As rock and metal fans, we often treat the older legends with the utmost respect. Snoop Dogg, who just turned 50 last month, has made the argument that aging rappers deserve the same respect that the rock and metal icons do.

The topic came up during an episode of the Rolling Stone Music Now podcast, after discussing the premature deaths of Tupac and The Notorious B.I.G. in the '90s, and the fact that there aren't a lot of older rappers because the genre is relatively new.

"They don't limit The Rolling Stones, they don't limit those other groups that do it outside of our genre," Snoop said of musicians making music at an older age. "You got rappers in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. You ain’t got no motherfucking rock and rollers in the Rap Hall of Fame. So slow it down a little bit, and start putting some respect on our name and give us the respect for who we are."

"Don’t put no time limit on how old we are or what we are, because we don’t look at the rockers and say, ‘Man, he got white hair now when he used to have black hair, and it's all grey now,’" he continued. "We love their music, we love them, we respect them, we come support them, we sing their music — diehard fans. We should get that same love in hip-hop because we created something that's gonna last forever, it's generational."

The rapper then pointed out that hip-hop has been the most dominant genre in the mainstream over the last decade, and the fact that other genres pull influences from it in their own music to "stay relevant." Whereas hip-hop used to be a sole genre on its own, Snoop cited Run DMC as an example of artists who were able to fuse hip-hop with rock and other genres "and show that we're better together."

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