Snoop Lion: I want to be iconic

Snoop Lion thinks his new music will turn him into a "real icon".

The hip-hop star used to be known as Snoop Dogg but has reinvented himself as a reggae artist and Rastafarian. His new record Reincarnation is the first to reflect this new path and he thinks it will open him up to a new group of fans.

"Songs that will cross me over to a real musical icon. It's real important to me. You don't do it for the accolades but when you've been in it for so long and you've been great, you start to look for things to push you forward," he told Q magazine. "I wanna go to the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame. And the only way I can do that is if I do 25 years of great music non-stop. So I've got two more years to go. That's my goal."

Snoop tried to explain why he has gone for such a drastic change in his career. While he insists he didn't get "bored" of his bad-boy rap persona, he did want to mix things up. He used an analogy involving basketball star Michael Jordan, who famously tried to switch up his job too.

"It's like Michael Jordan. He won three basketball championships and decided to take a year off to play baseball cos he loved it. He struck out terrible and people were, Mike, you gotta put that 23 [jersey] back on! And he put that motherf**king number 23 back on and won three more championships in a row. So, to me? I'm at that stage where I won so many championships in rap that I wanna see if I can win a championship in reggae. And if it don't work out, I could always go grab my jersey, put it back on. Go back to the rap world," he said.