Sure, the bravado keeps in tune with the time honored tradition of rap, but Diddy's reliance on reminding us common folk of all the money he's pocketed over the years is just self-indulgent beyond reproach.
"We Gon' Make It" comes with some blaxploitation thickness, but then Diddy drops an Erick Sermon-styled flow with materialistic lyrical escapades about how he introduced the world to Jacob the Jeweler. To his credit, Diddy's intro rap actually sounds pretty good, except for the craggy, flem caked timbre of his voice which sounds like it's in need of a good throat clearing. At the very least they should have tossed some wiki-wiki into the mix. Here, however, tweaking is absent and it more or less sounds as if the DJ dropped the needle on an actual TFF album and let Diddy rhapsodize over it. Case in point, "Testimonial (Intro)" features a paint-by-numbers extrapolation of Tears For Fears' "Head Over Heels." Creative hip-hop has always taken recognizable songs and tweaked them to fit the urban parameters of the genre. As with his previous musical exploits, it features the same unabashed raping of recognizable pop hits from yesteryear. Rosete, Keri, Mario Winans, Brandy, Keyshia Cole, Mary J. While the cover features a picture of Diddy profiling in stunner shades, the album itself features a bevy of support from the likes of Jack Knight, Nicole Scherzinger, Christine Aguilera, Big Boi, Ciara, Scar, Twista, Timbaland, Shawna, Avant, Nas, Cee-Lo, Mika Lett, S. Diddy & The Bad Boy Family-is that this album is all Diddy. What sets this endeavor apart from his previous works-the 1997 album No Way Out credited to Puff Daddy & The Family and the 2001 album The Saga Continues as credited to P. If you can't sell yourself then who can?Īll of which brings us to Press Play, the first album that Sean Combs has recorded under the Diddy moniker (and his second proper solo album since 1999's Forever). Therein lays the key to Diddy: he knows about saturating the market and making sure that everybody not only knows his name, but his various products as well. He just managed to get it out to more people than any of the previous attempts at the cross-genre. Some might argue that his brief foray into rap metal was groundbreaking, but actually it wasn't anything that hadn't been done before.
And while he's fluid on the mic, he's really more verbal flash than substance (he ain't no Rakim, that's for sure). Some of his "greatest" hits are nothing more than classic rock songs broken stripped down to their barest essence and finessed into hip-hop ditties they largely work because they feed the masses need for familiarity. Regardless of Diddy's business acumen and keen grasp on giving the people what they think they want, you'd be hard pressed to label him a musical genius or place him on a list of the most groundbreaking MCs of all time. Beyond that, Diddy is nothing short of a brilliant marketing master, keeping his name and profile in the public eye and more or less pioneering the modern day "famous for being famous" modus operandi that the likes of Paris Hilton have managed to use to such good effect. Sure, his house has produced some other hits, but it's still best known for the vivid imagery that the Notorious B.I.G. Think about it, he's basically built a successful empire around the music, legend, and image of Biggie. He's also the king of the one-trick pony.
0 kommentar(er)
