Baz Dreisinger

Next, Conan jokes about a certain sweet scent that, back in the day, emanated from Snoop’s dressing room, but the rapper is deadpan. Quitting his “thousand-dollar-a-day” marijuana habit in order to be a better coach to his son’s football team and a role model to his fans is, he insists, no publicity stunt. Snoop first told me he quit because one of his musical idols and close friends, Johnny Wilson of the GAP Band, told him to; days later he added, “It’s hard to have a clear head, to put in that quality family time, if you’re always high.”

The mantra coined by Snoop’s omnipresent publicist, Richie Abbott, goes like this: “Snoop’s for the kids.” I hear it often during our trip from L.A. to Las Vegas with Snoop, who’ll be ad-libbing prank phone calls as a guest on Comedy Central’s “Crank Yankers.” The tour bus is outfitted with strobe lights, black leather seats and bottles of Hennessy, but Snoop could care less. He’s holed up in the back of the bus with fast food, a Kung Fu video and PlayStation.

In the “Crank Yankers” studio, Snoop enjoys the wholesome mischief of prank calling, keeping us in stitches, after the job is done, with calls to friends like Dennis Rodman. He’s almost too soft-spoken to pull off a prank: When words like “bitch” (or, in his slightly Southern twang, “bee-atch”) slip sweetly from his lips, Snoop might as well be murmuring “baby.”

But as the show’s team scribbles prompts on poster board, holding them up as guides for Snoop while he makes his calls, I wonder if they’ve been informed that Snoop is now “for the kids.” For one skit, Snoop is instructed to phone a high school principal and tell her he’d like to lecture students about drugs. Following the principal’s stunned initial response — “You want to come here? To our little town?” — staff scribbling begins. “Ask about the weed she likes,” reads one poster board. “Can she let you hand out rolling papers?” “Gin and juice?” “School gangs?” “How’s her butt?”

After two hours in this sea of gangster clichés, Snoop is transported from the studio in a swarm of bodyguards who can never leave his side — especially at the local mall, where Snoop decides he wants to meet the saleswoman he’d prank called. The shopping spree becomes a quasi-riot when word spreads that Snoop is in the vicinity, and the shop owner closes his gates as Snoop models Roca Wear jackets. Crowds gawk through the iron gates as if ogling the top attraction in a zoo.

Hoping to make Snoop’s son’s afternoon football game, we finally file into a homeward-bound bus. Snoop tries to wander off.

“Where do you think you’re going?” one bodyguard calls after him. Snoop keeps walking. “Over there,” he says with a frustrated sigh, pointing at the McDonald’s across the road.

“Not alone, you’re not!” comes the reply, as it seems to have come many times before. Faster than you can say “Big Mac,” Snoop’s security team are on his tail. They’re always on his tail. They were on his tail in April, when — for the third time in his career — Snoop found himself in the line of fire, the target of a loaded gun.

As Snoop’s long, lean figure disappears in the dawn, a timeless question springs to mind: Can an old Dogg learn new tricks? Once upon a time, Snoop was gangsta rap’s golden-tongued child. His mesmerizing delivery, so tranquil it could rival Mr. Rogers’, belied its subject matter: juice-and-ginning, Crip walking, the bitch in his bed last night. His brand of hip-hop — its images of young black men in low-riders, sporting gang colors and proclaiming “fuck the police” — first put South Central Los Angeles on the musical map in the late ’80s, then rode the wave of ’90s culture wars by prompting FBI warnings, nationwide boycotts, and courtroom dramas. A decade after gangsta rap’s heyday — after Snoop’s “Doggystyle” sold 802,000 copies in its first week and was the first debut album to ever enter Billboard at No. 1 — the 31-year-old Snoop, declaring himself a family man, tries out a public rebirth. But with five albums, a gangsta-hungry fan base, and a real-life gangster history, can a gangsta rapper really move on?

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There’s a knock at the door of Snoop’s dressing room at “The Jimmy Kimmel Show,” where Snoop is co-hosting for a week. No one wants to answer because everyone knows who it is: theater security, requesting yet again if, please, could Snoop’s people put out the blunts, please? The smoke has drifted down the hall.

There’s smoke for every inhaler in Snoop’s sizable, wide-ranging entourage: old friends from his hometown, Long Beach, Calif., many of whom work in one form or another for DoggyStyle Records; a coterie of middle-aged, silk-shirt-wearing avuncular types with names like Uncle Charlie Wilson and June Bugg (who’s actually Snoop’s uncle); at least a handful of bodyguards, some of whom have been with Snoop almost a decade. Midriff-baring ladies keep all the men in rollicking moods.

In the corner of the room, oblivious to the hubbub surrounding him yet somehow defined by it, is Snoop. He’s having his hair braided by a woman who materializes every time Snoop needs a new look, which is often: The rapper travels with an inexhaustible supply of sweat suits and Converse sneakers. One eye on me, the other on his PlayStation, Snoop answers questions efficiently, as if he’s been well trained by publicists over the years. He sums up his evolution neatly: “In 1993 I was restless. I had no cares, no kids, and I was enjoying the limelight. 2003 is about my kids, my wife, my bettering myself, and trying to be more of a role model.”

His friends are excited about this evolution. They say he’s the same-old Snoop, just older and wiser. “Quitting weed? That ain’t no image change. That’s positive change for his health,” says a singer called Lil’ Half Dead, who’s known Snoop since childhood. Rapper Kam, also a longtime friend of Snoop’s, nods. “He’s an institution now, not an individual. Whether we want it or not, we’re role models.” His wife Shante — who began dating him after he walked up to her at a high school football game and told her she was pretty (“Because there was just something funny about him”) — says football helped turn around Snoop. “Ever since he started coaching our son’s team, he’s just more devoted.”

After the Kimmel taping, Snoop, a little less pre-packaged, holds a blunt in his long fingers. And yes, he’s inhaling: Though he first quit cold turkey, Snoop now smokes on special occasions (and plenty an occasion seems special enough). When I tell him he makes a good talk-show host, he’s all ears. “You think so?” Snoop asks, almost breathless. I suggest it’s because he’s a tolerant guy who can calmly take in varied personalities — even ones like Tammy Faye Baker, Kimmel’s guest tonight. He stares at me for a moment, in rapt attention. “I like her,” Snoop nods. He also likes Bill Clinton (“I miss you, Bill. Let’s make a record together,” he says), and insists the world needs more role models. “Who?” I ask. Snoop stares again. “Me,” he replies softly, as if the question were rhetorical. “I’ve seen a lot. I can be a leader.” But what, I continue — he’s glowering at me now — about headlining L.A.’s annual pro-pot concert last November, or being named High Times’ “Stoner of the Year”? What about lyrics that still find him, “gin and juice in hand,” Crip-walking up a storm?

Snoop is suddenly that L.A. archetype, a reformed gangster. “You gotta understand that people can relate to it because I actually lived that lifestyle, so it’s not a preach-and-teach routine. I can make people say, ‘Well, I don’t have to do it because Snoop did it for me — and I see the results of him doing it but also the results of him doing better.’”

America — a country built by Puritans who were fixated on reform — has long loved converted sinners. It adores, too, bad boys with soft spots — which is probably why a rapper’s most fashionable accessory these days is a child. Eminem’s high-profile daughter Hailie represents our rebel’s ultimate goodness, his potential for reform.

Snoop’s favorite song on “Paid tha Cost to be Da Boss” is “I Miss That Bitch” — in which said “bitch” is marijuana — because “when I wrote that song, I was really missing weed bad. But I knew I could quit.” Asked to describe himself in a word, he offers three: “standup kinda guy.”

Only “Jim Henson’s Muppet Christmas Special,” which Bill O’Reilly’s fuss got him edited out of last year, seems to hit a chord. “I can’t believe [O'Reilly] did that, and he let millions of kids down,” he says quietly. “They love me.”

Snoop turns away in disgust, passing the blunt to his “spiritual advisor,” Archbishop Don “Magic” Juan. Juan, sipping from a bejeweled goblet and wearing a white suit with a dollar-bill pattern, is a former pimp who earned ordination. Decked out as Dolemite, he’s the rapper’s unofficial mascot.

“Snoop is calmer now, baby,” Juan shouts at me above the din, waving smoke from my eyes with a gold-encrusted hand. “Millions have seen it. They saw it at the Playboy mansion, when we visited there together. His family life has improved, and he’s reaching a spiritual level that he couldn’t reach before because his brain was clogged up with weed and alcohol. That’s why his career is taking off the way it is, why he’s touring with those — what’s their name? — Hot Chili Peppers, and with 50 Cent.”

Juan helped Snoop prepare for his role as Huggy Bear in the upcoming remake of “Starsky and Hutch,” starring Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller. Says Snoop, “The music side is so natural for me — it’s creative in the natural sense. But the movie thing pushes me. It drives me to become another character, to do things I might not do.” Snoop has already flexed his gangsta muscles in John Singleton’s “Baby Boy” and smoked chronic alongside Dr. Dre in “The Wash.” The latter is an over-the-top comedy about South Central L.A. that, like Ice Cube’s recent “The Friday After Next,” is starkly different from what critics called “new black realist cinema,” which pervaded Snoop’s early days in rap: “Boyz n the ‘Hood,” “Menace II Society,” and “Poetic Justice.” At the film premiere party for “The Friday After Next,” food was served by jovial waiters sporting gang-style bandannas.

Between inhales, Juan is still talking. “Everybody’s always pullin’ at Snoop Dogg, but I try to do for him. I go get him things, like a fish fillet — I know he like that. Orange Crush — he like that, too. And because of my association with Snoop, I’m taking myself to new heights. Like — and you print this — I’m the first pimp William Morris ever signed!”

