Personal Information
Born: Sean J. Combs on November
4, 1969, in New York, NY; son of Janice and Melvin Earl Combs;
Children: Quincy, Justin, Christian, Jessie, D'Lila, Chance
Education: Attended Howard University, 1988-90.
Memberships: American
Federation of Television & Radio Artists; American Federation of
Musicians; Daddy's House Programs; Sean "Puffy" Combs and Janice Combs
Endowed Scholarship Fund, founder.
Career
Uptown Records, New York, intern, 1990-91,
director of artists and repertory, 1991, vice president, 1991-93; record
producer, 1994-; Bad Boy Entertainment, founder and chief executive
officer, 1994-; rap musician, 1997-; Sean John clothing line, founder
and chief executive officer, 1998-; actor, 2001-; television producer,
2002-; Broadway debut in
Raisin in the Sun, 2004.
Life's Work
Very few people can follow popular
culture today without knowing the name of Sean Combs, whether it is as
Puff Daddy, the rapper of the mid-nineties, as P. Diddy, the
rapper/actor/entertainer of the new millennium, or as Sean Combs, the
mind behind Bad Boy Entertainment, the Sean John clothing line, and the
producer with sure-fire hit making instincts. While he has had monstrous
success, Combs has had his share of rough times in the past decade.
But, no matter where critics stand on Sean Combs the man, it is true
that Combs's name is synonymous with the rise of the hip-hop culture in
America.
Combs has had a prolific presence in the media. He has
grown from producing albums for other artists to being the artist
featured on his own albums. He has moved from the music world to acting
in movies like the 2001 acclaimed
Monster's Ball. His
entrepreneurial exploits have allowed him also to depart from the
entertainment industry to found a successful urban clothing line, Sean
John. In 1997, he had a number one single "I'll Be Missing You". This
single was replaced as number one on the Billboard Top 100 by a hit
single by Notorious B.I.G., featuring Combs, "Mo Money, Mo Problems".
This feat was previously met only by Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and Boyz II Men.
Started Early in Music Business
Sean
Combs was born in New York City on November 4, 1969, to Janice and
Melvin Earl Combs. Combs grew up believing his father was killed in a
car accident when Combs was three, but found out at age 14, through
research at a public library, that his father had been a small time
hustler who was shot in the head on Central Park West. His widowed
mother worked three jobs, including as a teacher and a model, in order
to scrape money together, to buy a house in suburban Mount Vernon, New York.
"At
first I thought nobody would accept me as a rap artist," Combs later
told Chuck Phillips of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. "After all, it's
not like I came from the 'hood," he added. But his mother maintained the
family's ties to New York's Harlem, and it was there that young Sean
Combs obtained a remarkable cultural education, soaking up the creations of the founders of rap music: Grandmaster Flash,
Run D.M.C., KRS-One, and more. "I would be 12 years old, and sometimes
I'd be out until 3, 4 in the morning, seeing the music. I had to sneak
out to do it, but I was doing it," he told Rolling Stone's Mikal
Gilmore. He obtained the nickname "Puffy" from a childhood friend.
"Whenever I got mad as a kid, I used to huff and puff.... That's why my friend started calling me Puffy," he told
Jet.
Combs
enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1988. Although he
spent much of his time promoting rap-music events, he managed to remain
at Howard for at least two years. Recommended by rapper Heavy D., Combs
parlayed his musical activities into an intern ship at New York's Uptown Records in 1990. After just three months, he attracted the attention of label head and former rap artist Andre Harrell,
who named his young protegé director of artists and repertoire, a
position of extraordinary influence for a twenty-year-old with a keen
understanding of the city's flourishing rap scene. Within a year Combs
became vice president. He quickly became an accomplished producer,
working on such successful Uptown releases as Jodeci's
Forever My Lady and Mary J. Blige's
What's the 411?.
Started Bad Boy and Recording Career
Things
took a turn for the worse at a disastrous celebrity basketball event
that Combs promoted at New York's City College in December of 1991. Nine
people were killed in a stampede
at the gates. In the aftermath, Combs received some blame for the
deaths, but was successfully defended in court by renowned attorney
William Kunstler. In 1993 Combs was fired from Uptown Records. The split
with Harrell was difficult for him. "It was like the old sensei
[teacher] rejecting the student," Combs told
Rolling Stone.
A scant
two weeks later, however, Combs finalized a deal with the large music
conglomerate Arista to distribute the musical output of his new company,
Bad Boy Entertainment. Bad Boy succeeded from the start and over the
first four years of its existence posted skyrocketing sales; estimates
of total sales over the period 1993 to 1997 range from $100 million to
$200 million. Arista rewarded Combs with a $6 million cash advance when
he renegotiated his relationship with the label in 1997.
Although
Combs has produced top-chart-level recordings by Bad Boy artists Mase,
Craig Mack, and others, and has worked with outside artists of the
magnitude of Aretha Franklin
and Sting, his greatest success at the helm of Bad Boy came with the
recordings of New York rapper Christopher Wallace, better known as Biggie Smalls, who recorded under the name of the Notorious B.I.G. Smalls was Combs's first major project at Bad Boy. "He saw things so vivid," Combs recalled in a 1997 interview with
Rolling Stone.
"If you sat and listened to a Biggie Smalls record in the dark, you see
a whole movie in front of you." The first Notorious B.I.G. album,
Ready to Die, attracted widespread attention; the second, the prophetically named
Life After Death,
was one of 1997's top sellers, spawning an unprecedented two Number One
singles after Wallace's murder in March of that year. Combs had earlier
moved in the direction of mainstream R&B and was credited by some
with founding a hybrid named hip-hop soul; as executive producer of the
Notorious B.I.G. recordings, he proved himself master of the hardcore
gangsta' rap style during its period of maximum sales.
