Best Of: Rhiannon Giddens / Investigating Diddy’s Rise & Fall

0:00This week on here and now anytime, how climate change is literally shifting the earth beneath Alaskan's feet through floods, landslides, and melting ice, and what they're doing about it. Bring on the locust, because we've had everything else, I mean, luckily Jino is very resilient. Come with us to Alaska on here and now anytime, on the NPR app or anywhere he lives in a podcast. From WHY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley in Los Angeles. That's today's guest, Rianne and Giddens, playing the opening banjo riff on Beyoncé's hit Texas Hold'em. Giddens doesn't usually play pop music. She comes from the Black String ban tradition, is the artistic director of the Silk Road ensemble and studied opera in college. It's not a usual path from opera to the banjo, but... There's nothing about you that is usual. Also, Rolling Stone investigative reporter Cheyenne Roundtree talks about her new book,

1:05Bad Boy for Life, which tells the story of Sean Combs across the names he gave himself, Puffy, Puff Daddy, P. Diddy, and Love. Plus, Justin Chang reviews the new film, Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, starring Mahershala Ali. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. This message comes from Wise, the smart way to manage your money around the world. With Wise, you can send, spend, and receive money in over 40 currencies at the mid-market rate. Learn more at Wise.com. Teas and Seas Apply. This message comes from Instacart. Instacart knows not all bananas are created equal. Some want them green, some ripe, some want them ready right now. With Instacart's preference picker available at most retailers, you can choose preferences like avocado ripeness or deli thickness before your shopper starts. So instead of hoping for the best, you get groceries picked the way you would pick them. Download the app and get bananas just how you like with Instacart.

2:07Opposition to data centers cuts across party lines, which is rare in Wisconsin politics. But who has the power to decide whether a data center is built? We'll dig into the politics of data centers. And who has power in Wisconsin? On the swing state of the Union podcast from WUWM, a part of the NPR network. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. On NPR's Wildcard podcast, Willem DeFoe is an open book. A terrible liar. Are an actor supposed to be good at lying? Yeah, maybe I'm a bad actor. Definitely sometimes. Watch or listen to that Wildcard conversation on the NPR app, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tonya Mosley. Terry has our first interview. There are many ways you may know my guest, singer, banjo player, fiddler and songwriter Rianne and Giddens.

3:08Early in her career, she co-founded the Carolina Chalka Trops, which played music from the Black String Band tradition dating back to slave times. She since recorded several solo albums. On one of them, she recorded and wrote several songs based on slave narratives, and one song based on an ad from a slaveholder looking to sell a young and slave woman, offering the buyer the option of buying the woman's nine-month-old baby. Giddens studied opera singing in college, and won a Pulitzer Prize for co-writing the opera Omar about a Muslim scholar from Senegal who was sold into slavery in the U.S. She also was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the Genius Grant. She's now the artistic director of the Silk Road Ensemble, which was founded by cellist Yo-Yo Ma and is dedicated to playing with musicians from around the world, drawing on their musical traditions. If all that isn't enough to spark your interest, it's time to bring in the name Beyoncé.

4:09It's Giddens playing banjo on Texas Holdham, the hit track on Beyoncé's country music album Cowboy Carter. We'll talk about that a little later. Rianne and Giddens has a new album called Hope is the Thing with Feathers. The title track is the title of an Emily Dickinson poem that Giddens has set to music. She's brought her banjo and fiddle, and we'll play and sing a little later in the show. Let's start with a track from the new album. This is Stepaway Blues, which she co-wrote. Stepaway, stepaway, I've got my soul in my hand. You better get my name out your mouth. You'll never understand. I'm tired of taking off my skin, so you can see my heart.

5:17Rianne and Giddens, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thanks, thanks for having me. It's such a pleasure to have you back. Stepaway Blues, which you co-wrote, you write in the liner notes that you think it definitely feels like a song for your crone ears, and crone is an archaic word for people who don't know the definition. It's basically a condescending and contemptible word for an old woman who typically is ugly if the word crone is used. When you say your crone ears, what do you mean and why is that a song for your crone ears? There's words that have dictionary definitions, there's words that have connotations that were generations ago. There's words that are being reclaimed, and I feel like crone is one of those words, because women who have gone through menopause tend to disappear in societies, including ours. I think we are all looking for ways to reclaim that time, because it actually is the

6:18time of great power, which is why of course it's been under attack for all of patriarchal history. For me, that's the way I use crone is actually in a more of a recolonel limitory, is that a reclamation sense of, you know, it just means I'm in this period of my life. And so that's kind of the spirit of me using that word is not an ad integration to myself, but more of a reclamation kind of spirit, if that makes sense. So in what ways that's a defining song for your crone ears? Well, it's, I'm entering in that time, I'm 49 years old, you know, and so I'm just kind of entering in the space of the, this chapter where I just don't care anymore. You know what I mean? Like I just want to say what I have to say, and you know, it will be taken the way it's taken. I mean, obviously within reason, but I need to step into that a little bit, because I've spent a lot of my career sort of, you know, being the peacemaker, being the mediator,

7:20sort of trying to represent things in a way that's not too offensive, but that, you know, at least sits in an emotionally hard space. And that's a very difficult thing to carry and I've been carrying it for a long time. And I definitely am feeling like I need to let some of that go. And you know, if I, if I, if I come out with something a little stronger, if, if not now, then when, you know, so that's, I'm feeling that coming on and that song kind of represents that for me. So in step away blues, part of the lyric is, I'm tired of taking off my skin so you can see my heart. Yeah. Where were you in your life when you wrote that, that you thought about that line? It's been a, it's been challenging. The work that I do, you know, I'm really lucky to get to do what I do and I feel really so blessed, right? So let's get that out of the way. Like I have privilege, I have a great team, everything.

8:22However, the work that I do is very culturally difficult because what I'm doing is in a large part, I'm talking about very difficult things in our history to mostly wide audiences, you know. So every night I'm, I'm sort of just bearing everything, you know, so that people can have an emotional connection to some really, really difficult history. I shouldn't have to do that, you know, and so I'm happy to do it, but it wears on you. It wears on you and the years pass and you continue to perform blackness for people in a way that is palatable, right? In a way that keeps everybody there and not walking out the door and that is only something I can do for so long, you know, and so it kind of combines with this age thing where I'm kind of hitting this time where I'm like, do I want to keep doing this? I don't know. So part of the ability of engaging in art, engaging in art, making songs, making visual art, whatever you're doing, dancing is a way to get out some of the emotions that you're

9:25feeling about things in a way that maybe other people can draw strength from. Well, you're in an interesting spot because like you represent just as a person a lot of different traditions mixed into one human being. So it makes, it just seems to parallel, you know, the music that you play in the traditions that you draw on. But drawing on so many black traditions as part of your music, you felt uncomfortable performing mostly for white audiences and frustrated that black audiences often don't seem interested in the music and assume that it's not really black. And you've said that the first time you felt really accepted by black audiences is when you performed at Singsing Prison in New York and when you were on Beyoncé's country album Cowboy Carter. So can we talk about Singsing for a moment? Yeah. And just to be really specific, that's just the blackest audience I've ever had. You know, the audience, the fullest of black people, which of course is like so overwhelming,

10:27you know, all of the layers that that represents, you know, that I'm in at prison and then, you know, looking at the carceral system is so messed up and is so overrepresented by black and brown people. I mean, that's a whole history, right? But then the cultural response that I got on that night, I had never really gotten before because I've never had a majority black audience, you know, and so it's just so many layers. I've had black people at my shows always and there's always no all of them. I see them all kind of count them, you know what I mean? And like I've said many times, like I love my audiences no matter what. My thing has been I want to get, I wanted to get more, I wanted the black, I wanted to get black. See, it's like, it's so complicated because it's like there's black people who know my work, right? So when you're talking about black mainstream media, like, okay, is that really how much do I need to worry about that? So I've kind of like struggled with that. And that's why the doing the Beyonce song, doing centers, like being a consultant on

11:30centers and having a song on that soundtrack, those are mainstream things, you know, that were then also connected to, you know, like in centers and the Beyonce song, black culture in a way that I couldn't cross into just doing my folk circuit and doing what I do. So those things were really strategically, like I was like, I just want anybody who's in the mainstream black community who may not, you know, come over to the banjo in the fiddle world because of the story that's told around it, because of the assumption that it is white music. I wanted it to be there so that it's another way in. I just want people within the black community to know this is also an option for you. And you can do it in a way that doesn't feel like you're asking permission. Like I had to go through that, but there's so many people in the black community who are starting to realize this is something that is for them as well and as part of their history and they're picking up, you know, a gourd banjoes and fretless banjos and it's

12:33small, but it's growing. So that's really wonderful. And like that's why I do those things. They're very difficult to do like existing dealing with anything in the pop world is hard, you know, because I'm up. I'm a folky to the to the bone. Since I brought up Beyonce and Texas Hold'em, did she tell you what she wanted you to play? Did she have something in mind or did she just say like, do what you think is best that makes sense for the song? Because you open the recording. I wrote that thing. You're the first thing we hear. I wrote that lick and I wrote the viola that's also on there. So that is something that I came up with. So let's hear a little bit of it. This is Texas Hold'em with Rianne and Giddens on banjo and viola if we get that far into the recording. So that was Rianne and Giddens on banjo on Beyonce's Texas Hold'em from her country album,

13:55Cowboy Carter. I love that track. And I think it sounds great with you on it. So how did that change your life, if at all? Because you're not used to being part of the mass media mainstream. I mean, when that album came out, everybody was talking about it. So did that change your life in any way or change your perception of what it's like to be in the center of the pop music world and the black pop music world? It didn't change my life because I wasn't in the center of it. My sound, that sound was, was wonderful for me. It's all I ever wanted. I didn't want any more than that. It was there to be discovered. It's there to be discovered. I watched all the line dances to it on Instagram and TikTok and I was just like, that was really exciting for me. And that's all I wanted from it.

