Puff Daddy & the Family debut studio album, entirely produced by the Hitmen. Originally, it was to be called "Puff Daddy & the Goodfellas", then "Hell Up in Harlem", finally, Puff chose for the more sober "No Way Out", following the death of his friend Christopher "The Notorious B.I.G." Wallace, which occurred four months earlier. The guests are members of Puff Daddy's group, "the Family", Lil' Kim, Ma$e, Biggie Smalls, The LOX and 112, as well as Faith Evans, Foxy Brown, Kelly Price, Simone Hines, Melissa Feliciano, India, Busta Rhymes, Carl Thomas, Jay-Z, Black Rob, Ginuwine and Twista.
Epic intro by Stevie J, then Puff mumbles something about police sirens. You could associate it with the magnificent intro of the movie "Platoon" (1987), because the music is the same: the Hitmen take from Samuel Barner, "Adagio for Strings". It follows one of the rare highlights of this album, "Victory": Stevie J's tense rhythm, sample from Bill Conti's "Going the Distance" for the soundtrack of "Rocky" (1971), frenetic snare drum, there's a guy mumbling something in rap and in the background Biggie's adlibs. Throughout the first minute you wonder how Biggie goes in and why is this guy still rapping, he's really poor, who is he? It's Puff Daddy, he would be the author of the record, the main rapper. Then comes The Notorious B.I.G. and destroys the cut from the first line, it's awesome, unstoppable, with a flow smoothness on a thrilling and gorgeous beat by Stevie J. He also throws a jab to Nas and performs with the intention of legitimizing his claim to the throne of New York. Busta Rhymes crazy aggressive hardcore hook that is better than all the rest of the album performed by Puff Daddy. There's a second verse by Combs, which spits quite soft, weak, poor compared to the other two. Biggie is back, with his last recorded verse in life, Busta's hook, Puff's outro.
"Been Around the World" is another easy highlight, because Biggie is still there. The production chosen by D-Dot, Amen-Ra and Puff Daddy is theatrically commercial: above this jazzy boom bap are his proteges, Biggie Smalls & Mase, Bad Boy's past and future. Together with them, Puff who still gives a useless intro and then delivers very badly, very dull, with a poor and banal style. Hook by Notorious BIG, good attack by Mase, which lifts the song with a flowing rap, fit with the rhythm, before the outro of The Madd Rapper. "What You Gonna Do?" is the testament of the album. Light and sublime jazzy boom bap by Puff Daddy, Amen-Ra and Nashiem Myrick, the track is a rare Puff Daddy solo — there are four out of seventeen — in which he proves he doesn't have the technical ability to handle a three-verse track, especially a five-minute long track, despite a brilliant, mesmerizing beat coming up to him and giving him a big hand.
Part of the problem is with what Puff Daddy thought was a good solution, which is to put a very long hook. He continues to deliver calmly and too lightly, almost speaking, and this is not enough to make a good song. Here more than in any other track, it's evident that the manager needs at least the lyrics, and he doesn't have them: if the disc is fairly listenable it has a sufficient lyrical weight, it's due exclusively to the guests. Track number five has a bouncy, accessible and commercial rhythm, on which Lil' Kim proves to be a better performer than the other dude, boasting a fluid and technical style. "If I Should Die Tonight" is a minimal downtempo interlude with Carl Thomas' soulful killer hook and Puff Daddy's spoken word. The producer and D-Dot do a nice job behind the keyboards for "Do You Know?": lively piano, good rhythm, Combs is still poor with that rap, he has a voice that sounds bad, quite simply. Kelly Price is great on the hook, and for a reason I don't understand, she's not credited.
