Diddy: No Half Way Crooks

Why We Turned A Blind Eye to the Dark Side of Hip Hop

Last night, I caught up with the last few days in the case against Diddy. It’s extreme. It’s shocking. It’s worse than I thought. Should we have known? I know it sounds crazy but spending my 20s in NY during the golden era of hip hop, I felt safe in hip hop environments. I worked in and around the industry for years, working for The Source, Rocawear, Ecko, Blaze Magazine, and Honey (a feminist magazine and a reaction to the misogyny but I digress). I also reported on night life and worked for marketing agencies to help tell stories around the music and the clothes. The cruel lyrics referring to women - we don't love them hoes - that came along with hip hop, those elements of the culture I thought were just bluster and posturing have shown themselves to be clues into monstrous behavior in the case of Diddy and pals.

We can’t say there were no signs. Eminem is one of the best rappers of all time but I cringe when I listen to him sing about Kim now. What was I thinking all those years ago when I listened without batting an eye? What was I conditioning myself to allow?

My acceptance of the rhetoric of the time comes from internalized misogyny. It just does. It was the price of entry. What I put in the blindspot is still revealing itself. I’m a 51 year old feminist steeped in feminism all my life but it wasn’t until I saw Amy Poehler’s feminist teen movie Moxie did I realize that Homecoming and football games in general are a spectacle of male worship. How did I miss this? The whole tradition of the girls in short skirts cheering on the boys and marching bands playing and fireworks, all that, while girls sports get ignored completely by the school. Girls are shut out of the hero story from the start of their life story.

I remember my father asking me why I loved rap so much as it was so misogynistic and I was a feminist. He wanted me to defend my position with an intellectual argument and instead I said: “it’s fun.” I said that to disarm him but it was true. The music was fun. It was energizing. I felt like the one rapping, not the minimized woman being rapped about. I didn’t identify as that. But still I was that. I was the woman. I was not the man minimizing her. I was fooling myself. I ignored the violence, shrugged it off. We all did. I did go on to explain that I felt the best rap was simply another generation of folk music. Storytelling. Snapshots of a culture and an experience. Swaths of society shoved to the side now finding a voice. And people were listening. A story once silenced was now being told. A lot of rap lyrics are metaphor, taking back power, I said And a lot of it was. Is. It comes from pain. It comes from growth. “He ain't a crook, son, he's just a shook one.” - Mobb Deep.

I’m not blaming hip hop as a genre. Hip Hop produced geniuses: The Wu Tang Clan, Nas, Mobb Deep and great party music: Biggie, Jay Z, Ja Rule,… In that realm, let’s face it, “Diddy” rode coattails. Not that it matters if he wrote every track, he’s a rapist, but now we see the crude lyrics were not just throwaway shock value. They were an assertion of entitlement to female bodies. We saw it with Russell Simmons who is hanging out in Bali forever (having nothing to do with the outstanding allegations against him, right?) and I wonder how many other people will go down with Diddy? I wish it all was just bluster and artists working out their anger. I was brought on to help a kid who was having problems with bullies and was refusing to go to school in the mid-90s when I was only 21. It was the last semester and he had only had 9 successful school days. The district hired me to as a tutor and aide to bring him to a special teaching facility and help reintegrate him into the classroom hour by hour after he had caught up with the school work. This was pre-Columbine and at one point he said he wanted to get a gun and shoot up the school. He loved rap. I told him, ‘rap can help you work out those feelings. Use the music to as an outlet for your anger but you’re not a criminal. You are not going to actually go out and get a gun. It’s just expression.’ The culture encouraged violence but I also know that hip hop is complex and relieved a lot of tension from the violence that was everywhere. But letting women get the brunt of societal anger is over for us.

We have been in a decade long reckoning from a lot of pain and the comeuppance is far from over. Yet even with the J.D. Vances, Marjorie Taylor Greenes, Candace Owens and Laura Loomers of the world, a new era is emerging. There is no denying it. We are stepping into our power and our tolerance is at zero. Sure there are sink holes in the road and identity politics is still finding its way, but we will never again see a celebrity culture that gets rich off bragging about hurting women and that’s something.

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This is not an accompanying essay to an Actual People episode. (Yet!) The 2nd episode of the 2nd season is out now and it is an interview with the CSO of The Harris Poll and head of their Futures Pratice. Her name is Libby Rodney. Here’s what you can look forward to in listening:

🎙️Could the future of AI monetize creativity rather than exploit it? Is there a future version of capitalism where we ditch artificial #scarcity and all get a piece of the pie? Are GenX and GenZ BFFs? And can businesses finally end their love affair with the short termism they've had since 2022?

In Episode 2 Season 2 of Actual People, I chat with Harris Poll Chief Strategy Officer Libby Rodney to talk about the data, possible scenarios for AI to benefit us all, and why adding sixth grade to middle school was a terrible idea.

Listen and Subscribe to Actual People wherever you get your podcasts!