Too late for Snoop Dogg to show softer side. (Commentary).

CALVIN Broadus wants to protect his kids. I find myself of two minds about that. Part of me wants to slap him on the back in congratulations. Another part just wants to slap him.

To disciples of hip-hop and other jiggy people, Broadus is better known as Snoop Dogg, one of the lords of hard-core, or gangsta rap.

Recently, he did a surprising thing -- he pronounced himself clean and sober. No more pot, no more booze. For a man whose career has been built in large part on celebrating inveterate inebriation, it's not unlike Tammy Faye swearing off mascara.

Indeed, the decision was so unexpected that Snoop has been forced to deny rumors it was prompted by illness. "No," he said in a recent interview on MTV, "I don't have lung cancer, and I don't have throat cancer. I been smoking weed and drinking every day of my life for the past 10 years, and I just wanted to get high off of life and take a new direction."

Snoop went on to say that he stopped drinking and smoking because he wants to set a better example for his children and for the youth football team he now coaches.

"I wanted to be inspirational to the kids because they all look up to me," he said. "And I wanted to give 'em something to look up to, because it is cool to say no to drugs, and that's what I'm doing right now. I'm 30 years old, and as you get older you get wiser, and that's what it's all about."

Gangsta rap first came to national prominence in the early 1990s, attended by complaints from many observers that the music was unfit for human consumption, much less child consumption. Small wonder. This school of rap was a proudly amoral commercial for drug use, violence, coarseness, materialism and contempt toward women. It romanticized and made acceptable that which should always be abhorred.

I don't remember Snoop having such tender regard for the welfare of children then.

To the contrary, the rap community rejected responsibility. Rappers claimed that they were simply reporters, reflecting the ugliness they saw.

Which was a cop-out, an attempt to duck one of the primary obligations of any artist -- to answer for the art. Instead, these boys -- along with the occasional girl -- preferred to pretend the message had no meaning, the work no moral dimension, the words no weight. It's just music, they said. You don't understand, they said. We're just keeping it real, they said.

We are manipulative cynics who have discovered that we can get rich selling shock for its own sake, is what they never said.

To be fair, Snoop has a point: age brings wisdom. But it's not just age. It's also the fact that children are no longer abstract to him. Before, he was apparently unable or unwilling to care.

I can't say whether that failure was one of will, courage or character. I can say that it lends a hypocritical taint to what is otherwise a wholly admirable action.

He cleaned up his act because he was worried about its effect on his children.

I can't help wishing he had been half as concerned about mine.

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald.