...

Instagram/Snoopdogg
Instagram/Snoopdogg
Instagram/Snoopdogg

It's not every day that a rapper with a well-publicized love of guns, girls and ganja hangs out with our nation's top diplomat. Earlier this month, though, that's exactly what happened. 

It’s not every day that a rapper with a well-publicized love of guns, girls and ganja hangs out with our nation’s top diplomat. Earlier this month, though, that’s exactly what happened. 

In what has to be seen as a top contender for the strangest video of the year, Calvin Cordozar Broadus — the rapper better known as Snoop Doggy Dog, Snoop Dogg or, more recently, Snoop Lion — posted a short clip of himself chatting with Secretary of State John Kerry at a black-tie event on Instagram. The sound is too poor to hear much of what their conversation, but the video ends with a smiling Kerry tapping fists with Snoop Dogg before walking off. 

"Boss life. me n john kerry at d white house !!! #reincarnated #khc", Snoop Dogg wrote in the post, somewhat cryptically.

The video was taken at one of the formal receptions the Obama administration threw in early December to celebrate this year’s Kennedy Center Honorees: opera singer Martina Arroyo, pianist and singer Billy Joel, keyboardist and composer Herbie Hancock, actress Shirley MacLaine and songwriter Carlos Santana.

During the awards ceremony, Santana, a Mexican-American, had the line of the night when he joked that the "last time I felt like this is when I crossed the border and they gave me a wad of tickets to Disneyland and I rode the rides over and over again."

Some of the loudest applause, though, was reserved for Snoop Dogg, who rolled on stage to rap Cantaloop, the 1993 US3 song that was built around a short sample of Hancock’s 1964 jazz composition Cantaloupe Island.

"Thank you for creating hip-hop," Snoop Dogg said to Hancock after the song.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said she didn’t have many details of what was said at the impromptu summit, but joked that Kerry and Snoop Dogg had one thing in common.

"It’s safe to say that between the two of them, they’ve sold 30 million records," she said. A few minutes later, the joke was tweeted from the State Department’s official account.

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