In videos and songs with titles like “P.I.M.P” and “Pimp Juice,” in a VSOP liquor commercial, Snoop and Juan have lately been inseparable. Describing himself on one album track as “Snoop Hefner mixed with a little bit of Dogg Flynt,” Snoop also does ubiquitous solos in college-as-bacchanalia cinema — “Girls Gone Wild: Doggystyle,” a DVD advertised on the E! channel, as well as “The Real Cancun,” reality television’s big-screen debut. He sports lavish furs and a pimp’s cup, hamming it up in Rabelaisian glory.

In person, he’s sometimes in blaxploitation mode: Big Snoop Dogg, whose verbal ticks include lines like “you got’s to do it!” and “the game is calling me, baby!” and who uses the suffix “izzle” to produce a lexicon of slang (as in, “for shizzle, my nizzle,” loosely translated as “for sure, my man”). During my first encounter with him, Snoop drove up in a blue Porsche, wearing the sort of incognito getup — a colorful headscarf and enormous sunglasses — that hides little, especially on a 6’4″ celebrity. Unfurling himself from the car, Snoop gave me the once-over, licked his lips, and sweetly purred, “Where are you from, baby girl?”

“Personally, I don’t care too much for that side of him, but hey, if it floats his boat, it’s fine,” Shante says of her husband’s Superfly routine. “I just don’t get it — all the weird clothes and bright colors. I’m tolerant, though. Snoop tells me that every day.”

Shante may be married to Calvin Broadus but she’s also married to Snoop Dogg — who has both enemies and permanently affixed bodyguards. Snoop’s security team won’t say how his three L.A.-area homes are protected, only that they are protected. “Sometimes I think, Can’t we just take a trip to Disneyland, just the five of us, and not have all the security? But that’s just the lifestyle we live. Even the kids are used to it now,” sighs Shante.

Security is something other gangsta rappers know well. “A person like me with a past like mine — I live in a weird state of paranoia,” says Ice-T, one of the first gangsta rappers and a former pimp. Speaking with professorial gravitas about “the science of the gangster,” Ice-T — now 43 — sits in his Manhattan high-rise, nostalgic for his Crip-walking days, compulsively miming the gang dance that Snoop’s rhymes made famous. “I guess I’m what you would call hyper-sensitive, like a cat or predator in the jungle. I see everything. My instinct is the only thing that’s gonna keep me alive. I have a nice street level of fear that I turn into awareness. I call it being on point. I don’t get high, because I always want to be alert. You’ve got to be ready for whatever.”

Late last year — when Snoop first started talking reform, when it hit home that Ice-T had gone from peddling drugs in Compton to peddling “Posse Pops” ice cream — many heralded the triumph of time and money over something America once shunned: gangsta rap. A genre of hip-hop born in the late ’80s, gangsta rap — which some prefer to call “reality rap” — sprouted first on the East Coast with artists like KRS-One, then blossomed on the West Coast, where two acts took it national: Ice-T and NWA, or Niggaz With Attitude. Their 1988 album “Straight Outta Compton” — too controversial for MTV or radio — went triple platinum, established the theme and funk-backed sounds of the genre, and sent five teenagers from Compton to stardom: Andre Young (Dr. Dre), O’Shea Jackson (Ice Cube), Lorenzo Patterson (MC Ren), Eric Wright (Eazy-E), and Antoine Carraby (DJ Yella).

At its best, gangsta rap sustained the tradition, reaching back to ’70s political poets like the Watts Prophets, of voicing the young, poor, and black in L.A. At its worst, it devolved into tawdry trappings of gangsterism — misogynistic, violent posturing whose redeeming value was its putative realism — or meta-rap, which didn’t say something profound, political, or controversial but kept asserting that it could do so.

In 1992, a former bodyguard from Compton, Marion “Suge” Knight, secured backing from Interscope Records to establish Death Row Records, which immediately signed Dr. Dre and his protégé, a young rapper from Long Beach named Snoop Doggy Dogg (he’s since dropped the “Doggy”). Like his favorite rapper, Slick Rick, Snoop wrote rhymes that were often comic; his moniker evoked a cartoon, not a cartel. But though Knight liked to think of Death Row as the Motown of the ’90s, squeaky-clean Motown made black performers presentable to white audiences while Knight and Death Row generated over $100 million a year doing the opposite: Knight supposedly encouraged his legendary trio — Dre, Snoop and Tupac Shakur — to play up their gangsterism in every verbal and visual way possible.

This stoked the ire of Bob Dole, William Bennett, and C. Delores Tucker, of the National Congress of Black Women. In 1993, Tucker feasted her eyes on lyrics from “Doggystyle” and launched a crusade against Snoop and gangsta rap. Her 1994 statement in Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun’s Senate hearings deemed Snoop’s music “pornographic smut”; in 1995, her hullabaloo — and hefty chunk of company stock — succeeded in getting Time Warner to dump its share of Interscope, Death Row’s distributor. Snoop was, as Tucker put it in a recent phone chat, “committing genocide on our children, and I had to stop him.” Snoop is now Tucker’s victory medal. “They’re stopping all that gangster business now. Rappers are turning gospel,” she asserts.

Gospel? Not quite, but Tucker has a point. Dr. Dre, mastermind of “The Chronic,” an album that is to gangsta rap what “Ulysses” is to modernism, has long denounced any association with the genre; he’s now the legendary producer behind today’s top two rap acts, Eminem and 50 Cent. Ice Cube, who voiced the ire of Rodney King’s L.A., who once added a verse to rap group Public Enemy’s “Burn, Hollywood, Burn,” is — thanks to the hit movie “Barbershop,” which grossed more than $80 million, and his Cube Vision Films — Hollywood royalty. Ice-T has gone from singing about a “Cop Killer” to playing a cop on “Law and Order: SVU.” Only Snoop still calls himself a gangsta rapper.

At a taping of MTV2′s roving “$2 Bill tour” in Louisville, Ky., fans have lined up to see this gangsta rapper. The diverse crowd is the sort that MTV manufactures: old and young, black and white, industry and non-industry. Snoop takes the stage in a red football jersey and gray sweats, backed by a live band and backup singers who exhibit the more mature, soulful side of his new album. Snoop never sweats. In his signature style, he calmly ambles to and fro, enunciating rhymes as if conversing with his audience. Then Snoop begins a sentence with, “Now that I’ve quite drinking and smoking.” The audience boos; Snoop sighs. He revises his statement: “OK, OK — I still drink and smoke.” The crowd roars. Among them is a blond girl in a Kangol hat and low-cut sweater, who joins Snoop in a merry chant of “Fuck the police.”

At the Snoop Dogg Clothing Co. warehouse in Manhattan’s fashion district, head designer Guka Evans showcases the spring line. He lays out several oversized plaid shirts, matching khakis and two basketball-style jerseys. “These are the two Snoop personalities: the West-Coast casual aesthetic, and the more aggressive, athletic feel. During our first season, the retro-West-Coast look was the biggest seller,” Evans explains. There’s a tank top with “pimp” across the chest and a “Snoop All Stars” top that reads “Hoopdog.” Among the rejects is a shirt with “1-8-7″ printed on it; it’s inspired by Snoop’s duet with Dr. Dre, “Deep Cover,” about putting “1-8-7 on an undercover cop” (the municipal code for homicide). Designers had the shirt reprinted with “2-1-3,” instead, which is the Long Beach area code and the name of Snoop’s first rap group. “We didn’t think Macy’s would be too happy with that one,” says CEO Michael Cohen, pointing at the reject with a nervous laugh.

No one was laughing on April 10, when Snoop was driving his brown custom Cadillac (“brown sugar,” he calls it) south on Fairfax Avenue in L.A. and a northbound sedan fired nearly a dozen shots in his direction. They missed Snoop, but a bullet grazed one of eight bodyguards trailing him in five surrounding vehicles. An anti-gang LAPD unit heard shots and arrived on the scene; after questioning, Snoop was carted off safely in an armored vehicle. Either because it was utterly in line with the same-old Snoop — or puzzlingly out of line with the new-and-improved one — the incident remained relatively low profile, and no arrests were made.

According to Juan, whom Snoop had been visiting that night, the shooting was a product of young boys who tried to approach Snoop and were brushed aside by security. Rumor mills produced a juicier suspect: Suge Knight, gangsta rap’s longtime scapegoat. Knight and Snoop have been publicly feuding ever since Snoop left Death Row in 1998, while Knight served a five-year jail sentence for various parole violations. Snoop insults Suge on “Pimp Slapp’d,” a track from “Paid tha Cost” that includes cameos by an L.A. gang leader who has since filed a lawsuit against Snoop for sampling his voice.

“I have no hate for Bloods, just one particular fake-ass Blood,” says Snoop, referring to Knight. He claims Knight egged him on, plastering his face on the cover of an album titled “Dead Man Walking,” even promising a car to the man who’d cut Snoop’s hair. After the April shooting, a Web site for Death Row, now called Tha Row Records, featured Snoop, the sound of gunshots, and a whimpering dog.

“Snoop don’t threaten me or nobody on my label,” Knight told me at a charity Mother’s Day brunch he throws annually in Beverly Hills. “I mean, we never see the guy. He don’t come out, and if he do come out, the people don’t feel him. They don’t respect the simple fact of who he is, because every time he come out he gets shot at. And if he do go out, it’s like a million police, or, for him to go to the restroom, 20 people gotta walk with him. That’s not living.”

At a magazine shoot in New York, Snoop insists on featuring a “Fuck Simon” T-shirt (Simon is a nickname for Suge). Uncle June Bugg, busy trying to chat up any woman at close range, doesn’t seem to notice; Abbott fires off frantic two-ways; Snoop’s bodyguards, slumped in chairs like exasperated parents, can only roll their eyes — just as they did when Snoop blasted “Pimp Slapp’d” in his Vegas hotel room.

“Artists shouldn’t get into feuds if they’re just doing it for sales, because they should be able to deal with the repercussions,” Knight declares, wiping a bead of sweat from his brow. “They shouldn’t listen to the executives because while executives are at home, watching TV or playing golf somewhere, these guys are trying to hang out in clubs, and that’s when the feud starts, and it’s real life.”

