Dionne Warwick’s celebrated music career has recently evolved into a new kind of spotlight as the unofficial “Queen of Twitter.” Her hilarious and candid tweets calling out other celebrities crosses the generational gap between the 82-year-old star and younger fans of today’s favorite stars, and she certainly isn’t shy about putting fellow musicians – especially rappers – on blast.
Warwick’s one-of-a-kind talent
Born in 1940, Marie Dionne Warwick grew up in New Jersey as part of a spiritual and musical family. Her mother managed a well-known gospel choir and her father became a gospel record promoter while Dionne would sing as a stand-in if other choir members were absent.
Warwick’s sound can’t be defined by a single genre, but she was clearly influenced by her gospel upbringing as well as the leading ladies of the jazz scene like Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn. Her one-of-a-kind sound is a perfect blend of her soulful voice and upbeat, pop rhythms which made songs like “I Say A Little Prayer,” “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” and “Walk On By” some of the biggest tracks of the ’60s and ’70s.
Warwick has won six Grammy Awards including a Lifetime Achievement Award, and she continues to make music – like an R&B single with Dolly Parton and her 2019 album She’s Back which was produced by her son. She is also an outspoken woman of color who stands up for African American and women’s rights. She even called out a group of popular rappers with an Intervention-style awakening.
The day Dionne ‘out-gangstered’ Snoop Dogg
In Dionne Warwick: Don’t Make Me Over, a new documentary about Warwick’s life, one of the founding fathers of the rap movement came forward with a hilarious story about the time Dionne “out-gangstered” the biggest names in the hip-hop scene.
According to Snoop Dogg, who is now 51, Warwick told him and other rappers like Tupac Shakur to arrive at her home at 7 am sharp. Snoop admitted they were so intimidated by the singer that they were all in her driveway by 6:52 am. “We’re powerful right now, but she’s been powerful forever,” Snoop recalled feeling before the meeting.
Once inside, Warwick called out the rappers for their misogynistic lyrics and told them to call her a “b**ch” to her face. Dionne also reflected on the incident and remembers telling the group of men, “You guys are all going to grow up. You’re going to have families. You’re going to have children. You’re going to have little girls, and one day that little girl is going to look at you and say, ‘Daddy, did you really say that? Is that really you?’ What are you going to say?” she asked.
Snoop Dogg does in fact have a daughter, Cori, who is 23 years old. “She was checking me at a time when I thought we couldn’t be checked,” Snoop shared. “We were the most gangsta as you could be, but that day at Dionne Warwick’s house, I believe we got out-gangstered that day.”
‘I hope I’m making you proud’
“These kids are expressing themselves,” Warwick commented, “which they’re entitled to do. However, there’s a way to do it.” In another interview, Warwick shared that the “spanking,” as she called it, came from a place of love: “They felt that I was, as they said, ‘dissing them.’ I wanted them to know that they were dealing with someone that – first of all, if I didn’t care about you, you would not have been invited to my home.”
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Snoop Dogg also talked about how meeting with Warwick changed the course of his career for the better: “I made it a point to put records of joy – me uplifting everybody and nobody dying and everybody living. Dionne, I hope I became the jewel that you saw when I was the little, dirty rock that was in your house. I hope I’m making you proud.”