Mellowing with age but still one cool cat

Snoop appears, as if by magic, in a puff of his own smoke. The rapper, actor, gangster and stoner extraordinaire has reinvented himself as a reggae-singing messenger of hope. Snoop Dogg is dead, long live Snoop Lion.

We meet in his management office in Los Angeles, a warehouse dedicated to all things Snoop. He slopes in, dressed in a white T-shirt, dark jeans and jacket, trainers and shades, lion medallion hanging down his chest, patchy Rasta beard - and surprisingly beautiful.

Snoop has just made a documentary, Reincarnated, that charts his path from gun-toting gangsta-rapper to the peace-and-love Rastafarian who claims to have been reincarnated (also the name of his new album). He talks about how he has changed as a man, a husband, a father of three. "When you allow evolution to happen, that's when it becomes the greatest thing it could possibly be."

Snoop Lion still has a fair bit of the Dogg in him. But then Snoop Doggy Dogg, as he was first known, was never afraid of embracing his contradictions. He emerged in 1993 with the hugely successful album Doggystyle, and set the pattern for 20 years of guns, gangsters and misogyny. His voice was rich and seductive. His raps were X-rated, yet the kids loved him. He wrote about pimping and dealing on the streets of underclass black America, yet the white middle class adored him.

Snoop is one of rap's great survivors: 20 years on, he is still successful when many of his contemporaries are dead. As a young man he was in and out of prison for drug dealing; in 1993 he was charged with accessory to murder (he was eventually cleared); a decade ago he combined his successful recording career with pimping (until it put too much stress on his marriage), and in 2006 he was barred from entering Britain after he and his entourage were involved in a mass brawl at Heathrow airport.