For Sean Combs, the biggest red flag—to himself, and those who know him best—was when he didn’t feel like creating anymore. It’s been eight years since his last release, the mixtape Money Making Mitch, which was billed as a return to his Puff Daddy ‘90s roots, all flash and flexing. It’s been 13 since his last proper album, the paradigm-shifting R&B-techno-rap hybrid Last Train to Paris, which he released as the group Dirty Money. But no matter the moniker, or if it ever even saw the light of day the assumption was always that Diddy, one of the great music masterminds of the last 30 plus years, was always in the studio working on something.
Until he wasn’t. Diddy turned 50 in 2019—one year after the death of Kim Porter, the mother of three of his children, and one year before the death of his longtime mentor, Andre Harrell. Those events, in tandem with the normal rhythms of getting old while being rich, famous and a veteran of music’s youngest genre, contributed to one hell of a mid-life crisis. It’s small wonder Diddy stopped dancing.
“I was having a conversation with Jay-Z and I was like, ‘Yo, I don't feel like going in the studio no more,’” Diddy tells me. “‘I was like, ‘Shit is just so… just different. I don't know where the love is at. I don't make music no more.’ And he was like, ‘Man, that's really sad, bro.’”
It’s a somewhat startling account of a conversation between two rap titans who made some of the jiggiest music of the ‘90s—so much so that it startled Diddy himself to find a way to snap the hell out of it.
“I was like, ‘Damn that is sad,’” he laughs. “Fucking Jay-Z just told me that this shit was sad. I didn't know how to turn it back on. And then, one day God came to me—and God's a woman. So She was like, ‘It's time, baby.’”
To find himself, to rediscover the work he had once loved doing, Diddy renamed himself Love (he legally made it his new middle name at the DMV) and went, as he describes it, “off the grid.” (Which, judging from the album’s appropriately grandiose trailer, meant exotic locales sans phone and plus female companionship, including sometimes partner Yung Miami of the City Girls.) Ergo, his first project in close to a decade: The Love Album: Off the Grid, which he’d just previewed to me and a few other writers at The Whitby Hotel in New York, one week before it dropped on September 15.
It’s a sprawling, 23-track statement that finds Diddy reaching back beyond even his history of making rap hits with the likes of Mase and Notorious B.I.G. to his true-blue roots of R&B, reconnecting with the young Harlem wunderkind who put Mary J. Blige and Jodeci on the map and ruled radio producing inescapable earworms for everyone from Usher to Mariah Carey. Any fear of cobwebs, rust or atrophy is definitively shaken by track four—Off the Grid features Diddy rapping across most of the tracks, but overall it’s him in full Quincy Jones mode, culling the best, brightest and most underrated in R&B, both vets and rising. It’s the only project where you’ll find Babyface, Mary J, Justin Bieber, Swae Lee, The Weeknd, Jeremih, Summer Walker, H.E.R. and Jazmine Sullivan in one place. And it’s all in the service of meeting his trademark bar of nothing less than perfection to bring the genre back.
About that—yes, he got flack for kickstarting his rollout this time last year with the declaration that “R&B is dead.” He’s less dramatic about explaining his stance now. “I think R&B has been in a very unfair position…the Powers That Be said ‘R&B and hip-hop are the same thing,’” he says. “No, they're not the same thing. I'm Black, I'm Puff: they're not the same thing. Yes, we look alike, we dress alike, but they're two separate art forms,” he says adamantly. “It's been a miscommunication. [Some guy named] Tom said hip-hop and R&B are the same thing.” (Tom is, one would assume, Diddy-shorthand for a white faceless streaming executive.)
Watching the genres become amorphous, plus a need to make music to fill the void and grief in his heart—he told the New York Times he would often lock himself in the bathroom, cut off from even his own children—led him to the full circle point he’s at now: to show everyone how it’s done and get back to talking shit like only Puff Daddy can do in the process. “So when it’s in jeopardy of getting wiped out of history, me, as one of the gatekeepers of R&B—I just really felt like I had something to say. And the best way to say it was through unity. The Sheriff is here. So it was like, let me just tap in with the musicians, and let's have this R&B renaissance. But it ain't like, ‘Puff’s coming to save R&B’—nah, let's do it all together.”
That meant assembling Avengers like the aforementioned heavy hitters but also writers' writers, like Jacquees, Ty Dolla $ign and Diddy’s new protege Jozzy. There are also newer artists that his sons put him onto, like Kalan Fr.Fr., on one of the album standouts, “Stay, Pt. 1.” It’s a real who’s who party, though he does vaguely allude to one female artist who opted to “sit this one out. I don't really take no for an answer like that, but I'm still waiting. I'm never saying her name. I'm not going to throw her under the bus. But I'm going to hold on to my dreams though.”
As for the hardest track to nail, instead of naming the Babyface song “Kim Porter,” a seven-minute tribute that serves as the album’s climax, he pinpoints the Justin Bieber track “Moments.” True to theme, it finds JB in his Journals bag—but Diddy, ever the psycho-perfectionist, says it took two years to get there. “Knowing that you got a record with Justin Bieber, you just want to make something special, you know what I'm saying? And so just imagine it being just 70% done for two years. And it's driving me crazy,” he recalls. “Like, I don't even know if this record is going to make it, because I don't know what to put on there, to have it be like how [I’m envisioning it]. I'm like, Quincy wouldn't do this. And then I had to keep on pushing myself and pushing myself. And [finally] I was like, I hear it, I hear the horn. Then I brought in a percussionist. And then Justin heard it, he went back in and he recut a bridge. That was the hardest song, but it came to life.”
The work and dedication is evident—it hasn’t been a week yet, but for my money Off the Grid should come in near the top of a lot of year-end album lists. Regardless of the outcome, Diddy is feeling energized, so much so that he just wants that mystery dream collaborator to know he’s ready when she is: “It can happen later. I’m back in the game.”
Just how back are we? Enough to extend that energy to a rap comeback as well? “I just have to have something to say,” he tells me, choosing his words carefully. “I produce all genres of music, but hip-hop, I have to figure it out. I always have to figure out a new frequency. I can't just come and do what's going on right now.” For now, he’s leaving the rapping to his son Christian, who performs as King Combs. “Watching my son has inspired me to want to figure out what's the new hip-hop that I’d want to make. But [R&B] is the first step for me. That's where I'm at to be honest. But I am looking at hip-hop and how I could bring the Love era into it, and still be considered raw and real. And I think there's nothing rawer than love.”
Melding love and rap isn’t anything he hasn’t done before—debates rage to this day about which song is more classic: his heartbreak, I-fucked-up ode with Usher, “I Need a Girl” or its swagger-back sequel, which features a much more vibrant beat and a video set in Miami, all parties, good vibes and motorcycles. On his way out, Puff weighed in on the “I Need a Girl” debate, barely hesitating with his definitive answer: “It’s part two,” he said with a laugh. “I was like, ‘Fuck it, I'm outside, baby. I'm back on my feet.’”