Snoop Dogg Lends a Verse to Mike Dunafon’s Campaign Song, Plans Yes We Cannabis Festival
Glendale Mayor Mike Dunafon has a story made for viral success: The former rugby player runs an anomaly of a town surrounded on all sides by Denver with his strip-club-owner wife, Debbie Matthews, not so subtly at his side. Now he's running for governor as an independent candidate on a...
Glendale Mayor Mike Dunafon has a story made for viral success: The former rugby player runs an anomaly of a town surrounded on all sides by Denver with his strip-club-owner wife, Debbie Matthews, not so subtly at his side. Now he’s running for governor as an independent candidate on a platform that basically boils down to one giant “FREE CANDY” sign.
Key among his beliefs is that you should be able to smoke as much weed as you like. That’s been a popular message, one that’s earned him endorsements from the likes of Wyclef Jean and, now, Snoop Dogg.
After a highly Instagram’d meeting with Snoop while the rapper was in town for the Gypsy Jane Cannabis Music Carnival, Dunafon’s campaign has been making the rounds this week, talking about a Halloween-weekend festival called Yes We Cannabis. It would be held at Infinity Park (Dunafon’s rugby palace in Glendale) and feature Snoop as the headliner.
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So they did, and now Snoop Dogg has done a hip-hop on top of that hip-hop. Dunafon dubbed it “The Trap: Dogg Cut” on the show. You can hear a rough mix of it starting at 24:08 in the video below. Dunafon does some ad-libs, because he’s got hip-hop down at this point. Snoop’s verse starts at 26:45 and we didn’t laugh once while listening to it.
How Wyclef and Snoop and iCannabis Radio will impact Colorado’s race for governor remains to be seen. But current polling has the incumbent John Hickenlooper, who is a Democrat, locked in a tight race with Republican Bob Beauprez, with the remaining three candidates combined earning less than 10 percent of the votes.
Neither Hickenlooper nor Beauprez has been even close to as effusive about the legalization of marijuana as Dunafon. But while Hickenlooper’s position is best described as cautious, Beauprez’s is openly hostile — at last week’s debate in Fort Collins, he said he favored the repeal of Colorado’s laws allowing the sale of recreational marijuana.
“Yes, I think we’re at that point,” Beauprez said, “where the consequences that we’ve already discovered from this may be far greater than the liberty, I guess, that the citizens thought they were embracing.” Hickenlooper, meanwhile, opposed the law initially, but he has never suggested repeal.
Still, it’s a safe bet that the Snoop Dogg vote is solidly Hickenlooper over Beauprez. And so we’ve arrived in a truly strange place, where by the transitive property of enemies and friends, West Coast hip-hop legend Snoop Dogg and conservative congressman Bob Beauprez find themselves inadvertently in cahoots.
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Kiernan Maletsky is a former Westword intern.
Music Editor Emily Ferguson
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