Knight puffs on his cigar. “So I think they should be careful what they say, or if they say it, they should mean it and deal with it — and when you have to deal with it, stop calling the police. If you have a problem, be able to roll by yourself. You shouldn’t have to be saying ‘we, we, we’ all the time. If you cut out all the extra fat, most people would stop talking their mouth so much.”

At the magazine shoot, an onlooker attempts to explain the Suge-Snoop enmity. “Snoop’s a Crip,” she says, pronouncing the word with awe. It’s the routine performed for a gangsta-curious public: Is he or isn’t he?

“Snoop was a rapper. He wasn’t into gangbanging — it was nothing like that,” says Snoop’s first bodyguard, McKinley “Malik” Lee. “He sold weed, he went to jail a few times, but he wasn’t some big gangster. Snoop was a character. He was comical, a ladies man, a player. He wasn’t anything like the music. Matter of fact, I couldn’t understand why he chose to take his music that way.”

Growing up on 21st Street in Long Beach, Snoop sang in the church choir and listened to music he still loves: Al Green, the Dramatics, Curtis Mayfield. At Long Beach Polytechnic high school, recalls longtime friend Nate Dogg, “I’d beat on the desk and Snoop would freestyle.” Snoop, Nate, and Warren G formed the rap group 213 and eventually got successful producer (and Warren’s older stepbrother) Dr. Dre to give their demo a listen.

“Snoop was funny and he made me laugh, but the guys he hung out with — I didn’t like them at all. So I told him I wouldn’t go out with him at first,” Shante recalls. A month later, she says, Snoop was back at her door a changed man, no longer hanging around the Rolling 20 Crips. His music, though, was awash in Crip talk, which was enough to turn debut video shoots into anti-Snoop mini-riots, especially — as was once reportedly the case — when they were filmed in Blood neighborhoods and Snoop wore Crip-style blue.

“The people he grew up with knew the reality — that he wasn’t Cripping like that — but others didn’t,” says Lee. “You reap what you sow. You speak it into existence.” After Snoop’s debut on “The Chronic” made him famous, Death Row installed him and Lee in small apartments that Knight owned in the working-class Palms district of L.A. It was an attempt to keep Snoop from harm’s way — and it failed. Here’s the popular account of what happened in August 1993 at a park near that apartment: Gangsta rapper Snoop Dogg showed authentic Crip colors when he and his bodyguard feuded with a 20-year-old rival named Philip Woldemariam, who was killed. Snoop landed on the cover of major music magazines. Death Row happily surrendered to the marketing frenzy, recording a video for the eerily appropriate Snoop single “Murder was the Case.” “Doggystyle” flew from record stores.

The account given by Paul Palladino, the private investigator who got Snoop and Lee acquitted, is far less glamorous. “It wasn’t a gang dispute — the case was much more complicated than that,” he explains. While Snoop and Lee were inside Snoop’s apartment, which was known to house the rap star, Woldemariam and friends — drug dealers with a paranoid theory that Snoop would usurp their business — threw gang signs at a coterie of Snoop’s friends who were loitering in front of Snoop’s building. Later that day, when Snoop was driving his SUV to the studio with Lee beside him, Woldemariam and crew flagged the car down, approached its passenger side, and pulled a gun; in self-defense, Lee fired and Woldemariam was killed. Ironically, Snoop’s lyrics, which had created his gangsta identity, were cited at hearings as proof of this very identity.

“Everybody on the streets was saying it was gangster this and gangster that, but it had nothing to do with gangs,” says Lee. “If that trial wouldn’t have happened, though, Snoop’s album wouldn’t have dropped the way it did. ‘Murder was the Case’ was recorded two years before the shooting ever happened.”

Lee claims that the April shooting was prompted by Snoop’s presence in the very neighborhood of “the deceased,” where Snoop still has enemies. “Of course there’s still beef! A life was taken, and to people in the streets, Snoop Dogg did it. If there was peace made, it’s one thing, but there was never any closure — it was never spoken on righteously. Snoop needs to call a meeting, a press conference, and say that that murder wasn’t about gangs, say to the family, ‘Hey, we didn’t even know who your son was.’”

But in Snoop’s vision of the universe, he’s moved passively along by a larger-than-life force. “I’m a child of God and I walk in the right way, so I’m not worried. If something is gonna happen, God’s gonna make it happen,” says Snoop, asked if he felt afraid in 1995, when he and his bodyguards fled from gunshots at a video shoot in New York — or if he feels afraid now.

“When the [April] shooting happened,” says Shante, “I got kinda down — like ‘How come we have to live like this?’ It’s like, he had a dream and he wanted to fulfill it and it’s fulfilled — so what do you do now? I just pray.” She remembers the day after the shooting, when Corde came home from private school upset. “He said, ‘Mom, why does everyone keep asking me if Dad’s OK?’”

We’re waiting on Snoop at a small house in the Valley, where he’ll shoot a segment for one of his final Jimmy Kimmel appearances. Crew members are discussing last night’s show, which featured Snoop and the rapper he toured with this summer, the enormously successful performer credited with the recent East-Coast rebirth of gangsta rap: 50 Cent. “Is Snoop a real gangster?” one staffer asks me. Before I can respond, another staffer interjects. “You know who’s a real gangster? That 50 Cent.” All nod in reverent silence.

Several bodyguards arrive at the house; others arrive later with Snoop, who’s running on what Abbott calls “Snoop time.” One bodyguard regales me with stories of his trip to Brazil, where Snoop was shooting the video for “Beautiful.” The video has a different aesthetic from Snoop’s previous video, which served up gangsta delights: blue bandannas, low-riders, and an abusive LAPD officer. The bandanna, however, was worn by a Snoop doll; the low-rider was an outrageous Snoop DeVille; and the officer a comic dwarf. If 50 Cent’s aesthetic is “real,” used as an un-ironic epithet even in a post-postmodern era (“50 is real, so he does real things,” reads his Web site), Snoop’s is so deliberately artificial it’s camp.

Lil’ Half Dead arrives with Snoop. He’s fresh out of jail and says he sometimes has to drive around the block before entering his own home, because he’ll always have enemies.

“No one, including Snoop, wants to live the kind of life it would take to truly be safe. He’d have to never bring old homies around, because it’s usually the friends who end up starting all the drama,” Palladino had told me, recalling a scenario early in Snoop’s career when Snoop, arrested for firing road-rage shots at a police officer who took down his license plate number, was released upon discovery that Snoop’s friend — driving Snoop’s car — was the one who’d fired the shots. “I told Snoop, ‘With friends like that, you don’t need enemies.’”

Later that day, when I ask Snoop what he’d change about the music industry, he turns melancholy. “The untimely deaths,” he says, stone-faced. One such death is that of Snoop’s friend Tupac Shakur, a gangsta rapper who was one-part political poet and one-part gangsta posturing. This latter part earned him the enemies who were his tragic undoing. Unidentified gunmen murdered Tupac in Las Vegas in 1996, but he still sells records, containing songs recorded before his death; he still appears, saintly as ever, in nostalgia-ridden music videos. He’s the embodiment of Robert Warshow’s famous essay about the gangster archetype in American culture, which claims that because the genre must culminate in a fatal climax, one can only be a true gangster in art or in death.

“If you want to leave it all behind, you have to sever ties with the past, really,” says Palladino. “Suge couldn’t do it, and he still won’t. How can you do that when you’re under enormous pressure to stay true to the streets?”

Russell Simmons, chairman of Def Jam Records and one of hip-hop’s most high-profile spokesmen, says it can be done. Recalling a recent vacation he took to St. Bart’s with platinum rapper Jay-Z, Simmons is wistful. “Here’s a kid from the projects on my boat, loving life. He doesn’t want to be involved in shoot-ups. He’s grown past that.” Simmons claims that even today’s most successful live gangster, 50 Cent, can also grow past it, and still maintain his fan base. “Hip-hop is defined by change,” he insists.

Back in the Valley, Snoop is ready to be filmed. With his Long Beach buddies milling about, Snoop shoots a short skit in which he’s having a garage sale, peddling bongs, hash brownies, and other such stoner paraphernalia. Actual neighbors line up to buy them. Then they watch in awe as Snoop, lost in a whirl of bodyguards, zips back to Hollywood.

The show’s name was to blame for my initial bias: “Redemption” carries hefty verbal weight. Penitent sinners experience redemption. Contemplative outlaws experience redemption. Meditating religious icons experience redemption. But a blockbuster rapper marketing a new album via an upcoming prison stint, promoting his “countdown to lockdown,” to cite the title of rapper Lil’ Kim’s 2006 pre-prison BET reality show — does he experience redemption, even as he’s likely getting paid per episode? I was skeptical.

So I staged a “Road to Redemption” viewing marathon and took stock. The show proved easy viewing; compared to such vapid MTV fare as “The City” and “The Real World, Brooklyn,” it was highbrow stuff, indeed, and it did deserve credit for trying to positively affect young people’s lives. Big up for that one, MTV, and for tackling prison-related issues altogether: As the world’s No. 1 jailer, America is in dire need of a cold, hard look in the mirror. With T.I. set to serve a (massively reduced) sentence — his year and a day for felony weapons charges is evidence of what celebrity status and a pricey lawyer can do — there’s vital need to promote the idea that even though top-selling rappers are doing it, prison’s not some hard-knocks coming-of-age rite, and it’s definitely not cool.

But the show was also easy viewing because all the episodes are of a piece; show after show it’s “same formula, different troubled teen.” Each episode is structured around the rapper’s (er, MTV producer’s) “four-step process” to adolescent reform, which T.I. recites: 1) sneak up on the wayward youth; 2) show ‘em what they’re doing wrong; 3) show ‘em the likely outcome of said wrong; and 4) inspire change by exhibiting alternative choices.

