Black cool is one of America’s great innovations, right up there with basketball, blue jeans, and the internet. It blends several forms—music, sports, fashion, speech, ways of cutting through space—into a wholly distinctive, globally influential aesthetic. There are French fashion houses in thrall to silhouettes first spotted in Harlem, Japanese men who have devoted their lives to spinning jazz records in Shibuya, and lavish murals of Tupac Shakur as far apart as Sydney and Sierra Leone.
Sean Combs, the disgraced record mogul, certainly did not invent Black cool. But like Miles Davis, Muhammad Ali, and Michael Jordan before him—and like Jay-Z, Kanye West, and many others who followed—for a flicker of time he was its most formidable ambassador.
That moment coincided with my adolescence, which is why the revelation of Combs’s extravagant cruelties—the depravity with which he used all that he’d gained—has left my childhood friends and me feeling so betrayed. We had looked up to Diddy, whom I will always think of as Puff Daddy or Puffy. When we were at our most impressionable, he taught us what to want and gave us a model for how to behave and succeed. Seeing him fall apart in our middle age feels like a kind of heartbreak. The verve and swagger he injected into our childhood dreams have curdled into something rancid.
Certain photographs of Puffy are permanently etched into my memory. In 1995, dipped in a flowing black-and-gold Versace Barocco silk chemise, liberally unbuttoned to flex a thick Cuban link anchored by a diamond-encrusted Jesus piece—the definitive signifier of inner-city affluence. September ’96, on the cover of Vibe magazine: head peering from behind his greatest protégé, the Notorious B.I.G.; signature blackout shades; a perfect S-curl relaxing the weft of his fade. The cool he exuded in these moments was inspirational, even masterful. My friends and I had never seen anything like it so fully pervade the culture, certainly not from someone we felt we could relate to.
I have not admired Combs for decades now, since well before his trial this year. But I will always be partial to the Puff Daddy of the ’90s: from 1993, when he founded his record label, Bad Boy Entertainment, through the spectacular rise and death of the Notorious B.I.G., and peaking around 1998 during hip-hop’s “shiny-suit era,” which he pioneered with Ma$e and the Lox.
By the time I got to college, Puffy was even wealthier, and my cultural references had begun to change. I vaguely remember the preposterous images of him strolling beneath a blazing Mediterranean sun while his valet spread a parasol over his head. He was mainly in the news because of a shooting at Club New York, which resulted in bribery and gun-possession charges against him and a highly publicized trial (he was acquitted). For my friends and me, his shocking newness had begun to fade.
Back in his prime, though, Puffy conveyed a sense of youthful ambition that we revered. He was able to transition from sidekick and hype man to dealmaker and multiplatinum performer. Before turning 25, he had founded his own culture-defining business—soon-to-be empire—and knew precisely how to leverage his growing fortune into social capital.
More than his success, we were struck by two qualities that seemed novel to us. The first was the amount of effort he openly displayed, which counterintuitively amplified his cool. Puffy made no pretense of obscuring the maniacal work required to achieve his goals. When he closed a million-dollar deal, he slammed the phone down and screamed. (Years later, he would become one of the original hustle-culture influencers on Twitter.) He showed us that flourishing was not a condition one had to be born into—that luxury and labor were connected.
The second quality was his ability to make Black people and Black culture—even its less compromising, more street-inflected iteration—feel at home in places, such as the Hamptons, that had not previously welcomed them. Puffy’s motto “I’ma make you love me” felt innocent and aspirational to us, not least because he actually achieved it. We were still many years away from realizing just what he would do with all the love he was given.
Puff Daddy seemed to us then like a Black man utterly free in a moment of expanding opportunity. Before the age of social media, before we’d ever stepped on a plane, Puffy represented our first intimation of an unrestricted way of being-for-self in the world. On the one hand, he was the antidote to the soul-crushing squareness of upwardly mobile middle-class life that we so feared—degrees, office jobs, bills. On the other hand, he was perfectly assimilated into the good life of the American mainstream, to which we desperately craved access.
This made him dramatically unlike his peers. Tupac and Biggie were confrontational, and look where it got them. Rap entrepreneurs such as Master P and Brian “Baby” Williams were rich but ghettoized; any number of establishments wouldn’t seat them. Puffy, by contrast, looked like a marvelous solution to the problem of success and authenticity that my friends and I had been struggling to solve.
Yet we were suffering from a kind of myopia. And it wasn’t unique to us. The generation after us put their faith in Kanye West, whose most recent contribution to the culture is a single titled “Heil Hitler.” Role models are like seasons. One passes irretrievably into the next, but for a moment they might reveal possibilities that outlast and surpass them.
*Illustration Sources: Jeff Kravitz / FilmMagic, Inc / Getty; Nitro / Getty; Steve Eichner / Getty Images; Al Pereira / Getty Images / Michael Ochs Archives; Richard Corkery / NY Daily News Archive via Getty.
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