Diddy Does Not Run the City

What was hidden, suspected, or obvious in 30-odd years of SEAN COMBS, aka 'Puff Daddy,' aka 'P. Diddy,' aka—no laughing!—'Love'

You know you effed up when Suge Knight sees you in the headlines and says, “That rap mogul’s bad news!”

That’s the scene I envision in some commons area at San Diego's RJ Donovan Correctional Facility, where the mountainous L.A. gang-affiliated former head of Death Row records — home to Dre, Snoop, and Tupac during rap’s 1990s conquest of pop — is now serving 28 years, his latest stretch for running over two men at a burger stand, killing one, a fellow record-label founder. (You know: old school.)

As he sits there watching TV, does Suge, whose 30-year career was filled with pointless beefs, corruption, terrorism, and the betrayal of artists who entrusted him with their lives, cooly take in this week’s federal court appearance by his one-time nemesis, Bad Boy records head Sean Combs, shake his head at his coming legal apocalypse and marvel at how some people just can’t handle success?

How does he process this reversal of fortune? How do we?

Hip-hop fans of a certain age will recall the duality I’m referring to, between the proudly thuggish Knight and his West Coast all-stars, and the more cosmopolitan Combs, whose prize attraction was the monumental talent Biggie Smalls. In 1995, when real, committed hip-hop artists were finally enjoying mass acclaim and sales, Knight took the opportunity of 1995’s televised Source Awards to do to the larger hip-hop community what Trump still does to U.S. politics: talk shit, incite beef, and push buttons until blood spilled.

Suge fired his first shot from the podium, not-so-subtly alluding to label heads who put themselves all up in their artists’ songs and videos, which triggered an ugly little melee in the auditorium, after which Knight presided over an inter-coastal rivalry that social media companies would now call “engagement-driving,” which ended with Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls gunned down within the same six-month period — Tupac in the front seat of Knight’s BMW sedan, Biggie in an SUV motorcade that included Combs.

Knight would soon begin a four-year prison stretch later that year for unrelated assault charges. Combs would turn Smalls' death into the centerpiece of his own solo rap debut, No Way Out, kicking it off by a single that sampled a large chunk of the Police’s "Every Breath You Take,” featured vocals by Smalls' widow, Faith Evans, and centered Combs as the forlorn crestfallen hero to the Biggie Smalls saga. “I’ll Be Missing You” became the first rap song to debut at number-one on Billboard’s Top 100, sold over 3 million copies in the U.S. Both entrepreneurs have now outlived their star proteges by more than 30 years.

So maybe, as Combs takes a decisive step into criminal infamy, the Bloods-claiming former Death Row head finally feels some grudging respect. Maybe he’s reappraising the glad-handing mama's boy and former major-label intern who had the audacity to name his label Bad Boy. Maybe he’s taken a fresh look at this obvious industry fake who had no real connection to the criminal enterprises at the heart of that era's hip-hop lyrics and self mythology and now feels that Puff-Diddy is actually legit.

He sure looks legit. The federal indictment for "racketeering conspiracy" lays out a story that remixes Harvey Weinstein, R. Kelly, Jeffrey Epstein, and Whitey Bulger, its grab bag of charges including sex trafficking, forced labor, kidnapping, bribery, and, why not, arson. 

The going gets lurid in a subsection account of "Freak Offs," a phrase that suggests a translation error but was apparently the internal term for a kind of extremely limited-distribution entertainment product that must have taken more planning, enthusiasm, coordination, and energy than Combs gave to most of his artists’ careers. 

Per the indictment, said Freak Offs (those caps are the government's) were "elaborate and produced sex performances" in which Combs took on his usual array of executive and performer roles — arranger, director, masturbator — and employed a small staff of Combs Enterprises employees and associates to transport commercial sex workers across state and international lines. 

What the government says transpired puts William Burroughs depravity into scenarios not unlike big-budget rap videos of the late ’90s. The performances were, the indictment reads, “highly orchestrated with male commercial sex workers,” "occurred regularly, sometimes lasted multiple days" during which Combs gave his talent a variety of controlled substances "to keep them obedient and compliant" and videotaped them without consent. After that — and good luck forgetting this next part — "Combs and the victims typically received IV fluids to recover from the physical exertion and drug use." 

Apparently, that’s a Diddy party.

Among many other things, it sounds like one wang-dang-doodle of a late-stage addiction nightmare — particularly for the women dragged into it. In fact, Combs’ claims of finding recovery, along with well-founded suspicions about government cases that rely on these specific charges to discipline high-profile targets, might move some to give poor Diddy a break (reportedly he is on suicide watch in jail fwiw). Or at least it might if the guy’s demons weren’t so well-funded, well-defended, and long-running, and didn’t ruin so many lives. 