At the crux of the show’s formula sits a tactic that’s hardly new: the “scared-straight” approach. T.I. takes his young charges to funeral homes, prisons or backyards of bullet-scarred former O.G.s, which usually makes the kids shed a tear and rehearse penitent platitudes. Ever since its ’70s-era inception at Rahway State Prison, after all, the Scared Straight Program has been ready for its close-up: From the 1978 Oscar-winning documentary “Scared Straight!” to the 1999 MTV series of the same name, it has produced many a TV-friendly moment — but little more. Various studies, including one by the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, suggest that Scared Straight-style programs were not just unproductive but counterproductive: Recidivism rates for those who participated in the program proved higher than for those who hadn’t, and Scared Straight-type intervention increased odds of offending by 1.7 percent. Explanatory theories abounded. Perhaps the program inadvertently acted as a challenge to teens, daring them to prove they weren’t scared. Perhaps it romanticized the behind-bars lifers it featured, or served to desensitize instead of deter.

Ultimately, are intelligent viewers really meant to believe that after one mini scared straight-style experience, T.I.’s subjects are ready for reform and a glimpse of the future — which usually includes a pricey gift from the rapper himself? Would that reform were such an uncomplicated process. “No more guns, no more violence, no more bad stuff,” says Mario from Compton, Calif., fondling his new boxing gloves. “I’ve learned I can do anything I want,” says Cynthia from South Central Los Angeles, ogling her new laptop. Such comments sound as canned as T.I.’s über-scripted interstitials, delivered throughout. From the rapper on down, the show is a triumph of the hyper-artificial, hyper-produced happy ending.

Granted, all reality TV isn’t real — but all reality TV isn’t tackling such a vital real-life cause, and trafficking in weighty words like “redemption.” To call what T.I. or his well-meaning subjects are doing “redemption” or even “rehabilitation” is to cheapen the profound currency of these terms, which are vital to the reform of our utterly dysfunctional prison system. Critics of indeterminate sentencing — which is grounded in the belief that offenders can indeed be rehabilitated, and promotes sentences contingent on factors unique to each offender’s case history, life story and behavior while incarcerated — argue that too many prisoners who claim they’ve been reformed are merely faking it; therefore, cut-and-dried rules need apply. Alas, is there better support for their argument than T.I.’s show, which is a prime-time ad for “faking it”?

Rehabilitation and redemption should be the cornerstone of our criminal justice system, so let’s not insult the countless men and women who’ve spent years behind bars genuinely redeeming themselves by using these words lightly. “T.I.’s Road to Record Sales and Possible Mild Improvement”? Maybe. But “Redemption”? Please.

Visiting Juan in his Los Angeles apartment, as I once did, is like entering a time warp. Bypass the 1976 Rolls Royce parked out front and step into a living room straight out of “Superfly” — chenille sofas, shag carpets and mirrored wall paneling etched in gold. Juan wore a rainbow-colored leisure suit, shoes tie-dyed to match and shirt unbuttoned to the waist. He poured himself a pint of Hennessy and did what pimps and preachers do best: talk. For nearly two hours. After which he showered me with gifts — a Playboy T-shirt, a sample-size vial of perfume, an autographed photo — and exhibited the mainstream press he’s gotten over the years.

“It ain’t like it was in the ’70s and ’80s, when people were like, ‘oooh, pimping — that’s a bad thing.’ Now everybody wanna be a pimp,” he cackled, unleashing a folder full of clippings on the glass coffee table. He waved one in the air. “They even put me in the L.A. Times! Watch the E! Channel and you’ll see a ‘Player’s Ball’ — and it’s all white folks there! This is a new mackallennium, baby!”

Juan wasn’t exaggerating. “Pimping” has not just become an urban pop-culture staple, it’s even spread to the hinterlands. Take multi-platinum, omnipresent rapper/producer Lil Jon, who’s never without his favorite accessory: the glimmering goblet known as a “pimp’s cup” (which I personally witnessed him cart around a nightclub, casually insisting that bartenders serve his drinks in it). And now, thanks to Lil Jon, Snoop Dogg, Don “Magic” Juan and others who’ve popularized it, little Joey in the suburbs can now purchase his own rhinestone-encrusted pimp’s cup — maybe from PimpWear.com, one of the many teen-friendly outlets peddling pimp paraphernalia, maybe to match a T-shirt from his favorite new brand, which he thinks is way cooler than Phat Farm: Pimp Clothing Co.

Young Joey is also targeted for the forthcoming flash animation film “Lil Pimp,” about a freckle-faced, 9-year-old white boy who learns the ways of the block. Featuring the voices of Bernie Mac, William Shatner and Jennifer Tilly, “Lil Pimp” was originally a Columbia Pictures release. But after its mere title made black activists squirm, and after half the audience reportedly walked out on one test screening, straight-to-DVD seemed a more reasonable option.

Pimp juice — defined by the unofficial but authoritative online urban dictionary as: 1. “that certain j’ne se quoi [sic] that attracts the opposite or same (not that there’s anything wrong with that) sex”; 2. “a liquid substance that makes even white folks pimptastic and pimpalicious” — can, thanks to rapper Nelly, be purchased at your local supermarket. His energy drink (yes, called “Pimp Juice”) recently added the U.K., Japan, the Caribbean and Israel to its already extensive distribution map. The drink sold a million units in its first few months on the shelves, which is more than most albums sell in years.

Juan has shamelessly milked the popularity of “pimping” for all it’s worth; he has, to use popular parlance, expertly pimped his pimping. Be careful how you tell him that. “Ah, the word ‘pimp,’” he began, leaning back and scratching his beard. “Nowadays people say, ‘you’re pimping that movie,’ or ‘hey, I’m pimping my good looks,’ or they’re ‘pimping’ this and that. Let me tell you: The only way to ‘pimp’ is to have a girl on the street.”

MTV begs to differ. Its popular series “Pimp My Ride” — designed, says MTV’s Web site, to “show you how to transform your tired old hatchback into a full-fledged, fully loaded pimp chariot,” and hosted by “pimp master of ceremonies, [rapper] Xzibit” — employs “pimp,” sans sexual denotation, as noun, adjective and verb. Tech TV jumped on that bandwagon, schooling viewers on how to “pimp out your cellphone.” I found this headline in a New Hampshire paper last year: “Pastor rips candidates who ‘pimp’ black church.” And on the first episode of Fox’s new sitcom “Method and Red” — an atrocious cross between “Amos n’ Andy” and “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air,” with Will Smith replaced by Cheech-and-Chong-style rappers Redman and Method Man — I counted at least four “pimp” jokes, including this one: Uptight white mother berates hip-hop-loving son for listening to “an X-rated nursery rhyme that objectifies women”; young white boy innocently rejoins, “‘objectify’ — is that like ‘pimping’?”

But while it may have only recently trickled down to the suburban Joeys, pimp iconography is almost as old-school as the oldest profession itself. By the time the Hughes brothers unwittingly ushered in the pop-pimp craze with their 1999 documentary, “American Pimp” — released the same year as another low-budget cult favorite, “Pimps Up, Ho’s Down,” which is part pimp homage, part porn — pimp protagonists had been strutting through urban imaginations for decades. Malcolm X is doubtless the most famous of them, but the trend hit a crescendo in the ’70s, when it seemed every on-screen (blaxsploitation) or in-print (hard-boiled) narrative came complete with requisite broad-collared, cup-carrying Mack.

1969 produced the quintessential pimp saga — called, aptly enough, “Pimp”: a no-frills confessional by Robert Beck, aka Iceberg Slim. He and his kin are ancestors to today’s pimp-happy rappers, some of whom are hip-hop greenhorns — Nelly and 50 Cent took up pimp sticks for a track or two, while newcomer Lil Flip’s debut single was called “Like a Pimp” — but most of whom are aging has-beens. Ice-T, for instance, recently re-released his 2002 DVD “Pimpin’ 101,” which is chock full of world-wise tidbits like this one: “All of us are hos in one way or another, but very few will ever get the chance to pimp.” (As he repeatedly reminds anyone who’ll listen, Ice-T did get that chance: Before pimping his sordid past in rap tracks like 1990′s “Pimp Anthem,” Ice-T was, yes, a real-life pimp.)

But put someone like Iceberg Slim beside Ice-T (or Lil Jon, or any other pop pimp) and the difference is glaring. Slim’s Pimp reads as a great big “fuck you” to white America: a bitter, brutal, no-holds-barred account in which sticking it to the man was best accomplished by pimping his woman, to white and black men alike. To “own” the white goddess, to soil her supposed purity, was to hit the white man where it really hurt. Even the more commercialized pimps of blaxsploitation culture carried themselves impudently, as if to subtly, slyly hold their middle fingers in the air.

The only thing today’s pimp icons hold in the air is a paycheck. Over-the-top “pimpalicious” rappers, “pimped-out” hatchbacks — they’ve done what only pop culture can: transform the very real, very vicious legacy of pimping into cheerful buffoonery or hip slang. “Pimping” is now fun. It’s a campy little accessory that matches a grin and a bow, a cutesy cartoon designed to amuse the sort of people Iceberg Slim was railing against. To reference pimping today — whether via noun, verb or adjective — is to have it both ways: It’s to tap the well of hyper-masculine “cool” that’s long been stereotypically associated with African-American men and especially those of the Shaft variety, while at the same time defusing anything potentially threatening about such a forceful pose. What could possibly be threatening about “pimping” a cellphone? Or about party-happy Nelly beaming beside his can of “Pimp Juice,” or Big Snoop Dogg, shizzling his nizzles in an over-the-top Cadillac?

