VMAN 16

DEFINING DIDDY

Once the poster boy for hip-hop excess, Sean Combs has a new image and a new sound. it’s nothing to do with bling and everything to do with black

Photography Chad Pittman      Styling Jay Massacret

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jacket and shirt sean john

Text Jacob Brown

Diddy has love on the brain. “It’s my strength, my weakness, my kryptonite,” says the rapper, producer, mogul, and fashion designer. “It’s the thing I am always in search of—and I am the type of person that if I love you, I love you hard.”

Sure, that might sound like a sickly sweet stanza from some bubblegum-pop outfit’s latest hit—but when it comes out of Sean Combs’s mouth, and he is sitting across the table looking you right in the eyes, it sounds utterly heartfelt. The machismo façade of Diddy is on the wane. In its place, something softer is emerging, not soft in a weak sense, but in a real sense. This month sees the release of the first singles from Last Train to Paris, Combs’s new album, set for a March release. A concept album, it details a turgid, tough romance, all told in first person so that the listener can’t help but equate it with the impresario himself.

The truncated version is as follows: Boy meets a girl. They fall madly in love. But eventually she leaves him for being too much of a bling-bling hip-hop stereotype. “Pulling that Diddy shit,” is how Combs aptly phrases it. Heartbroken, he languishes until one night in London he gets a call. She has been spotted at a Paris club. He races to the station, all his hopes of winning her back pinned on catching the last Eurostar out.

Last Train to Paris is refreshingly not all about the Benjamins, a complete volte-face for Mr. Combs. No one is spillin’ Cristal. No playas. No bitches. No guns. If anything, the songs indict the hip-hop lifestyle, blaming it for chasing away the thing he wants most, the thing he calls more precious than bling.

Has the world’s biggest hip-hop ego—the one with giant Sean John cologne billboards of himself towering over Times Square—turned introspective? Yes. And it shows, not just in the music, but in the way he’s promoting the work. One example: over the summer he invited press to his recording studio in midtown Manhattan to preview the album. Introducing the tracks, he cautioned that they were works in progress. He hemmed and hawed over what the music meant, what he was trying to express—endearingly insecure behavior, the lot of it.

“It’s a weird thing,” Diddy says, “like, now that it’s really personal, I want everybody to hear it, but at the same time, I’m scared for everybody to hear it. I think I have evolved a little bit, grown up. The ostentatious, over-the-top Donald Trump kind of thing was fun.” But for Combs, that moment has long passed.

Somewhere, one can assume Chicago, Oprah Winfrey is smiling. At the end of 2007 she invited Combs to her show, sat him down, and politely read him the riot act. The treatment of women, the glorification of violence: hip-hop might be a rich musical genre, she said, but it was having a detrimental effect on the very people it should be lifting up—all detractions that have existed since day one of rap.

On the show, Combs pointed to hip-hop’s origin, the harsh reality black youths faced in the late ’70s Bronx. For many there were only two ways out of the ghetto, basketball and hustling. That frustrating reality needed expression. Combs admitted to Winfrey that things had changed since the ’70s, but argued that the music still expressed a reality worth hearing. She didn’t fully accept his line of argument, but she saw its merit.

Since that interview, the world has been turned on its head. For one thing, the economy collapsed. “Unless you have on blinders you know this is one of the craziest times a generation could ever be in,” Diddy says. “The future doesn’t look bright.” Though, like so many, Combs sees the downturn as a creative opportunity.

“It is how you deal with it that matters, either you can be depressed or look into what really matters. There are other priceless things besides diamonds,” he says, “like love and the beauty and miracle of making music.”

Certainly within the vague and sprawling environs of “black music,” creativity is at an all-time high. Traditionally, it is a voice for the oppressed. Black music is also defined by the way that white culture has continuously appropriated it. From spirituals to jazz through Motown to modern rap, black artists have been imitated and borrowed (and stolen) from. But in the last couple of years, that trend has sometimes been inversed, with black music borrowing from white—in fact not even American as much as European—music. The hits are sounding more and more electro. Classic hip-hop beats are being displaced by newer techno varieties. Diddy derides some of what he calls “Euro hip-hop dance” as lacking in rawness. “My music,” he explains, “I always envision it sounding like it comes from a booming system of a car as it drives by.”

Indeed, Last Train is raw. It feels genuinely new, with a pronounced vulnerability. But raw or not, there is little rapping on the album—Combs actually sings. Beats that could be called hip-hop are even rarer. Some tracks on the album even evoke the avant-garde Scandinavian electronic group the Knife.

This reversed osmosis of cultural borrowing dovetails nicely with the other event that has changed the world since that Oprah interview: Barack Obama.

Combs is acutely aware of this turning point and its potential impact on artistry. “It’s almost like black lifestyle represents the new America,” he says. “We’re the Obama generation and it’s not all about where we are at and where we are from, but also, where we can go. It’s past just dreaming about money and freedom. Now you can dream of love—or just dream. You don’t always have to be black and have your black car and be doing black things.”

Is that why black music can sound like white music now, and still be hip-hop?
With a self-deprecating laugh, Combs answers, “That’s the new black, to be able to just make some good music.”

Production Betsy Hammill
Digital technician Mario Torres (Another Digital)
Location Smashbox studios
Stylist assistant Olivia Kozlowski
On set production Peter McCFlafferty
Hair Shizz
Grooming Yumi (Frank Reps) and Merrell Hollis
Photo assistants Nick Walker and Koury Angelo