I met Puffy once, briefly, in the V.I.P room of a club in Ibiza. We were both drenched in the hallucinogenic purple foam with which the club’s spirit team had just hosed down the partying masses. I was—to be Frank—tripping my balls off, so when I say that Puffy had a ring-tailed lemur named Frank perched on his shoulder, you may want to take it with a grain of salt. I know it was him, though, and not just because he punctuated every third sentence by looking up to the heavens and saying, “We’ll miss you, B.I.G.”
It was the sunglasses, in an already dimmed room, and the smile that excited and chilled me at the same time, and the fact that the purple hallucinogenic foam with which he was visibly covered seemed to have no effect on him whatsoever. More than that it was the total and extraordinary invulnerability and inaccessibility of which the shades are the most explicit symbol and which is the signature of Diddy’s style and persona far more than any particular Sean John outfit he might happen to be wearing on a given evening.
‘What’s in a name?’ he asks (That which we call a diddy by any other name would smell as sweet), and the answer is a great deal. His many names are his homage to the black American tradition of playing/experimenting with names and nicknames that’s developed as a kind of transgressive counterpoint to the triumphalist white narrative of American history (Henry Louis “Skip” Gates talks about this kind of verbal play in The Signifying Monkey, his seminal work of literary theory). It’s a brilliant self-promotional trick, a self-serving gift to the jokesters of the entertaintment media—your Kurt Loder, your Billy Bush, your Conan O’Brien—that allows them to indulge their (and by proxy America’s) racist fascination with the exotic customs of these funny black people. It’s also a shell game, a dance of the seven veils, a series of masks behind which “Sean Combs” pretends to reveal himself but in truth remains hidden. He’s a promoter, a dancer, a producer, a rapper, a singer, a fashion designer, an entrepreneur, a social activist, a father, an actor. He’s everything and nothing.
Diddy, and in this he’s the kind of reductio ad absurdum of a certain strain of celebrity, is pure surface, pure reflection, pure cool. Everyone wants to know him, because we all yearn after the cool, but he can’t be known—even by himself—because to be known would be to be not Diddy.