She saves this track, by herself, and it's a piece that goes on for a long time, so, it's not an easy task: the song goes on as you wait for Kelly Price to sing the hook again and the girl continues to sing in the background as well, keeping the attention of the listener while that other dude mumbles things. Puff is bad on this album, but if you start to see it as a choral effort of several artists featuring Puff Daddy, as a kind of soundtrack or group record instead of a solo record, this track is among the best. "Young G's" is the best cut of the album. Sample from "On the Hill" by Oliver Sain, amazing. The midtempo drum is dusty, minimal, Rashad Smith's excellent jazzy boom bap. Biggie intro, then Puff's stanza is written by Sauce Money, the manager doesn't interpret it well due to a cumbersome and rusty, tired and bland, sparse and weak flow. Lifting the song up, once again, is Kelly Price on the hook, uncredited, she re-interprets the chorus of Donny Hathaway's "Little Ghetto Boy" in a good way. Jay-Z elegant entry, velvety, silky, calm, excellent flow. Hook, Biggie Smalls anthology entry, untouchable dope delivery.
Puff Daddy, Amen-Ra, Jay "Waxx" Garfield and Jesse "Corparal" Wilson create an authentic masterpiece for the "I Love You Baby" soundscape. It's amazing to find a rhythm of this level from Jay Garfield, it doesn't happen every day. It's even more incredible and even rarer to find a rhythm of this level made by Puff Daddy. How did he do it? Wow, if this guy is capable of things like that, I'll take back everything negative I've written about him so far. Without a shadow of a doubt, this is the highlight of Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs' productive career, he has never produced anything that sounds better than "I Love You Baby". Dirty and dusty strings, magical, glossy beat, relaxed, melancholic: it derives from the sample of "Xtabay (Lure of the Unknown Love)", a song by the Peruvian soprano Yma Sumac, who in 1950 released a particularly successful album with Capitol. It's combined with an excellent bass line, good piano, perfect drum, dirty, dusty, dry, hard, lively. It's sensational, truly sensational. Where, how, when and why did Puff Daddy dig so hard to find this sample? Has he really worked this far to find such a perfect sound?
Obviously, the answer to all these questions is a convinced, dry, cold and icy no, he didn't, without the possibility of replying. It was all a dream. It can not be true. It's not. If you look at the credits, you see that Hitmen is behind all of this, Bad Boy is behind this. It's not so. A user on genius.com invites you to read the passages of Prodigy's autobiography, "My Infamous Life": Havoc is producing a track for The Notorious B.I.G.'s studio album, "Life After Death", namely "Last Day". Biggie Smalls asks Havoc to bring Prodigy on the track as a guest, but Prodigy refuses, he doesn't want to perform with the Brooklyn rapper. At the end of his studio session, Havoc is so drunk that he leaves all six songs he made that day for the Biggie album: from that set, someone steals this beat for the track "I Love You Baby".
The Hitmen add only the piano, the work of Stevie J, the rest is pure Havoc. Incredible, a perfect beat wasted for that crap rap by Puff Daddy, one of the poorest rappers that history can remember and especially from the entire nineties. Right? Wrong. Fortunately, a real MC shows up in front of the mic, Robert "Black Rob" Ross, East Harlem, New York: his attack is professional and he performs with his best flow in career, delivering bars with an energetic and precise style, worthy of the best ever in the City, his voice is even similar to him, and he's completely fit. Black Rob also plays the second verse and completes a fantastic piece, surprisingly one of the best on this LP. There would also be the last verse of Puff, but for me the song ends there.
"It's All About the Benjamins" is a strong cut, at the expense of one of the worst beats the Hitmen could pull off. Puff Daddy and D-Dot behind the keyboards: this production team seems to be a living oxymoron, the first track they look like Havoc and they do one of the best rhythms of the year, the next track they look like Swizz Beatz and they do one of the worst rhythms of the year. Thankfully, they had simply stolen from Havoc before without even crediting him, so, that's no problem. Their real quality level mirrors this beat. In this seedy production, there's that annoying Neptune influence, it feels like a pre-Neptunes rhythm. The first verse is a good verse on paper, but Puff recites it without any personality and in the end, it sounds less good than it should sound. Jada & Sheek ride the beat well, simple hook, then Lil' Kim sweeps everything away with a spacial verse delivered with the personality and ruthlessness of a veteran. She's the clear MVP of this song. The producers place a Jackson 5 bridge, "It's Great to Be Here", for the last verse, which The Notorious B.I.G. recited with a great flowing style.
