P. Diddy & The Bad Boy Family – A crossover too far?

There is hip-hop, there is neo-R’n’B and then there is P. Diddy and The Bad Boy Family that does crossover music for all the races. Sean Combs, ex-Puff Daddy, is a master of doing it the way nobody else does it. All the ingredients and ‘Parental Advisory’ sticker are present and accounted for, plus a list of guests to frighten me inner child. But it appears that he, and his cohorts, pander to the same market Prince and Michael Jackson did during their mostest days.

There is an overwhelming feel that this is designer music, complimenting the Puff’s clothing line. Nothing wrong with it, certainly much better than manufactured pop, but equally (in)effective. It is just ear-candy and all the pretence of ‘Bad Boys’, dangerous, menacing and threatening to the social order, is just an image. Public Enemy, NWA and Eminem can cause some changes in the social fabric, ‘The Saga Continues…’ only alters Diddy’s financial state by upping it and upping it some more.

Diddy (he can’t expect to be taken seriously with such a moniker, surely?) is a businessman and then a musician, although he’d love you to believe ‘Bad Boy For Life’, ‘Child Of The Ghetto’, ‘Blast Off’; the truer picture is found within the titles like ‘Shiny Suit Man’ and ‘If You Want This Money’. There are too also too many ‘Interludes’ to make it a disjointed listening; it’s like a collection of snippets of something that could have been.

Reading Diddy’s sleeves might be even more entertaining than the music itself and guesting army of the current musical heavyweights spreads from the hottest production team The Neptunes (also known to moonlight as N*E*R*D) to Faith Evans and Kokane; there are samples of Al Green as well as The Alan Parsons Project and James Last (a middle-aged kitsch German pianist)…

This is marketed as a 'Compilation' but don't believe it, it's got Diddy's fingers all over. Anyway, too crossover that crosses nowhere.

6/10