P-Diddy Ruined Music

In the history of music, very few people have managed to do real lasting damage.  Boy bands in the 90's were awful, but they also shriveled up and disappeared as quickly as they appeared.  Whatever talented members they had (Justin Timberlake) went into acting/making club bangers with Timbaland, and the rest shriveled up and went away.  They still made some awful crap, like this insult to music:

But, luckily, no one listened to it, and they disappeared.  Probably to make cameos on Entourage for people to laugh at.  Ringtone rappers come in waves, and they do their best to suck, but they really only impact rap.  I don't like Hurricane Chris and Chingy any more than any other rap fans, but it's hard to say that they're destroying music.

P-Diddy.  Or Diddy.  Or Puffy.  Or whatever he calls himself these days has had probably the most effective campaign to destroy all music. First, there's rap.  Now, P-Diddy isn't a very talented rapper, but he's not the worst there is.  He blows, say, Gucci out of the water.  His flow is mediocre, and his lyrics are cliche, but that just makes him a dime a dozen, not exceptionally bad.  Either way, it wasn't rap that made him famous.  He first became a big name when he established Bad Boy Records in 1993.  That's when he became famous as "The guy who stands behind Biggie in his videos chuckling and dropping 'uh-huh' and 'yeah'" in at pretty inopportune moments.  And at that point, no one really minded him anyway.  Sure, he was kind of a clown, and everyone made fun of him the same way they made fun of Jermaine Dupri for being the guy who's hanging on to every aspiring pre-teen rapper in the game.  See: Example below.

But then, in 1997, Biggie was gunned down, and P-Diddy had no clue what to do.  His cash cow was dead.  But Biggie was arguably the best rapper of his generation, and without a doubt one of the greatest of all time.  So finding another Biggie just wasn't very likely.  So P-Diddy decided the right move was... to try his hand at rap himself.  That's where he ran into a problem.  As I might have pointed out, he wasn't much of a rapper.  And, unlike Dr. Dre, whose unspectacular (though still MILES better than Diddy's) ability as an MC was overshadowed by his legendary beats and production ability, P-Diddy couldn't make beats either.  So that's when he decided to take a nuclear bomb to rap and start ripping off classic songs.  And making them not just worse, but awful.  And he didn't just do it once and disappear, the way ringtone rappers do now.  He did it over and over and over.

It started out tolerable, because he'd take old tracks from Biggie and throw them onto the track.  Also Frank Reynolds made an appearance in the Victory video.  And the video was pretty sick, so I could give him a free pass for stealing his beat from "Going the Distance" from Rocky.

But that was just the beginning.  Pretty soon he'd managed to turn Grandmaster Flash's The Message (a social commentary on gangs and a rap classic) into a  piece of steaming garbage about nothing, in which he and his buddy Mase (whose claims to fame were 1) sounding EXACTLY like P-Diddy on the track, and 2) quitting his job as P-Diddy's voice double to try to become a church minister.  Which he also quit.) made a video in which they hung out in a padded white room for awhile.

But that was just the beginning.  Other victims included I Did it for Love by Love Unlimited.  Which P-Diddy turned into It's All About the Benjamins.  Which Wikipedia describes as being about "living rich and the importance of having money."

Then there was I'll Be Missing You.  Where he took Sting and the Police's song about... stalking and turned it into... a posthumous tribute to the guy he stalked.  Then he did his best to destroy classic rock by convincing Jimmy Page's coked-out corpse to appear on Come With Me and play the guitar riff from Led Zeppelin's Kashmir.  Now, Kashmir as a song doesn't really make much sense, probably because Page and Robert Plant probably wrote it after doing a mountain of coke and then huffing all the glue at the Home Depot.  But it sure as hell was NOT about Godzilla.  But, surprise, the Godzilla soundtrack is exactly where the Zeppelin classic showed up.

And that was pretty much the last straw.  After a 3-year run of destruction, P-Diddy kind of disappeared.  Yeah, he and his soul patch still made appearances with Jennifer Lopez at award shows, and in that absurd billboard over Times Square, but he stopped trying to make music.  Unfortunately, now, every time I watch Rocky, every time I hear Sting come on, and whenever I listen to Zeppelin, I think about P-Diddy and I get angry.

Thank you, P-Diddy, for ruining music.  I hope your next album doesn't sell a single copy.