Puff Daddy has a solo track, "Pain", on a wonderful soulful jazzy boom bap by Combs and Nashiem Myrick, based on Roberta Flack's "Let's Stay Together" sample: it's so good it's easy to suspect it's another theft from somewhere. Ah, this choice would also be the title track. From now until the end, production collapses vertically. "Is This the End?" it was born as a soulful jazz rhythm, but the boys mess the beat behind the keyboards and a confused noise emerges on which Carl Thomas, Ginuwine, Twista's quick rap and an excessively long verse from Puffy find themselves. The production of "I Got the Power" is done with burps: it's a solo by LOX, Styles P, Sheek Louch and Jadakiss, with Diddy making a simple hook. The group is greeted by the worst musical carpet of the record and cannot save the track, despite the effort, it's impossible.
Foxy Brown and Simone Hines' hook are the only things you can save in "Friend": it's a track where nothing works, from the bouncy rhythm that comes back, mediocre and cheap, to Puff's meager hook, Puff's shoddy delivery, to completely avoidable sexual outro-skit. "Señorita" aims at the Latin market with a relaxed rhythm and spitting bars with a boring flow in the last solo of Puff, it's one of the weakest tracks on the disc. When you think the album can't get worse, "I'll Be Missing You" comes to dismantle all your certainties. Puffy is a huge Police fan, it's no secret. Who is not? But from here to do a rnb song sampling the Police, it wasn't a good idea. The rhythm is practically untouched and doesn't sound good. Faith Evans' hook sounds forced and is still better than what Puff did on this record — I remember, it's the best album of him. The 112 on this track are credited. Finally, "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down": three stanzas, one each for Mase and Puff and the opening one in back n forth over the rhythm of "The Message" by Melle Mel & Duke Bootie to close the album.
Final Thoughts
Five singles are drawn. "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down" anticipates the release of the LP by five months and is Puff Daddy's first official single as lead artist: it reaches number one on the Hot 100, stays there for six weeks, and becomes one of the best-selling singles of the year and decade. It's very important, as it ushers in Puff Daddy's dominance into the mainstream. The heartbreaking single "I'll Be Missing You" comes out two months before the album, in memory of friend Christopher Wallace: is first in the Hot 100, reaches first place in 16 other countries, platinum in 12, at the end of the year is on the podium of the best-selling songs in half of Europe and is the third best-selling in the USA, preceded exclusively by a piece by Jewel ("Foolish Game") and by "Candle in the Wind 1997" by Elton John, in honor of Lady Diana. The third is "It's All About the Benjamins": actually, it comes out before the others and in 1996 he's in a DJ Clue mixtape with the verses of Puffy and LOX, then the manager brings the song into his LP and adds the verses of Kim & Big to it. It's the only single not to obtain certifications.
"Been Around the World" is extracted as the fourth single, as the previous one reaches the second place of the Hot 100, and gets the platinum disc. Fifth and last, "Victory": the RIAA certifies it gold, but it finishes #19 on the Hot 100 and in second place among rap singles, despite a record budget for the music video, around $ 2.7 million. Released by Bad Boy Records and distributed by Arista, the album hits the top spot on the Billboard 200, stays there for four non-consecutive weeks and is one of the best sellers of the season, certified seven times platinum in just a few years. It's first in Canada, Austria, Switzerland and in the UK urban chart, obtaining certifications in twelve countries on four continents. Nominated for five Grammy Awards in 1998, it won as best rap album.