“Snoop the Pimp” is, after all, far more mass-marketable than “Snoop the Gangsta,” which was the rapper’s ’90s incarnation. Ageless American icons that they are, gangsters had their hip-hop heyday in the gangsta-rap-loving ’90s; they reared their heads again in recent rap, after 50 Cent made many believe in gangsta rap’s reincarnation. But gangsterism, then and now, proved a little too real for mom and dad. They worried that their child’s favorite rapper didn’t just talk about having guns — he actually had them. They’re not worried, though, that when he’s not in the studio, Snoop or Lil Jon or Nelly is actually out on the street, overseeing a gaggle of girls. Pimping is simply a persona or an expression, and everyone knows it. Gangstas were controversial because they toed the line between real and fake; today’s pimps are fake as fake can be. Little Joey can talk all he wants about pimping his new tricycle. No one has to fret that it’s the germ of his hustling career.

We might soon see, however, the first nail in the pimp-happy coffin. John Singleton is producing the independent film “Hustle & Flow,” about a former pimp who sets off to launch a rap career. Starring rapper Ludacris and featuring a cameo from Isaac Hayes, “Hustle & Flow,” by all accounts, has one thing that makes it potentially different from the other pimp products on the market: gritty realism, a good dose of which might be enough to remind MTV viewers that “pimping your ride” does have connotations that are, alas, neither cute nor cuddly.

Jean’s excruciatingly righteous new single, “If I Was President,” released via AOL Music, isn’t likely to boost his hardcore hip-hop credibility, either. “If I was president,” the rapper begins, “instead of spending billions on the war/ I’d take that money so I could feed the poor.” The well-intentioned, musically bereft track has the feel of a grade-school writing assignment — “what would you do if you were president, Billy?” — and AOL has, aptly enough, turned it into one: Fans are invited to add their own “If I Was President” declarations to an online message board; winning entries will be incorporated into a remix of the original Jean song.

I recently heard an industry rumor, though, that amounted to a challenge: Spend some hours with Jean at his Platinum Sounds studio and try to emerge without being converted to the belief that this utterly imperfect artist — heavy on political correctness, light on hit songs — is one of the greatest acts in hip-hop history.

That challenge, combined with an interest in his most recent album, “The Preacher’s Son,” landed me at Jean’s midtown Manhattan studio on a chilly New York afternoon. Jean, sporting slack jeans and an Expos jersey, shakes my hand vigorously. Then his cellphone rings. He flicks it open. “Jonathan Demme!” he sings to the voice on the other end. Jean, 31, considers Demme, the Brooklyn-reared director, his “adopted father.” The pair recently worked on “The Agronomist,” a documentary about a murdered activist in Haiti for which Jean — raised in Haiti and known for being outspoken about the politics there — composed the musical score.

“Yeah, we’re at 60,000 a week,” Jean says into his phone. “But you know Clive — he ain’t gonna stop until it’s a million.” “Clive,” of course, is legendary music mogul Clive Davis, now head of J Records; “60,000 a week” refers to “The Preacher’s Son,” Jean’s J Records debut and his fourth solo album.

“It’s all good,” Jean continues. “It’s moving like a Wyclef Jean record — a longevity type of thing.”

A Wyclef Jean record does not, after all, move like a record by the Fugees, the group Jean launched with Lauryn Hill and Prakazrel Michel (aka Pras) during his high school years in New Jersey. In 1996, the Fugees released one of the most artistically and commercially successful hip-hop albums of all time, “The Score,” which has sold more than 16 million to date.

After the Fugees broke up, Hill released an opus, “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill”; Pras released little worth noting; Jean released a bit of both, launching a career that’s spotty, persistent and ultimately hard to pin down.

He’s produced brilliant tracks for the likes of Whitney Houston, Santana, Mick Jagger, Sinéad O’Connor and Destiny’s Child. And combined sales of Jean’s first three solo albums, he informs me as we take a seat in the studio, have recently hit the 10 million mark. His first solo album, “Wyclef Jean Presents the Carnival,” went double platinum and earned him a Grammy nod.

But Jean’s next two albums, “The Ecleftic” and “Masquerade,” boasted no such commercial or critical success. They did boast an unusually assorted supporting cast: Rappers made their appearance, yes, but so did Kenny Rogers, Tom Jones and Youssou N’Dour. There was a reworking of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here.” Lyrics came alternately in English, Caribbean patois and French Creole, Jean’s original tongue. Jean’s diversity has ultimately been his blessing and his curse.

“You never know what I’m gonna do, so you always give me that 10-second listen,” he tells me. At the 11th second, however, music industry demographics kick in — and Jean’s audience remains hard to classify. “People will be like ‘I don’t know what’s going on with you, because I like you, my mom likes you, and my little brother likes you,’” Jean explains. Six-year-old children and 60-year-old women line up for his shows; truckers have stopped him on the road, he says, to confess that he’s their favorite artist.

Jean told me he is in the midst of churning out a French Creole album, a reggae album (à la Gregory Isaacs) and a hip-hop album, “Silent but Deadly” (whose first single is “If I Was President”). He’s cultivating talent for his own Clef Records: 18-year-old Trini Don, who’s been described as a female Notorious B.I.G., and 3 On 3, singing brothers from the Bronx who happen to be sons of former Harlem Globetrotter Muggsy Bogues.

Platinum Sounds is a Wyclef Jean album come to life: You never know who’ll turn up. Among those who did while I was there: the manager of politically radical, indie rap duo Dead Prez; a posse of men in jackets splashed with “Bad Boy,” for P-Diddy’s un-political, un-indie label; a P.R. rep for reggae label VP Records; bearer of the tentative treatment for Jean’s new video, to be shot in Miami’s Little Haiti. Following the crisis in Haiti, one video became two: Jean returned there to make a statement about Caribbean unity, shooting a second, as yet unreleased video, featuring American rapper Scarface, Jamaican reggae artist Buju Banton and Haitian group T-Vice.

Don’t call Jean a rapper. “I’m a hip-hop musician,” he says, seated comfortably on a black leather sofa and surrounded by guitars, which he’s adept at playing. “I want to make healing street music. To address the things that matter — you know, life, love,” he explains. “To say something. Of course, keeping it sexy, because I’m very sexy. But food for thought. Like a good book.” He calls “The Preacher’s Son” his most recent “good book.” It’s a label I endorse: “The Preacher’s Son,” while released to minimal fanfare, is addictive. It has requisite radio bangers (“Party to Damascus,” with Missy Elliott) and duds (“Industry,” a plodding journey through hip-hop blunders). But on “The Preacher’s Son,” Jean does more singing than rapping. This is good, because Jean is a “rapper” only in the strict sense of the word: He chats over beats and music. He lacks varied intonation or rhythmic flow, which is what rapping is really about.

His singing, though, is bad. I mean bad bad, but now that falsetto-fixated rappers who can’t sing — like Andre 3000 or Pharell Williams — are a hot commodity, bad bad is good bad. Jean can carry a tune but barely a note. So when he sings, he sounds as if he’s half joking; you’re never sure if he’s serious about his voice or being ironic with it. And in the end it doesn’t matter, because the effect is compelling. Pair Jean up with a woman whose singing is good good, and the effect is mesmerizing. He and Lauryn Hill discovered that formula in the ’90s, but since the Fugees disbanded, Jean has tapped it for a string of collaborations with ur-Lauryns — his best one is “911,” with Mary J. Blige. Jean has described the song as “one of those things that god put together,” and it’s that rare Wyclef Jean hyperbole that isn’t, in my mind, hyperbole.

Jerry “Wonder” Duplessis, Jean’s longtime producing partner, arrives at the studio and dispenses with his black leather jacket. Wonder is Jean’s first cousin, and Jean — who really is, by the way, a preacher’s son, and really named Wyclef Jean (first name: Nelust) — has long kept his music in the family. At age 9 Jean moved from Haiti to Brooklyn’s Marlborough projects, and then to Newark, where he played guitar in a church band that also included his two sisters and two brothers — “the Beatles of the church,” he calls them. His parents kept close watch on what emerged from their son’s radio: Christian rock and country music were acceptable, as was secular music with a philosophical bent. The two Bobs — Dylan and Marley — thus made the cut. And Jean has been compared to both: Howard Dean called him “the Bob Dylan of the hip-hop generation,” while Jean himself told me that in Haiti, he might as well be Bob Marley himself. As if to fit that bill, Jean’s music has, in content and delivery, grown more and more Marley-esque. On “The Preacher’s Son,” he has a song titled “Rebel Music” and one in which he and Buju Banton seem contenders for the “modern-day Marley” crown.

“Hip-hop today needs the spiritual tone of reggae,” Jean says, launching into a jeremiad that befits a preacher’s son. “Hip-hop used to be, ‘I feel like listening to some conscious music — so throw on a De La Soul record.’ And then, ‘I feel like laughing — throw on “Parents Just Don’t Understand.” I feel like getting on some gully, gangster vibe — throw on Kool G Rap. Some universal hip-hop? Run DMC.’” Now, he continues, hip-hop is limited to one subject. Or three: “Cars. Jewelry. Women. Period.” He’s certainly not immune — two and a half years ago he began hosting a car show, showcasing his collection of 37 exotic cars.

His gripes would be tedious and trite — mourning the music of yesteryear has long been a hip-hop sport — if not for the fact that when it comes to the younger generation, Jean puts his money where his mouth is. To aid children in the U.S. and Haiti, he founded the Wyclef Jean Foundation. He was arrested for protesting New York City’s 2002 education budget cuts. He’s held countless benefit shows for a slew of charities and recorded social justice songs like “Diallo.” He recently told New York Newsday that his new single is inspired by one wish: “I want to help educate [youth] about how important it is to vote.”

But attend one of Jean’s shows — as I did in New York, well before our meeting — and the stale phrase “conscious rapper,” which connotes backpacks and soapboxes, never comes to mind. Jean put on a musical revue that merged inspiration and education. He spent most of his stage time ensuring that the under-21 crowd knew music wasn’t born yesterday, nor is it solely an American occupation. He rapped a verse or two, then danced salsa to a Celia Cruz tune. He played a decent-sounding riff on his guitar and reminded everyone that African-Americans were rock ‘n’ roll originators. He shared the stage with sundry guests: reggae artists, gospel singers, b-boy dancers. And throughout, he hopped about the stage gleefully, dreadlocks trailing behind him, as if possessed by the music — as if to say, “I’m having fun!”