14:55I continued to do the work that I've always done. I did a lot of free emotional labor during that time advocating for anyone's right to this music from the black community because of the history of it. And I have receipts. So I wrote opinion articles for the Guardian and I did interviews and I was constantly asked about this. And to my ability, given legalities, what I did is I used it as an opportunity to advocate for the true history, the true cross-cultural history of country. And that's what I always try to do. Anything that I do, it is for that purpose. It is for the mission of uplifting voices that have not been previously really uplifted and to try to burst the mythology that has been set up around this music, which is white supremacist and nationalistic. And it's very clear that these narratives are there to do damage. So I'm always trying to try to correct that. I'm not interested in it for my own gain, not interested.

15:57I really am there to tell the story. And that's what I did over and over and over again when KELOLY Carter came out. So it gave me that opportunity to have that platform myself. I may be a gained a few more followers or whatever. And also, Kache. I got Kache in the black community for that. That to me was perriceless. If I talk to a black person and I'm like, what do you do? And I'm like, I play the banjo that I con. And I'm like, you know, Texas Holden, that was me. And then they go, oh, you know what I mean? And that's like, that's amazing. So as a black banjo player who has been trying to advocate within our own culture for this, that was a huge card for me to be able to play. And it gives you a chance to tell more people that the banjo has African origins. And that, you know, it's not a white mountain instrument. It comes from black tradition. And then white people picked it up too. And but that's how music is. It travels through all these different cultures and circles and things mix.

17:00And it just keeps growing. That's exactly it. And the thing is the banjo is all of those things also. It is and also because other marginalized groups, you know, when you think about people who settled in the Appalachian Mountains, they were poor. You know what I mean? They were under attack by the, you know, by people who wanted the resources of the mountains. And they adopt this instrument so thoroughly that it becomes their own as well. So everybody played the banjo. You know, it starts as an African diasporic instrument invented in the Caribbean under duress in a time of unimaginable, like slavering the Caribbean. We think slavery is bad. Whatever we think is worse when it comes to the Caribbean, right? And it's a crucible where a lot of actually what we think of as American creolization happens in the Caribbean first and it comes up with enslaved people who are brought from it. So the banjo is coming up as a part of that. And it becomes the fabric, part of the fabric of the new emergent American culture. We're listening to Terry Gross's interview with Rianne and Giddens.

18:02Her new solo album is called Hope is the Thing with Feathers. We'll hear more of their conversation after a break. I'm Tony Mosley and this is Fresh Air Weekend. Austin Tice is an American journalist who disappeared over a decade ago while reporting in Syria. And for years, we've been searching for him. This looks like a secret passage. I'm just pushing the doors so you can get in. Listen to Where is Austin Tice from MPR's embedded and BBC Radio 4 on the MPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This election season let the NPR Politics podcast save your time and your sanity. We'll help you understand key races, which polls you can safely ignore and what might happen if power shifts in Congress. Our short daily episodes come out every afternoon so you can spend less time scrolling through each chaotic news cycle. Make NPR Politics your hub for midterm election coverage, follow our podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air Weekend.

19:02I'm Tony Mosley. Look at Back to Terry's interview with Rianne and Giddens. Her new solo album is called Hope is the Thing with Feathers. She's also the artistic director of the Silk Road Ensemble and started her career playing music from the Black American String Band tradition dating back to enslavement with the Carolina Chocolate Drops which she co-founded. You decided to go to Oberlin College and study opera singing there which you never really pursued because you found the Black String Band tradition. It's not a usual path from opera to the bandjeers but... There's nothing about you that is usual as far as I can tell. Okay, so you don't sing opera but you do the Black String Band tradition. Since you have the fiddle with you, can you talk about what is the Black String Band tradition?