Combs was
to achieve even greater success on his own, recording with various other
Bad Boy artists under the name Puff Daddy & the Family. The
No Way Out
album, released in July 1997, included "I'll Be Missing You"; the album
took the theme of a tribute or a requiem for the murdered Smalls.
Musically, the album was marked by wholesale
adoption of the melodies and rhythm tracks of familiar pieces of
R&B and rock from the 1970s and 1980s. Writer Sean Piccoli of the
Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel
dubbed the practice "stapling," as opposed to the "sampling" present on
earlier rap recordings, where only short snippets of music would be
borrowed from earlier sources. "I'll Be Missing You" was directly based
on the 1983 Police hit, "Every Breath You Take."
Combs has taken
criticism for this practice, both from other hip-hop artists and from
fans of the artists whose work he borrows. Yet Combs was not the
inventor of such wholesale borrowing; as he was putting the finishing
touches on the
No Way Out disc, movie star/rapper Will Smith recycled Patrice Rushen's 1982 hit "Forget Me Nots" on the soundtrack of the film
Men in Black.
The style dated back at least to MC Hammer's 1990 "U Can't Touch This"
(based on Rick James's "Super Freak" of a decade earlier). Furthermore,
those who claimed that Combs in "I'll Be Missing You" was coasting along
on the strength of the Police recording mostly failed to notice the
other quotation contained in the song: the early twentieth-century
Protestant hymn "I'll Fly Away," and, on the album, the classical
orchestral work "Adagio for Strings," composed in 1915 by Samuel Barber.
Clearly, for millions of listeners, the works blended into a convincing
expression of Combs's grief over his friend's death.
Success Hampered by Court Cases
The
end of the 1990s saw a rise in Combs's presence in various courtrooms
throughout the country as well as a rise in Combs's presence in the
business and philanthropic
world. Daddy's House Social Programs began in 1995. This charity
organization, guided by both Combs and Executive Director Sister
Souljah, seeks to promote the positive influence of parents, teachers
and mentors for urban youth. Daddy's House has spearheaded programs in
academic tutoring, promoting higher education, and international travel
for students. The charity even runs summer camping programs in upstate
New York.
In 1997 Combs opened up Justin's, a fine dining
restaurant in New York and another in Atlanta in 1999, with plans to
expand to new locations. In 1998 Combs made his run at a clothing line,
Sean John. Designed with urban male youth in mind, the clothing line
became an almost immediate success and has been nominated for a CFDA fashion award every year since its inception. In 2000 Combs appeared on his own reality show on ABC, called
Making The Band. The series ran for two seasons on ABC, but moved to MTV under the name
Making The Band 2 for its third season. Combs made his Broadway debut in a 2004 revival of
Raisin In The Sun , and received excellent reviews for the effort.
In 1999 Combs was brought up on charges of assaulting record executive Steve Stoute.
Stoute was one of the executives who allowed the airing of a video on
MTV that pictured Combs nailed to a cross. Combs was upset at the disrespect he believed the video showed to God. After a public apology
to Stoute, the charges were dropped. In 2000 Combs was charged with
criminal possession of a weapon stemming from an incident at a New York
nightclub on December 27, 1999. Combs was at the club with then
girlfriend singer-actress Jennifer Lopez. A jury, in March of 2001,
found Combs not guilty of all charges. On May 24, 2000, Combs settled
the lawsuit that was a result of the 1991 New York City College tragedy.
He received further vindication on June 1, 2004 when the North Carolina
Court of Appeals reversed a $450,000 judgment against him for allegedly
having a man beaten.
All of Combs's legal and personal problems
culminated in a public personal name change. In 2001, Sean "Puff Daddy"
Combs made an announcement that the entertainment world would now know
him by the name "P. Diddy." The name change stemmed from the legal
issues, but that was not the only reason. Combs believed that he was not
given the respect and admiration he deserved
for his entertainment work. He looked at himself as a person who, for
the most part, stayed out of the east coast/west coast rap wars, looked
to better the quality of hip-hop entertainment, and tried to become a
role model and leader for people of his race. A name change would allow
him to wipe the slate clean and start anew.
However, Combs found that even as P. Diddy, his past still haunted him
and his respectability was still in question. On New Year's Eve 2003,
according to
Villa, Combs announced at a party, "First they called me Puff Daddy, then they called me P. Diddy. But now I'm just Sean Combs."
Combs
increased his focus on philanthropic causes in the early 2000s, making
headlines on November 2, 2003 by completing the New York Marathon and
raising $2 million for children's charities in the process. On July 20,
2004, he unveiled plans for Citizen Change, a nonpartisan
campaign to mobilize youth and minority voters to participate in the
presidential election that year. Earlier, on February 4, he was named to
receive the Patrick Lippert Award for his ongoing work with a similar
nonpartisan organization, Rock the Vote.
Legal and political involvements notwithstanding,
his entertainment career thrived also. Later that month he shared his
second Grammy Award for best rap performance by a duo or group--his
third Grammy overall--for "Shake Ya Tailfeather,", recorded with Murphy
Lee and Nelly. After announcing his pending retirement from solo
recording in March of that year, he made his Broadway acting debut in a
revival of Lorraine Hansberry's
Raisin in the Sun,
at the Royale Theater, and received admirable reviews for the effort.
In other 2004 honors, on June 7 Combs was named the top men's wear
designer of 2004, by the Council of Fashion Designers. Less than two
weeks later, on June 19, he carried the Olympic torch for one lap,
through the streets of New York City.
It is clear that with the
success Combs has had through repeated name changes, the next few years
will prove to be both exciting and profitable for Sean Combs.