Gearing up to make music, Jean is having fun in the studio today. A batch of men from Guadeloupe have materialized, and one of them is Admiral T: a slender fellow who looks about 19 and is, I’m told, is a reggae star in the French-speaking Caribbean. He’s here to record a track with Jean, whose fist he pounds diffidently.

Dispensing with formalities, Jean is soon joking with the men in Creole-tinged English. He bounds toward the stereo and slips in Admiral T’s album. As Jean plays and replays Admiral T’s French reggae tracks — “Pull up!” he cries, which is reggae-speak for “that song is so good, we must rewind it!” — I try to reconcile the reticent young man in front of me with the commanding voice blaring forth from the bass-heavy speakers.

Sufficiently warmed up, Wonder, Jean and Admiral T turn their attention to the task at hand. Wonder cues up a beat; Jean and Admiral T begin formulating lyrics for a verse that’s a paean to Caribbean women. It’ll be delivered in French Creole, but Jean scribbles lyrics in English and, aided by his French-speaking set, translates.

“My girl from Martinique — let’s see … she’s what?” asks Jean, to no one in particular. “What are Martinique women known for?” Admiral T is stumped; they skip that one and move on to Jamaican women, then Trinidadian ones.

“My ghetto girl!” exclaims Jean, relishing the phrase. “My ghetto girl — I need a good line for her! Like: ‘My ghetto girl will always hide my pistol.’” He laughs heartily. (Jean says his wife, Marie Claudinette Jean, is a “‘hood kinda girl,” though she’s also a designer of her own couture clothing line, Fusha. The pair have dated since childhood and they still live, sans children, in New Jersey.)

“I need to come up with a really good one for the ghetto girl,” says Jean. Instead, he races into another room and returns with a small keyboard, which he begins tinkering with. Intrigued by the sound of his notes, Jean hooks the keyboard up to a mic so he can add them to Wonder’s beat. Twenty minutes later he’s back with a guitar. Half an hour later he’s back with menus from a nearby Caribbean restaurant, instructing his assistant to take our dinner orders. Evidently no one is leaving this studio anytime soon.

By the time I do leave, well into the night, Jean hasn’t eaten his dinner yet. He hasn’t stopped playing with his studio toys, either. Poised at the mic, he’s merrily delivering lyrics and, obviously, just getting revved up. His collaboration with Admiral T is shaping into a relentlessly energetic track with a hip-hop beat and a world-beat soul.

When I asked Jean where he sees himself in 20 years, he answered me without flinching. There was no talk of a Fugees reunion — although he says he’s not opposed to one. (“The world needs another Fugees record,” he’d told me, adding that such a record would sell “like Michael Jackson numbers, like ‘Thriller’ numbers.”) There was no talk of a forthcoming clothing line, a high-profile retirement, or a lucrative career playing a thug in Hollywood productions — which makes him one of the only hip-hop stars in existence not banking on one or more of the above.

“I’m just a music man,” is what he told me. “I don’t see myself without a guitar in my hand, playing for a crowd.”

Playing for a crowd, indeed. If one spirit reigns in the world of Platinum Sounds — which is the world of Wyclef Jean — it’s the spirit of play. And that, I realize, is why rumors of Jean’s greatness are not overrated. Artistically inconsistent as he is, Jean is one of the few left in hip-hop who are in it for one reason: the love of music. He has fun listening to it, making it, collaborating on it, experimenting with it — even if he’s alternately failing miserably and innovating brilliantly. Being “just a music man” is no small feat in a music industry that more and more resembles a corporate ladder. As he dances his way from one room to another — here perfecting the bass on Wonder’s beat, there chanting lyrics, slightly off key — Jean seems content to remain on his rung, as long as he can make merry, meaningful music there.

Pulling up to Donovan Bennett’s studio in the fairly humble neighborhood called Mona, I smell status: The small street is heavy with big cars, including that music-industry trophy, the Escalade. This colossal entity, says my companion, a local journalist, might belong to Sean Paul, who owns one and is as likely as any other dancehall artist to drop in at Bennett’s studio.

Paul, it turns out, isn’t in the studio today; neither is customary caller Elephant Man, who’s in Los Angeles shooting his latest music video. Bennett, 26, goes by “Vendetta” and is the rising young star behind the revival of the reggae sound that’s now a requisite staple of virtually any American pop star — from Missy Elliott to Beyoncé to No Doubt. He’s working today with Vybz Kartel, a 26-year-old lyricist who is dancehall’s hottest commodity but who hasn’t yet crossed over to the mainstream U.S. market. Kartel, born Adidja Palmer, takes an assertive stance at the mike. He sports the Diesel-esque style — straight-leg distressed jeans, fitted button-down shirt, platinum pendant — popular among the dancehall set, and holds his two favorite props: a plump joint of marijuana and a notebook of song lyrics he’s about to deliver, rapid-fire and sharply articulated. Kartel dubs his signature style “new millennium dancehall”: a hybrid of Jamaican patois and hip-hop slang.

Kartel is big in Jamaica, and Bennett can help make him big in America. But since Bennett is increasingly big in both countries, you wonder if these casual recording sessions will continue much longer. Bennett has lately produced American tracks by the Wu Tang Clan and Alicia Keys, as well as a good chunk of a reggae album currently finding favor in the American market: Elephant Man’s “Good 2 Go,” which debuted in Billboard’s top 100 and featured the MTV-friendly single “Pon Di River.”

Bennett, his hair in long, braided cornrows, sits serenely in his chair, like a kid at his PlayStation: intensely involved in his game but still in autopilot mode, and maybe a little bored. He leans forward only to deliver scant commands: “Pronounce it ‘Yale,’ not ‘Yay-all”; or, “ride the riddim better,” the dancehall equivalent of “stay on the beat.” Bordering on shy, Bennett is the epitome of a behind-the-scenes man.

Bennett plays the “riddim,” the unique beat that the song will be centered on. This riddim is called “Chrome,” a catchy confection of drums and steady electronic accents that is already a success: Big-name artists have recorded songs over it, and this week it backed the No. 1 song on Jamaican reggae charts (“In Her Heart” by Capleton, a Rastafarian known for his fiery delivery). Though Bennett didn’t make “Chrome,” the man who did — a middling artist called Alozade — asked Bennett to produce this, with Kartel on vocals.

For his 2003 debut album, “Up 2 Di Time,” Kartel teamed up with Bennett; before that he made his name as a lyricist, ghost-writing for other artists. The track he delivers today is a meticulously rhymed, uproarious ditty in which he and Alozade are jailbirds. In real life, both have indeed served prison time; Kartel’s December arrest on weapons and assault charges was reggae’s talk of the town for weeks.

“It’s just another Biggie and Tupac thing,” he says of his arrest, which was prompted by an altercation with a veteran dancehall artist he’d been feuding with. I remind Kartel that the “thing” of which he speaks didn’t have a particularly happy ending: Neither rapper is alive today.

“Good point,” he says, then laughs.

Kartel laughs often, and heartily. Instead of a hardcore gangster track à la Tupac or Biggie, Kartel’s track is comedy, a witty mini-narrative — which he now delivers into the mike — about day-to-day nuisances of prison life: Oh, if only that prison slop were red snapper and rice!

“Whatever people are rhyming about, I try to do differently, to put a twist on it,” Kartel had explained earlier. “Like, for instance, everyone is talking about the pussy — so I’ll talk about the breast. Seen?”

Kartel, of course, also talks about pussy: One of dancehall’s most beloved subjects, female genitalia are never overlooked. Dancehall can make Spike TV look downright girlish. It is, with scant exception, an all-male genre that spawns both virile political anthems, some of which have been censored off Jamaican airwaves, and a trailer load of sexual swagger, known in patois as “slackness.” The Rabelaisian nature of such swagger — a carnivalesque celebration of all things corporal — is too over-the-top to offend. Handled artfully, explicit fare like this is dancehall’s greatest selling point: Everyone relishes an uproarious-yet-salacious bedroom story. Handled clumsily, it gives dancehall a bad name. Dancehall’s acute veneration of heterosexual sex tends to produce homophobia, the genre’s longtime bête noire. For over a decade, consummate dancehall artists have penned anti-gay lyrics that effectively wrote them off American airwaves.

Now that American ears are listening, artists temper lyrics. Ever so slightly, though: For American ears, unschooled in Jamaican patois, lyrics are beside the point, anyway. Dancehall crosses over via simple English hooks (Sean Paul’s: “Get Busy,” or “Gimme the Light”) and especially via the product that Bennett manufactures: riddims, the vital, essential currency that fuels the new reggae sound, and transcends language altogether.

Growing up in Westmoreland, a rural parish of Jamaica, Bennett relocated to Miami for college, graduating from the American Technical Institute. “I knew it’d be music, what I’d do with my life, but I didn’t know it would be producing,” he says. Moving from Miami back to Jamaica, he settled in Kingston, established the “Vendetta” sound system, a roving DJ business, and casually began doing what Jamaican DJs do: make riddims. Every DJ has a beat, though, and many have good ones; only a select few have enough savvy to accrue the dozen or so vocalists who record over them.