September 7, 1996. 2Pac is killed in drive-by shooting. March 9, 1997. Biggie Smalls is killed in drive-by shooting. Blown up by the media to explode, the East Coast-West Coast war is about to end, but no one knows it's about to end. The streets are darker. The alleys are tighter. The nights are colder. The sky cries. Puff Daddy doesn't have time for this bull****. This is his moment, what he has always been waiting for: he's in the greatest hype of his career, he's about to ride the crest of the highest wave of his life. He can't be wrong. He can't afford it. He quickly calls his production team, the Hitmen, and imprisons them in a recording studio in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. The Thing is done. The Thing is his first studio album. It should be perfect and if you look at it commercially, it is. It's flawless. If you look at the tracklist, this is the rap album of the year, hands down. You can't say anything. Biggie's name repeats itself so many times it gives you a headache. There's the whole family. There's Jay-Z. There's Busta Rhymes. There are Lil Kim and Foxy Brown on the same album. There are Lil Kim and Faith Evans on the same album. It's hard to do better.
The production is entirely done by the Hitmen, his team of producers, and Combs is credited on every track. Production is very simple. Puffy was never a great wizard behind keyboards, he didn't innovate, he never had too much imagination. These 17 songs have identical structure and are musically based on more popular songs by other artists. Puffy copies them and puts them on his album, passing them off as samples and to make hooks. And he copies from everything. There are no giveaways, tributes or awards. There's just a big theft of rhythms and hooks (often both) from many artists, such as Bill Conti, David Bowie, Lisa Stanfield, Yarbrough & Peoples, Marvin Gaye (cover of the same name), The Gaturs, Diana Ross (almost namesake track), Oliver Sain, Donny Hathaway, the beat stolen from Havoc, Love Unlimited, Jackson 5, Roberta Flack, New Edition (eponymous song), Mother's Finest, Ohio Players, India, the Police and Melle Mel.
The sound is professional, boom bap jazz, pure East Coast, cool, crisp, clear. Commercial. Beautiful, for half an hour, as long as there are artists able to enhance it. In the remaining 50 minutes, the Hitmen put production on autopilot and the results are disastrous. Even with two fifths or, rounding up, half a set of beats done right, the album would still be solid. However, there's a major problem looming over the disk, impossible to ignore: Puff Daddy is also the lead rapper. He's not a rapper. He doesn't have the basis for doing it. In its intentions this is a sentimental and emotional album dedicated to his friend who has just passed away, but every single bar that he performs sounds empty, apathetic, without energy, they all fall lifeless. His flow goes out bland, his words struggle to come out, he has no personality, he's talking all the time.
The album has a genuine incoherence and a boyish irregularity, which is troubling and disarming at the same time: one track glorifies gangsterisms, the next one mourns the friend who died from those same gangsterisms. It's the musical equivalent of throwing yourself on the ground crying rivers of tears over your newly deceased friend's corpse, then suddenly cranking up the MAC, firing casually on random enemies until the clip runs out, and then crying back on the blood of your friend.
Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs first album is excellent, when Puff Daddy isn't on the album. For the first ten tracks, it's one of the best albums of the year: The Notorious B.I.G. is the main guest of the project and appears four times in this initial section. The other external performers are Busta Rhymes, Mase, Lil' Kim, Carl Thomas, Jay-Z, Black Rob, The LOX and Kelly Price: nobody disappoints and they all carry on the album very well. The second part of the tape doesn't really exist: there are still Carl Thomas, The LOX and Mase, there are other competent and fresh guests, good singers, but nothing seems to work as before. The record is lost in rnb, pop rap, excessively honeyed, whining and muddled songs, and on choppy and economic rhythms, the production budget was running out. With ten fewer tracks, it would be a much stronger LP. As a hip-hop document, it has an intrinsic importance that transcends its own value, goes beyond the (very often) poor quality of music and rap: the album turns the whole game around and marks the birth of the shiny suit era.
Highlights: "Victory", "Been Around the World", "Young G's", "I Love You Baby", "It's All About the Benjamins (Remix)".
Rating: 6.5/10.
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