One stray Dogg

"Life couldn't get any better. And as bad as the world may have seemed to folks on the outside, from the inside it was perfect. Even in the worst of times, niggas still got their party on." So goes the introductory chapter of American hip-hop megastar Snoop Dogg's first volume in the series Doggy Tales. Contrary to the rapper's view of his world as described here, however, the blingy dust cover and title of his "novel", Love Don't Live Here No More, are positively sublime when compared to the alternately outrageous and hilarious tropes of his prose.

This book says a lot about the intrinsic abilities - or indeed their absence - of Snoop Dogg. He surely displays none of the relative virtues that graced rappers of stature like Tupac Shakur, brutally murdered in Las Vegas in 1996. Indeed, Snoop himself has been convicted countless times on accusations of sexual assault, possession of arms and drugs and assaulting authorities and fans alike. In many ways, the multi-millionaire Calvin Broadus Jr (his real name), signed up by recording mega-companies such as Geffen Records, personifies all the vices of backstreet hip-hop subculture in the US.

The platinum-selling artiste's tale tells the adventures of a rapper-cum-drug-dealer-cum-pistolero called Ulysses, a far cry from any association whatsoever with the sublime Homeric hero. Ulysses, who toys vaguely with the idea of becoming a rapper, is violently uprooted from southern Long Beach on his mother's whim, and together with his brother Bing is flung into the unforgiving world of subterranean North Long Beach.

Following his fateful move, Ulysses describes his new surroundings that, "judging from the chipped stucco and barred windows; the liquor store next to the pawnshop next to the Nix Check Cashing Store next to First Baptist across the street from Third Baptist down the block from Second Baptist; Church's Chicken; and the older cats with the brown paper bags stumbling in the streets - instead of moving on up, we'd just moved over".

And move over Snoop's account does. It never so much as moves up or indeed, in any direction, because his prose is cerebral and artificially maintained. Snoop Dogg's writing is a sleazy glorification of the sordid. Unlike fellow artistes like Eminem, whom Seamus Heaney has applauded as a great lyricist, Snoop Dogg wallows in bad writing and finds solace in a false sense of the absurdities of life.

The award-winning porn director's novel moves from one scene of violence to another of harassment and sexual assault, from poorly described downtown and suburban environments to curt and self-consciously obscene exchanges with one repulsive character after another.

Ulysses' adventures may be termed "picaresque" in that events seem to conspire in taking him from one mess into another without his own express will, action or consent, in a narrative that epitomises a postmodern-latter-day depthlessness. In an attempt to dramatise a violent, escalating denouement to his protagonist's repeated forays into gangsta troubles, Snoop Dogg endows his book's final chapter, for instance, with a typical factional shootout. "That evening, two of Buddha's boys were gunned down in the front seat of their car. That same night, Buddha returned the favour with three of Chino's men [...] it was the craziest s*** ever." His fiction is certainly reminiscent of Snoop's own muddled-up life, with such episodes recalling his arrest on suspicion of complicity in the assassination of gangman Philip Woldemariam in Los Angeles in 1993.

Had Snoop not termed this work as a "novel", he might have gotten away with it all, and we would have been justified in taking his writing with a pinch of salt. But then, he has chosen to cast it in classical novelistic structure, and given he has no respect for any other convention whatsoever, be it literary, social or human, one can only describe Snoop's work as amateurish at best, and at worst, a vacuous waste of time. In his writing, he has reproduced the typical shallowness and bad taste that grace his public image. The rude knowledge that such an obscene would-be artist affords to bask in a perverse fame speaks volumes about the equally vile dispositions of the money-making coteries and wretched fan-base that support him in the US.

Written in collaboration with playwright David Talbert, the book includes an eponymous audio CD containing an original single. Snoop Dogg epitomises the new moneyed elite of American rap, a spineless generation of young pseudo-artists that should be held responsible for their perverse impact on teen and adolescent age groups.

I sympathise with the parents, too involved to gauge the sickening personalities of their kids. God forbid that our youth be inspired by such indignities as those peddled by the Snoop persuasion.

• Bugeja is a doctoral researcher and Commonwealth scholar in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.

• A review copy of this title was supplied by Agenda Bookshop.