“That’s kinda tricky, that part,” is Bennett’s assessment. It’s an understatement. For big-name Jamaican producers — like Sly and Robbie, who lately produced pop group No Doubt’s Grammy-winning reggae single “Underneath It All,” or Jeremy Harding, who works with Sean Paul — getting dancehall stars to make songs for their new riddim can be as easy as a direct phone call and a handshake. But for unknown beat makers, the process involves hustling, haggling and, when all else fails, imploring. There are no rules and no fixed rates. An artist might offer vocals to a riddim for free — because he likes it that much, or because he needs it to boost his career. He might get a tip of several hundred dollars, or, says Bennett, a couple thousand. Forget American music-industry notions about singles that promote albums, or studio vs. tour time. Whether a new album is on the way or far away, whether he’s touring or in his yard, any dancehall artist who’s invested in his Jamaican fan base — from Sean Paul on down — stays on top of the riddim trade, regularly recording singles over the new, best ones. A good share of these recordings are befuddling entities to an American record exec: floating singles, done for a puny fee, never to appear on any album.

Sound system gigs gave Bennett enough music-industry contacts to collect vocalists for his early riddims. Artists began approaching him, turning his Don Corleon Records into a hot commodity.

The best of Bennett’s riddims, created in the last couple of years, are musical compositions in their own right. “Egyptian” has a delightfully quirky, kitschy melody line that would make an apt theme song for a video game about ancient Cairo (“Speed Through the Pyramids”?). “Good to Go,” Bennett’s favorite, is a simple guitar lick that goes a long way, a pared-down riddim that left much room for interpretation and thus inspired several distinct-sounding hits.

Bennett smirks when I ask him how he decides which artists to put on his riddims. Many, of course, are obvious picks: Sean Paul, Elephant Man or, lately, Vybz Kartel.

“Yes, Sean is the same about my riddims now as he used to be — if he likes it, he’ll come and record,” Bennett says with a shrug. But dancehall is a notoriously here-today-gone-tomorrow industry — how does he sift through all the up-and-comers? “I can’t say yes to everyone, but I try to listen when I can. I gave Kartel a try, and it worked out well for both of us, right?”

Hours later, Bennett, Kartel and those who’ve lingered pile into Bennett’s control room to sample the fruits of their labor: the final addition to the “Chrome” riddim, unofficially dubbed “Prison Life.” Bennett plays the track; his entourage howls with delight; Kartel, eyes red from ganja, spirits high from Hennessy, blissfully renders judgment: “Dat a bomba-claat tune, yeah!” — patois for, roughly, “That’s one hell of a song, indeed!”

Because its riddim is popular — and so is Kartel himself — this new song will soon be on every club DJ’s playlist. It’ll then make it to radio and, perhaps, onto an album: maybe Kartel’s, or some compilation CD. But for the moment, the song’s here-and-now is what matters: It’ll make Kartel and the riddim yet more popular — and popularity means more work, and thus more paychecks for artist and producer both.

On the way out of Bennett’s studio, I meet DJ Liquid and Coolface, producers who work with Bennett. Each has a new riddim on the market. DJ Liquid’s “French Vanilla” is already popular, while Coolface’s “Cool Fusion” riddim — his first — is still in development: He’s recruited Kartel and several others to supply vocals on it, but is eager for names that’ll increase its spins on radio and in clubs. Coolface stops my ride, a producer for Jamaican music television, and asks her to personally deliver “Cool Fusion” to Buju Banton, a reggae crowd pleaser who hasn’t yet agreed to make a song for it. A track by Banton is sure to give the riddim a boost. She takes the CD; we exit Don Corleon Records with beat in hand, middlemen in the inexhaustible riddim trade.

Bob Marley, of course, is the supreme figurehead of roots reggae, which is what you probably think of when I say “reggae”: music reflexively associated with beach resorts and rum punch, live bands and dreadlocked singers who praise Jah. Bennett, on the other hand, deals in the other kind of reggae, the beat-based electronic music, known as dancehall, that’s now the prime currency of the contemporary Jamaican music industry and a major influence on American pop.

If the past 30 years of reggae have a historical arc, then Marley and Bennett — hardly of the same stature but very much in the same field of work — might well frame it.

Dancehall was born before Bob: at Jamaican parties during the late ’50s, where men with modish monikers — Count Matchukie, U-Roy, King Stitt — were garrulous hosts. Inspired by American radio DJs, they chatted ceaselessly over the music, serving up smooth talk like this, courtesy of King Stitt: “No matter what the people say/ These sounds lead the way/ It’s the order of the day from your boss deejay/ I King Stitt.”

They’re reminiscent of American hip-hop lyrics — and well they should be: “Toasting,” as chatting over music was soon called, became a Jamaican art form that was transported to the Bronx in the early ’70s by immigrants like Clive Campbell, better known as DJ Kool Herc — forefather of a “new” style of American music in which men rhymed over prerecorded music and dubbed themselves “rappers.”

In America, rappers became stars of the billion-dollar industry that hijacked pop culture. Jamaica’s golden-tongued talkers — eventually called “deejays,” still the name for dancehall artists like Sean Paul — weren’t as lucky. In the late ’60s, tech-savvy producers found a way to separate a track’s vocals from its instrumentals, and invited deejays to put their party routine on wax. A popular genre was born; it was amazingly cost-effective; it was quickly eclipsed by another genre that exploded alongside it during the early ’70s, music that’s still the ambassador of all things Jamaican: reggae. Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff had melodies, looks and lyrics that made them global superstars. Deejays like U-Roy or Dennis Alcapone had, in foreign eyes, none of the above — not pretty faces, inspirational melodies, or even intelligible lyrics (unlike reggae singers, dancehall deejays doused their speech in thick patois). Reggae was international music; dancehall was local stuff.

A mouthpiece for the Caribbean underclass, dancehall was derided, for many years, by the Jamaican upper crust and some of its public officials, all but ignored by foreign critics who dismissed it as a paltry, lowbrow derivative of “the real thing” (code phrase for “Marley”). In 1994, Jamaican poet Mutaburuka dubbed dancehall “the worst thing that ever happened to Jamaican culture.”

Of late, however, the tide has turned. It began in late 2002, with a musical hook about an herbal substance kind enough to transcend cultural barriers. “Just gimme the light,” sang a then-underground dancehall artist named Sean Paul. Never mind that most Americans aren’t fluent in Jamaican patois, the idiom of dancehall reggae. The sheer energy of Paul’s “Gimme the Light” — and its glossy video, which soon earned rotation on MTV — made words beside the point. It launched a string of Sean Paul hits and a $7 million joint venture between Paul’s label, VP Records, and Atlantic Records — a deal Atlantic co-president Craig Kallman called “a watershed moment in the history of dancehall.” Red, gold and green became the color scheme of the moment, adorning Puma’s Jamaica-themed sneaker line and last summer’s MTV Video Music Awards — where Sean Paul, nominated as best new artist, faced a sea of Jamaican flags. Paul, nominated for three Grammys, won one for “Dutty Rock,” the first undiluted dancehall reggae album to ever go platinum (then, double platinum). In 20 years of reggae Grammys, Paul is only the fourth dancehall artist to bring it — and now an irrefutable point — home: The music that was reggae’s bastard child had become its favored son.

But if Sean Paul is the obvious poster boy for dancehall’s success, it’s the producers, like Bennett, who are the industry staples. These low-profile men have long been making high-profile beats that define the genre.

Instead of building a new beat for every new song, dancehall features multiple artists recording over a single beat, the riddim. Here’s the process, in a nutshell: Bennett makes a riddim; he invites 20 or so artists to devise lyrics and melodies for it; reggae radio gives about half of these songs airplay at a given time. It’s musical recycling, akin to a literary challenge in which 20 authors are given the same plotline and told to produce individual short stories. If you don’t believe that one beat can go a long way, take a close listen to two dancehall tracks that hit the Billboard jackpot last year: Sean Paul’s No. 1 smash “Get Busy” is a bouncy, hip-hop-styled dance track, and Wayne Wonder’s “No Letting Go” is a dulcet love song; both are recorded over an entity known as the “Diwali” riddim. Or consider R. Kelly’s dancehall-flavored recent hit “Snake”: A slew of reggae artists co-opted its beat — soon rechristened the “Snake” riddim — and recorded songs over it that scarcely evoke the original track. Dancehall riddims generally earn names before individual songs do — a fact that cuts to the heart of the genre’s musical formula.

“A producer can’t do it all; the artist plays a big role,” insists Bennett, but he does admit that riddims often trump all: “If my riddim is hot, and it’s getting a big buzz, every artist will want to have a song on it.” To understand dancehall reggae’s current wave of crossover is to take a tour of the riddim trade, to glimpse how Jamaican music makers — short on pricey resources that the American music industry takes for granted — crafted an alternative musical system that wrings a lot from a little.

Bennett is in the midst of looking for a part-time home in Miami. He’s lately been doing some work for Def Jam, and an American base would ease the commute to New York. “It’s business,” he shrugs. Little seems to excite Bennett; music is his 9-to-5. Only the subject of VP Records — the largest U.S. distributor of Jamaican music — gets him riled up. “They’re crooks,” he says of VP, claiming that unlike Greensleeves, whom he works exclusively for, VP asked him to sign away publishing rights to all songs on his riddims. “We need local, Jamaican distribution for music,” says Bennett, now animated. “But obviously that’ll take big money, and we don’t have it here.”

Not yet, anyway. And according to those critical of dancehall production, big money would mean big improvements. “It’s lazy work, the riddim system,” says Stephen “Lenky” Marsden, one of the most successful producers in dancehall. “I don’t think it’s creative, this business of everyone on one beat. It only persists because of our economy — because we don’t have any money.”

Marsden is a keyboard player who, like a host of Jamaican musicians — notably Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, who once backed Bob Marley and Peter Tosh — suddenly confronted an electronic-based riddim method that made instruments practically passi. Instead of beating the system, Marsden, and the others, joined it. In 1998, he created the “Diwali” riddim, which is basically a series of hand claps. It sounded like nothing dancehall had ever heard, so initially only two minor artists agreed to voice songs over it. But “Diwali” became the most successful riddim in recent history, backing three Billboard hits last year, including Sean Paul’s first No. 1.