It’s also odd that Combs has been mounting preemptive defenses against such criticism for almost as long as he’s been a public figure. Unless I’m misremembering things, he was actually culture’s biggest proponent of that pithy rhetorical countermeasure to all accusations, “player hater.” An insult that became foundational to the MAGA ethos: usable on liberals, Democrats, immigrants, LGBTQ people, women, judges, attorneys general, journalists, FBI agents, and anyone else who just hates the naturally awesome.

So with suspicions like these, plus decades of goodwill from those outside his immediate circle (looking at you, Oprah), Combs might well have denied and obfuscated his way through another few years. If it weren’t for one video that he didn't produce but definitely starred in: hotel security-cam feed from 2016 that showed him giving the freak-off treatment to singer Cassie Ventura near some elevators, grabbing her hair, throwing her down, kicking her — truly vile shit, I’m not linking to it — which, when it leaked this summer, moved our clown of a mayor to demand Combs return his key to the city (no!) but more significantly, put a decisive end to Combs’ tenure as a viable public figure.

It’s gross to get enthusiastic about the fall of another Black success story, and I recommend Harmony Holiday’s lyrical and heartbreaking essay on the inherited pathologies Combs’ case signifies and triggers. I also recommend my old colleague Danyel Smith’s harrowing NYT Mag piece, which details terrorism I was ashamed to learn had been so extreme and extensive in the same office building I worked out of during that time.

But that’s how this kind of infamy works these days, catching up to serial offenders once they’re not making others so much money, expunging them from culture’s record, tainting everything they touched. Last week, I found myself simultaneously hating the fact that Prince’s estate is likely to quash Ezra Edelman’s probing and probably amazing nine-hour Netflix documentary about this actual bonafide genius and thinking that his lawyer, Londell McMillan, is dead right in his concern that a warts-and-all doc like this could get the icon canceled. And that’s Prince we’re talking about.

To say the very least, Combs is no Prince. I know it’s delusional to imagine character defects as profound as Combs’ were legible in the crass and giddily commercial aesthetic he forged for hip-hop in the mid ’90s, but that stuff does make it a lot easier to turn the page on Diddy. As a pop presence, the '90s Combs always struck me as corny and tiresome, a vacant-eyed figure who wore clothes well and rapped with a plodding, downcast antistyle. His affectless presence was actually well suited to the beaten-down death row inmate he played in Monster's Ball, in a gentle, laconic performance that may be his career best. 

But I can’t in good faith denigrate all of Combs’s musical accomplishments, even though the last one that I saw was back in 1997. I remember it well, partially because it felt epochal even as it happened, and because it seemed to signify the end of an era.

It was during a Bad Boy showcase concert at Madison Square Garden, nine months after Biggie Smalls' murder, which hip-hop seemed to be metabolizing a bit too quickly. Jay Z, Usher, and Busta Rhymes all opened, if you can believe that, after which Combs cavorted alongside Mase, Lil' Kim, and other core Bad Boy artists, to a string of hits that made groundbreakingly liberal use of Phil Collins', David Bowie's, and other's "hits from the '80s," as Mase and Combs meta-ishly sing-songed. 

The show was fine, flashy, giddy, filled with well-deployed samples and fresh post-b-boy choreography. But midway through the set, when they came to "Mo Money, Mo Problems," the night itself seemed to pull focus, and this whole fraught period of hip-hop attained a stark clarity. 

This happened after Combs and Mase had cavorted through the first two verses of this bouncy single from Biggie Smalls' posthumous release Life After Death — a blueprint for countless subsequent releases by prematurely deceased rap stars. Then, as the song hit the final verse, which had been recorded by Biggie Smalls, there was no Vegas hologram of the dead MC onstage, no archival video footage synched up with the lyrics, no clip from a music video, no image of the rapper at all. 

Instead, as that booming, unforgettable voice danced over the track — spelling "B-I-G P-O-P-P-A,” full of soul, gravitas, that sticky, vicious flow and cockeyed charm — the track’s vocal audio was traced by a giant oscilloscope that filled the screen above the stage, over everyone, over the night, full of life but tracing a ghost. It was striking, terrifying, awesome, how the sound and visual expressed the simultaneous presence and absence of such a giant lifeforce. And it pains me to say one of the most riveting live-music moments I’ve ever experienced, and it was at a Puff Daddy show.

After this, the rest was not silence though probably should have been. Instead we got one last run through the chorus of a song that now sounds mid-’90s AF, a relic of a pre-9/11 and -financial crisis age. Sung over Diana Ross’s gay anthem “I’m Coming Out” with its towering production by Nile Rodgers, it’s an irrepressible pop song whose lyrics speak to the cash, power, and influence that enables freak offs of all sorts, co-written by a 20-something music mogul with a burgeoning persecution complex.

I don’t know what they want from me, it’s like the more money we come across, the more problems we see. 

Yes, the eternal quandary. I’m sure Suge can relate.