THE ANGELS – During a solid streak that lasted from the early ’90s to the early 2000s, Sean Combs’ hits were relentless.
Combs—then Puff Daddy, then Diddy, and now Love—was the driving force behind the fusion of hip-hop with R&B, and later the key driver behind its dominance of mainstream pop. He was the public embodiment of hip-hop’s limitless ambition, its entrepreneurial drive.
The artist, 53 years old, is now in his era of awards. Last year, he was honored for lifetime achievement at the BET Awards. Last month, he received the global icon award at the MTV Video Music Awards. He also has a new album, “The Love Album: Off the Grid,” his first solo studio album in 17 years.
However, Combs is not comfortable. Obtaining wealth has only emphasized the paths that remain out of reach for him as a black entrepreneur. “When I started to see how the media used our success, whether it was Kanye’s, Jay-Z’s, mine, Rihanna, LeBron,” he commented. “That’s just a couple of people, but if you market it well, if you put out the right kind of propaganda, you could make people feel comfortable like there’s inclusion. No, there is not.
“Every day when I wake up in the morning, I pray that I won’t have to ask a white man for even one (expletive),” he added.
To that end, Combs works on Empower Global, an online platform for businesses and entrepreneurship for people of color, which he said sought to rectify “what was taken from us in Tulsa,” in reference to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, in Oklahoma, in which the prosperous Greenwood neighborhood was burned to the ground by a murderous white mob. “Basically, it is empowering myself with the pain of my ancestors and devising a solution, instead of my heart turning to hate,” he noted.
“If it goes well for me, that doesn’t mean it goes well for us,” he continued. “I am here for us.”
Combs already had his sights set on the music industry when he was a student at Howard University in Washington. He dropped out after a few semesters to work at Uptown Records, then the most avant-garde label at the intersection of hip-hop and R&B. He helped craft an urban brand of soul music through Jodeci and Mary J. Blige, and then, after leaving and forming Bad Boy Records, he worked in the opposite direction, bringing the sensuality, pulse and joy of soul music to the hip-hop and emphasize hip-hop’s place in the lineage of black music.
He was intended to be a personality, not a performer, but that changed after the murder of Notorious B.I.G. in 1997. “I’ll Be Missing You,” the song that brought him into the spotlight, is a permanent fixture in the firmament of American melancholy.
Success in the world of fashion and spirits followed.
However, a few years ago, his life began to fall apart. In 2018, Kim Porter, mother of three of Combs’ children, died of pneumonia. They had broken up as a couple, but remained close friends. In 2020, his mentor Andre Harrell—who had hired him as an intern at Uptown and then fired him, only to join and work for Combs for many years—died of heart failure. Among those losses, Combs turned 50. He was left adrift in a spiritual desert.
“I had dealt with depression before, you know? Through many different things, difficulties and tragedies,” she recounted. But this was different. In fact, I locked myself in my room. For about a year and a half. In my bathroom. “I didn’t talk to my children, I didn’t talk to anyone.”
Little by little, Combs ventured to reinvent himself. He began referring to himself as Love (and legally changed his middle name to Love). He used therapy: “Maybe it’s very likely that it really saved my brain.”
However, perhaps more significantly, there is music again. The decision to return so prominently, after a long period away, signals a return to the core of what motivated Combs decades ago. “Music always fueled all my dreams,” he said. “So when I stopped making music, I kind of stopped dreaming.
“The Love Album” feels modern, a mix of sensuality and glibness. To make it, Combs collaborated extensively—The Weeknd, Summer Walker, Mary J. Blige, Justin Bieber, Burna Boy. “I called everyone and said, ‘I need your help to tell my love story,’” he said.
“As a black man, I am not going to allow myself to be programmed to not love myself and not seek what I deserve as a human being for myself and my people,” he asserted.
JON CARAMANICA. THE NEW YORK TIMES
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6920200, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-10-03 18:20:09
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