Marsden, meanwhile, keeps reminding me that he — unlike Bennett — is first and foremost a musician; he’s fixated on the fact that in riddim-run dancehall, “The music has been lost.” He’d like dancehall to start promoting well-rounded, artistic producers who make albums, not just riddims. “Like a Dr. Dre, he knows how to make a complete product.” I’m startled to hear Marsden demand the demise of the riddim method, the meat and potatoes of dancehall.

“Hear this: You can go out and make a riddim right now, and get some artists to sing anything over it — lyrics don’t even matter, anyway. There are so many stupid bubblegum Jamaican songs out there,” he says. “And I’ll bet you can get your riddim on the radio and get a deal. Go ahead — do it and get back to me.”

As pure as Marsden’s sentiments are, they strike me as a tad too flippant. Before I fly out of Jamaica, I arrive at Early Mondays, one of countless outdoor fêtes that occur nightly in Kingston’s ghettos. To a jaded American, such parties are a shock to the system: outdoor affairs — free ones — that consist of colossal speakers on the road and masses of dancing people wearing outfits that make Daisy Dukes seem prudish. There are no bouncers, I.D. checks, or lines at the door. In America, a party scene like this would be sucked up by the corporate structure faster than you can say “sponsored by Absolut.”

As it happens, reggae celebrities regularly attend Hot Mondays, and they’re here tonight. No one pesters them. Elephant Man relaxes with his crew near the concession stand, and Ghost — think of him as a Jamaican El DeBarge — stands by the wall. Elephant Man’s look tonight is minimalist — as compared to his usual attire, which generally involves giant sombreros or full football gear. His hair, dyed bright yellow, is braided and worn in pigtails; his T-shirt — Phat Farm or Sean John, or some other hip-hop brand euphemistically labeled “urban” — is adorned with an enormous platinum pendant of indeterminate mass. Nicknamed the “energy god,” Elephant Man is known for his self-described “crazy hype” live act — not a concert but an exuberant reggae revue: He dances! He chats! He climbs rafters! He sings “We Are the World,” utterly off key!

“The hook, the hook is the key,” Elephant Man says when asked of his crossover success, dropping the “h” so it sounds like “ook.” “You’ve got to keep the Jamaican flavor there but make it so that Americans can understand it. Like” — he launches joyously into the chorus of his first crossover hit, “Pon di River” — “‘I’ve seen ’nuff dance before, but I’ve never seen a dance like this!’ You see: Everyone can sing along to that!”

Fresh off the plane from Los Angeles, Elephant Man will return there later this week to perform at the annual Bob Marley Day Festival. Between flights, new riddims await his vocals. They always do. A producer’s dream, Elephant Man churns out a song — or three or four — in the time in takes another artist to pen a line.

I get an update on Coolface’s “Cool Fusion” riddim: Buju Banton likes it but won’t be gracing it with a track. All is still well for “Cool Fusion,” though; it’s getting radio spins and is featured on the new album by Sizzla, a devout Rastafarian who, along with Vybz Kartel, is contemporary dancehall’s underground favorite. Sizzla has style and subject matter that run the gamut from spiritual hymns about Ethiopia to tracks that tackle less sacred matters, like how to “pump up” a woman’s “pum pum.” The selector spins Sizzla’s latest tune: “I was born in a system that doesn’t give a fuck about you nor me, ” he chants. The crowd roars.

Bennett produced this track, and Sizzla’s entire new album. I scan the crowd for Bennett, but unsurprisingly, he’s not here. Not in the flesh, anyway; Bennett’s handiwork — one riddim after the next — is ubiquitous. The Kartel track I’d witnessed him producing will probably debut — from speakers like these — sometime next week. Before (and if) they make it to radio, new riddims and songs are introduced here, at Kingston dances.

As I consider Marsden’s insistence that the riddim method is so cheap and uncreative that even I can succeed at it, the selector switches to his “Diwali” riddim. One beat, so many songs, all of them distinctive: Sean Paul chats rapidly over the beat; Elephant Man sings a nursery rhyme; Buju Banton delivers an ecstatic prayer. This is the riddim method’s glory: A simple series of claps, a crew of innovative ears — and voilà! A crate of rapturous tunes. It strikes me that American artists, paying producers for a new beat that’s good enough to sell records, can essentially make hits from cash. But the riddim method, in which few artists get a beat all to themselves, has an egalitarian spirit. Its practitioners are presented with identical raw material (a riddim) and the same mission: transform something ubiquitous into something unique.

The crowd begins clapping furiously. They’re performing the dance associated with the “Diwali,” a dance American teens learned last summer as they lapped up Sean Paul and Wayne Wonder’s “Diwali” songs. Tonight, the clapping strikes me as applause — for Marsden’s riddim, which helped dancehall cross over last year, or maybe for the riddim method itself, which, in the right hands, can produce so much from so little. The clapping seems loud enough to reach Bennett’s studio in Mona, where he’s surely busy with a new riddim: more merchandise for the Jamaican music trade, yet another beat bearing the voice of Jamaica and, soon, carrying it overseas and to our airwaves.

Its aim having shifted from depicting subjects to slyly (or not so slyly) deriding them, reality television has found a new whipping post in an age-old convention: marriage. MTV’s “‘Til Death Do Us Part: Carmen & Dave” — featuring Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro and his new wife, sex symbol Carmen Electra — joins a deluge of reality programming that playfully, irreverently — and sometimes unwittingly — demystifies marriage and its accoutrements: engagements, wedding plans, nuptials themselves. Wednesday night (and repeated throughout the week), “‘Til Death Do Us Part” offers up its climactic episode — a big, fat celebrity wedding.

“The mythology of marriage is coming apart in contemporary culture,” asserts Sasha Cagen, author of “Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics.” Her talked-about new book proposes that for 20- and 30-somethings, singlehood is fast becoming not a default but a celebrated choice — boosted, in part, by reality television’s “completely over the top” portrayal of couplehood and matrimony.

Kicking off months before Carmen and Dave tied the knot last November, “‘Til Death Do Us Part” does what MTV does best: fluently alternate between sardonic cynicism and well-worn sentimentality. There’s cuddling and canoodling, yes, but also an ominous title set in a tombstone and a pre-wedding photo shoot in which bride and groom, sporting ghastly makeup, recline in coffins.

“I always felt strongly about marriage, and I’d always wanted a fairy-tale wedding,” says Electra, who — speaking by phone from New York — is known for flaunting her fine form in films like “Naked Movie,” or the more mainstream “Scary Movie.” “Dave and I already did the Vegas thing –”

“Not with each other,” Navarro interjects. “Carmen with Dennis [Rodman], and me with another girl — but years ago. The fact of the matter is, when you live the lives Carmen and I live, married life is the one stone left unturned. We’ve tried everything else!”

It’s not the most sacrosanct vision of matrimony, but these days, reverence has as much to do with reality TV as reality does.

“Some people have asked me, ‘Why get married? Why do you need that piece of paper?’” Navarro says. “I don’t need a piece of paper — frankly, I couldn’t even tell you where it is. But I did need a ceremony of devotion to my wife, or a public expression of love for her.”

Marriage-centric reality TV began with Fox’s “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?” in 2000 and, then, faintly more palatable offshoots: “The Bachelor” or NBC’s “Who Wants to Marry My Dad?” (Other wedding-focused reality TV shows include Fox’s “Married by America,” NBC’s “Race to the Altar,” TLC’s “Wedding Story” and the memorable Fox special “Bridezilla.”) All perfected the art of paying lip service to marital sanctimony even as their over-the-top premise — meet your match on a televised game show! — undermined it. One “Bachelor” couple after another faltered in their path to the altar, leaving only “bachelorette” Trista Rehn and her chosen man, Ryan Sutter. Their televised wedding, the reality genre’s stab at sincerity, ended up being just the opposite: 17 million viewers, 5,000 yards of pink ribbon, 30,000 roses and 1,500 pounds of chocolate turned nuptials into three-ring circus.

Like “Trista and Ryan’s Wedding” — or its more economical foil, TLC’s “For Better or For Worse,” in which couples let budget-conscious friends plan their big day — “‘Til Death Do Us Part” is a pre-wedding reality show that climaxes with the wedding itself. Focusing on the ceremony’s dynamics — over and above the couple’s — helps tone down cynicism: Divorce rates being what they are, it’s easier to plan a party than a partnership. And since nowadays folks rarely have just one, “For Better or For Worse” is a crash course on how to throw a wedding IKEA-style: on the cheap and in a jiffy.

“I think my reality-TV low point was seeing Trista and Ryan on a cellphone commercial with a wedding-planning theme,” says Cagen. “Consumer culture has fully absorbed the wedding planning process to the point of its being laughable.”

Emphasizing marriage plans instead of marriage itself is also a way for narratives to evade undue pessimism. From 19th century novels (“Pride and Prejudice”) to recent romantic comedy (“The Wedding Singer,” “The Wedding Planner”) and drama (HBO’s “Sex and the City,” which saved matrimony for last), marriage is happy when it’s a happy ending. Stories that begin with couplehood reveal what happens when the honeymoon’s over — and thus make good comedy: “I Love Lucy,” “Married With Children” and their reality-TV counterparts “Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica” and “The Osbournes,” also on MTV, mine the humdrum hemming and hawing of marital life for satirical laughs.

Generating those laughs are yin-and-yang couples like Carmen and Dave. While sweet-faced Carmen is prone to earnest statements like “I didn’t feel grounded until I met Dave,” a more sardonic (and more heavily tattooed) Navarro will riff on the couple’s “beauty and the beast” effect: “Carmen is a hundred times more attractive than Jessica, and I’m a hundred times uglier than Nick.”

But in the end, a sitcom is a sitcom; “‘Til Death Do Us Part,” “Newlyweds” and “My Big Fat Fiancé” are — at least on some level — reality. That fact produces a palpable irony: As gays around the country fight for the right to make wedding vows, reality TV revels in the right to make an all-embracing — and fiscally rewarding — mockery of them.