Fan Fare

Rapper Snoop Dogg is known for his rapid-fire description of urban life’s brutalities, but his new music video is a crossover into country music and something of an ode to “My Medicine” with the help of singer Willie Nelson. 

The 37-year-old rapper wears a cowboy hat, strums a guitar and opens the video, posted on his Web site this week, with a dedication to the late Johnny Cash, by calling him “a real American gangster.”

Country icon Nelson, 75, joins Snoop Dogg in the video, and is shown leaning into a microphone and singing, between shots of Snoop Dogg running through a forest and swinging a guitar.

What’s the inspiration that unites these two music artists separated by age and music category? Medicine. Or, as the song is called “My Medicine.”

Snoop Dogg and Willie Nelson’s medicine is all but spelled out in their history and when the rapper sings the lyric, “You say you can’t buy me love, but you damn sure can buy me bud.” And on that theme, part of the video is filmed in Amsterdam.

Snoog Dogg, whose real name is Calvin Broadus Jr., has built a reputation around his love of marijuana, and he has faced a string of arrests related to possession of the drug. In 2006, Burbank police nabbed him after a performance on NBC’s “Tonight Show with Jay Leno” and said they found marijuana in his car. Nelson, too, has been popped by the police for marijuana possession and has supported its legalization.