Snoop Lion

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Published September 28, 2026

Snoop Lion was the reggae-era stage name adopted by rapper Calvin Broadus (Snoop Dogg) in July 2012, announced alongside a Diplo-produced single and a Vice documentary. The name change became a running internet joke that spawned Photoshops, Twitter hashtags and an image macro run on Reddit and Tumblr.

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Overview

Snoop Lion was the Rastafarian-flavored stage name Calvin Broadus used for his 2012 reggae pivot, and the name itself did most of the meme work. Fans treated the swap as absurd on its face, then ran with it. The main formats were Photoshops planting Broadus' face onto lion imagery from other films and hand-drawn takes riffing on the same idea13.

Two Reddit posts anchored the format's look. One superimposed his face on a still from The Lion King on r/funny, and another, submitted by NuclearThane, cast him as the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz based on a drawing by the poster's father3. On Twitter the joke went verbal instead of visual, with users piling into the hashtag #UpgradedRapperNames to give other rappers similarly grand new animal titles3. Image boards like Memebase and the #snoop lion tag on Tumblr collected the rest of the edits3.

Origin & Background

Platform
SoundCloud (source) / Reddit / Tumblr (viral spread)
Creator
Calvin Broadus; meme edits by unknown fans
Date
2012

On March 19th, 2012, MTV News ran an interview in which Broadus described his upcoming album as being "like the reincarnation and the birth of me becoming who I really am"2. The name behind that quote landed four months later: on July 20th, 2012, he released the Major Lazer produced reggae single "La La La" on SoundCloud under the new alias Snoop Lion, alongside a Tumblr site at SnoopLion.com3.

The rebrand had a documentary attached. On July 30th, 2012, Vice published a trailer for Reincarnated, a film following Broadus around Jamaica while he cut the reggae album of the same name with Diplo3. Days later Vice's music vertical Noisey put out a companion interview clip, "We Got High With Snoop Lion," in which he explained the Jamaica trip as the trigger for the name change4.

How It Spread

Music press moved first. On the same day the SoundCloud track went up, Hip Hop Wired and Idolator flagged the new alias, and Pitchfork followed on July 21st with a writeup naming Diplo as the producer5. Two days later Rolling Stone, Spin, Billboard, The Guardian and The Huffington Post all covered the album announcement, giving the name a very large audience very quickly67.

The meme side of the response kicked in a couple of weeks later. On August 2nd, 2012, Redditor PhiladelphiaIrish's Lion King edit hit r/funny and picked up more than 13,000 upvotes and 135 comments in its first 24 hours, per KYM's tracking3. The same day NuclearThane posted the Cowardly Lion drawing from their father3. Twitter's #UpgradedRapperNames hashtag was documented by International Digital Times on July 31st3. Photoshops kept piling into Memebase and the Tumblr #snoop lion tag through the rest of the year3.

The joke got a second wind in late 2013 when Broadus announced yet another alias, Snoopzilla, for a funk collaboration with Dâm-Funk called 7 Days of Funk, which Pitchfork reported on October 15th, 20138. Broadus mostly reverted to Snoop Dogg after the Reincarnated cycle, but the Snoop Lion edits stayed in circulation as a shorthand for celebrity rebrands that don't quite take.

How to Use This Meme

The template is straightforward. Take an existing lion (Simba, the Cowardly Lion, a National Geographic photo) and Photoshop Broadus' face onto it, or draw the mashup by hand. The verbal variant swaps rappers' stage names for grander animal upgrades, as with the #UpgradedRapperNames tag3.

Frequently Asked Questions