Combs says Belafonte was a model for the kind of activism he envisions for this next stage of his public life. “I was like, we were in similar situations. You know what I’m saying? Coming from where we were having a position of power, being celebrities, and I was wondering, how did [Belafonte] get so dug into [social action]? And really dedicating his life.” He has always been dedicated to something. But whereas young Combs’s dedication was to family, friends, and making enough money to buy the kind of freedom he felt like the world was denying him, the elder Combs is dedicated to making that freedom possible for others. He says he looked through “history” and at his own biography during his journey to the Love era. In that excavation he saw the makings of someone destined to save his people. “The person that was able to go and do Bad Boy, if he’s in charge of bringing us together, it sounds like, ‘That’s the right motherfucker.’ ”
I believe Combs. I also believe the women in church who say God told them someone else’s man is their husband. If they like it, then I love it. Still, if I could ask the women in church one thing, it would be the same thing I tried to ask Combs with little success: I believe God told you that you have been chosen…but did he tell everyone else?
Sean “Love” Combs is a man standing at the crossroads of several sea changes. He is a not-so-young man whose legitimacy as a cultural icon hinges on his power to gate-keep youth culture. The influencer culture has taken the prototypes that Combs helped innovate and mixed commerce with social consciousness. It is no longer enough to look slick or create the newest dance. Today’s celebrity has to have a position on climate change, white supremacy, LGBTQ+ equality, and politics. Combs is also a girl dad. He has six children, three of whom are 14-year-old girls at the time we speak. He wants his daughters to inherit the keys to his kingdom in equal parts with his three sons. Raising a trio of girl bosses tunes a dad into the #MeToo movement. Combs is looking back at the international playboy of his youth and a near future where his daughters become young women. And above all, Combs is trying to do the brand iteration that made him successful in a climate that is openly hostile to what his brand represents. Combs’s “Black excellence” is, in practice, a celebration of Black capitalism. And, if you have not noticed, a lot of people have labeled capitalism as enemy number one. It is a cultural high wire perhaps too thin for a diddy bop.
That won’t stop Combs from trying. He launched a diversity training program with the powerful Endeavor this summer. The six-week course is dubbed, in true Combs fashion, “the Excellence Program,” and is designed to support aspiring entertainment executives hailing from underrepresented communities. It comes at a time when the entertainment agency model has come under fire for its lack of racial diversity. It is part of Combs’s desire to use his platform for collective good. But his understanding of what constitutes good may be at odds with the communities from whom he draws some of his inspiration.
In the spring of 2021, Combs published an open letter to “corporate America” in which he demanded that companies increase their spending with Black-owned media businesses, saying that “incremental progress” in ad-spend parity is unacceptable. Combs sees himself as advocating for the Black consumer in the “If You Love Us, Pay Us” missive. But critics were quick to say his callout was hypocritical, in part because Combs owns Revolt, a cable TV network that courts advertising dollars. Rapper Noname is the kind of artist who would have been difficult to imagine in Puff Daddy’s heyday. Noname is a fiercely independent rapper who, along with other contemporary artists like Chance the Rapper, rebuffs the traditional record-label deal as both an artistic and political statement.
Former Bad Boy artists The LOX and Mase have publicly criticized Combs for trapping them in what they felt were unfair deals in the past. Black capitalism, Noname alleges, would have one celebrate Combs’s individual success as social progress. She said on Twitter that Combs was “shaming white corporations for a capitalist business model he almost completely replicated.” This is not an isolated critique. It is a generational one. Younger audiences are rejecting uncritical boosterism of capitalism. And in a wider swath across pop culture, consumers are demonstrating a willingness to demand more from their para-social besties. That instinct is quite strong among young Black audiences, many of whom participated in Black Lives Matter protests over the last two years. Hip-hop artists can still make a song like “Party and Bullshit,” for sure. But they cannot make it without the audience pushing back on whether the bullshit was consensual and if the party had a purpose.
For his part, Combs tells me that he is not worried about bringing along those who disagree with him. “I can’t get caught up in that. I know where my heart is at, and you can’t just do it alone with just Black people. You got to have all types of allies. And that’s one thing I’m good at, I’m good at being a unifier, but I’m not going to be in a room with other tribes that protect themselves and make sure that they straight and not make sure that we straight. But also, I’m not a politician, I’m not trying to be the king or the dictator of somebody. I’m a boy from Harlem that came here to make a change. We all have our story.”
Combs’s story is a hood Horatio Alger tale. He started from the bottom and now he is here, as it were. It was a hero’s tale that made sense for where the culture was in 1999, even where it was in 2005. The 15 years before the 2008 Great Recession were a period of unbridled economic optimism. It was the era of the hustle, and Black youth culture translated it into an ethos, an identity, and an ideology. Lester Spence is a professor of political science and Africana studies at Johns Hopkins University. In his book on Black neoliberalism, he calls this hip-hop ethos the “Can’t Knock the Hustle” mythology of modern Black capitalism. That myth made sense in the year 2000, when Black America, in particular, was battling the war on drugs by extracting every ounce of opportunity from Bill Clinton’s expanding economy. Before financial bubbles started bursting in rapid succession in the 2000s, hustling felt democratic. Anyone with the right dream and the right grind could make it out of the hood, sometimes literally but usually metaphorically. In 2021, hustling doesn’t sound fun. It sounds like the drudgery it is, a set of coping responses to a hostile social order that has left millions of people behind. That kind of moment requires a different kind of story and maybe a different kind of storyteller. It isn’t that the hustle is dead, but that valorization of the hustle culture is surely on the ropes. Hip-hop’s core constituency wants to debate the veracity of hustling when predatory mortgages, student loan debt, rising rent, flat wages, and surveillance police states choke the very life out of Black lives, Black hopes, and Black hustle. Combs speaks reverently about Black Lives Matter, calling it “part of the Black Renaissance” and very much a “part of the Love era.”
