Bad Rap: Invincible
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What is the focus of 'Bad Rap: The Case Against Diddy' Episode 2?
Hi there, 2020 listeners. It's Deborah Roberts here. We're going to bring you the next installment of our six-part series on Sean Diddy Combs. Here's Bad Rap, The Case Against Diddy, Episode 2, Invincible.
And now, people all over the world!
On an August night in 1995, the four corners of the hip-hop world gathered at the Paramount Theater in Midtown Manhattan. Artists from the South, the Midwest, and from the East and West Coast were all under the same roof.
It's the Source Hip-Hop Musical Board!
They were all there for the second annual Source Awards. It was a celebration of hip-hop, a music genre that was rapidly moving from underground to mainstream. The event felt like a pretty standard award show. An eager crowd filled the auditorium waiting to hear the results.
And the winner is...
West Coast rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg, also known as Snoop Dogg, won Artist of the Year. East Coast rapper The Notorious B.I.G. won Album of the Year for Ready to Die. And Outkast, a duo from Atlanta, won Best New Artist of the Year. The night was filled with performances and acceptance speeches. And one of those speeches turned the 1995 Source Awards into one of hip-hop's most infamous nights. Yeah, yeah. Record executive Suge Knight and rapper Danny Boy won the award for Best Motion Picture Soundtrack for their work on the movie Above the Rim. Suge climbed on stage in a bright red button-down shirt. First of all, I'd like to thank God. Suge is not a small guy by any stretch of the imagination. He stands at maybe 6'2", and is definitely over 260 pounds.
Before he got into the music business, he spent a year in the NFL as a defensive end for the Los Angeles Rams. In 1995, he was running one of hip-hop's two big record labels, Death Row Records out of LA. Now, after thanking God, Suge didn't go on to give a standard acceptance speech.
The crowd had an immediate reaction. Some applauded, but lots of people booed when Suge said that any artist who didn't want their producer in their videos and songs should work with his company, Death Row.
Everyone knew who he was talking about, Sean Diddy Combs, or, as he was known back then, Puff, Puffy, or Puff Daddy, the head of the other big hip-hop label, Bad Boy Records, based in New York City. Unlike most producers and record execs, Diddy wasn't happy just sitting in the crowd or getting on stage to accept an award. He was an aspiring rapper himself and craved the spotlight. In fact, when artists from his label went up to perform a medley that night, he joined them. Well, he actually started the whole thing. Suge Knight and Diddy were already rivals, businessmen vying for their record label to be king. But Justin Tinsley, a reporter at ESPN's sports, race, and culture outlet, Anscape, says Suge's speech at the Source Awards was a turning point.
their rivalry became much darker. About a month after the awards, they were both in Atlanta for the birthday party of a rapper and producer, Jermaine Dupri. Tinsley says tensions between Suge and Diddy and their entourages were high.
Sides get to barking with each other, things spill out in the parking lot, and one of Suge's closest friends is murdered in the parking lot.
Atlanta police said Diddy's bodyguard, Anthony Wolf Jones, was their prime suspect. Jones' attorney said he had absolutely nothing to do with the shooting, and no one was ever charged. But the shooting made the friction between Diddy and Suge worse. And that's partly because their beef was part of something much bigger, the East Coast-West Coast rap rivalry, which people have obsessed over for decades and we could probably write a whole other podcast about. But here's what you need to know to understand what happened next. Diddy represented one of the East Coast's biggest rap stars, the Notorious B.I.G., or Biggie Smalls. Suge Knight represented one of the biggest West Coast rappers with his own unique approach to music, Tupac Shakur, or Tupac. And both rappers and their styles were vying to be the biggest in the country. So the beef between Diddy and Suge was also connected to a rivalry between Biggie and Tupac. And I'm not just talking about a couple of diss tracks like Kendrick and Drake today.
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