20:03Your mentor in that tradition was Joe Thompson who played music from that tradition and lived not far from you and grew up in the same town as your maternal grandmother. Yes. So there was an immediate connection there when you met him at like a music conference. The Black String bandje are gathering. He was 86 and he was the last of his family to play this music and they were the Thompson Family Band. It was him and his brother first and then him and his cousin and then it was just him when we met him. It had been passed down as this sort of family tradition and it can be traced back to the time of slavery and the Black String Band tradition used to be enormous. Everybody, there were Black String bands everywhere. I kind of called them like the jukebox of the pre-recording era America but the basic thing is that the Black String Band was a big thing. We cannot take it out of the history of American music. Everything collapses like a souffle. So the ability that we had to go study his music to be his apprentices because this is

21:08the old style of apprenticeship you just go play with the other person. We would sit with him on Thursday nights and we would just play his tunes over and over again. So it is a part of everything that I do is that and I know how privileged I am, the old drag get that I had a living link and elder, somebody that I am related to in the family tree. It is so rare in this kind of music in the Black community because we were erased so much and because people who were watching it and recording it weren't interested in what we were doing. So to have that is a real real gift. So yeah, I do play fiddle like I played banjo with Joe but there is an old time tune on the new record. I can play a Joe tune because I think that is more useful. This is called Black Annie.

22:21Oh, Black Annie, get away, oh, Black Annie, get away, oh, Black Annie, get away, oh, that is great. So that is Black Annie and I learned that from playing with Joe and there are so many aspects of that that feels like his music, his family's music. The fact is that he is playing tunes that other people in the region play, white musicians played. Music really was regional and we tend to divide it into racial categories because of the

23:26commercial music industry. That is really when that starts. Because back in the day you just played the music that you played and you heard what somebody down the street was playing and then you know what I mean. So again, that commercialism has really messed with us in so many ways. You know that kind of like double time bowing that you did? Is that something you learned from Joe? Yeah, it's like Justin Robinson is really the main proponent for his fiddle style. These days but you know this, this, this. You know this, there's a, his bowing was very particular and it was really beautiful. I can only do an approximation of it but things like, you know, he would, he did this pushing

24:32up thing, you know, Justin calls it the barking puppy. Yeah, I feel like there's times and I feel like I'm falling into his vibe, you know, and it's like, that's the other important thing about this music is that it is really the ancestral like in it and that's for everybody. Like, you know, this music has such a history and that's why it's so important to keep alive. It's such a history and there's times when I'm playing it, there's times when I'm playing the banjo and I just like feel like I feel the ancestors like I feel the, the spirits come through and it's like that's the only thing that's kept me going in this industry is knowing that I'm connected in that way to the people who came before and that like my nephew is 27 and he was five when he met Joe and he plays banjo and he plays bones and like when I hear him, I'm like, when I'm dead, you know what I mean? It's again that it can't stop with you.

25:32Rianne and Giddens, it has been such a pleasure to have you back on our show and to hear you sing. I love your voice so much and you're playing to you. But you, you are one of a kind. Thanks for having me. It was really, really nice talking to you. Rianne and Giddens, new album is called Hope is the Thing with Feathers and she spoke with Terry Gross. Hope is the Thing with Feathers, purges in the soul, sings the tune without the words and never stops it all and never stops it all. Sweetest and the gale is heard, so almost be the storm, could have bashed the little bird, they kept so many warm, they kept so many warm. Hope is the Thing with Feathers, purges in the soul, sings the tune without the words

26:33and never stops it all and never stops it all. In the new action thriller, your mother, your mother, your mother, the two-time Oscar-winning actor, Mahershala Ali, plays a devout Muslim family man who also happens to be a deadly assassin. The Sam Terik directed the movie, which opens in theaters this week and our film critic Justin Chang has this review. Your mother, your mother, your mother opens with a murder in a public restroom in Houston. The victim, a man, is never identified. The killer is a professional assassin named Latif, played by Mahershala Ali. As their bloody struggle plays out, we hear a solemn voiceover explanation of the film's title. It's rooted in a hadith, a record of the sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad. A man approaches the Prophet and asks, who deserves the best of me? The question is posed three times, and each time the Prophet responds, your mother.

27:37Right from the start, the Pakistani American writer-director, Basam Terik, clearly delights in outrageous juxtapositions. Latif is not your average contract killer. He's a husband, a father, and a devout Muslim, and he justifies his profession by only targeting victims that he believes society would be better off without. He also never uses a gun. A saber is his weapon of choice. It's not an easy thing, killing people and raising a family, just ask Tony Soprano. And it's about to get a lot harder for Latif. Right after this latest job, he gets the tragic news that his wife has died of an illness. Latif, not the most attentive of dads, is suddenly left to raise a teenage daughter, a preteen son, and a baby by himself. Assassins don't get bereavement leave, and so Latif remains under enormous pressure from his employer, a Muslim crime boss. Much of the pleasure of Tariq's movie comes from trying to get a handle on his Gonzo

28:39vision of Houston's religious criminal underbelly. It's a wildly stylized world of bright neon lights and ugly strip malls, where it can be hard to tell a house of sin from a house of worship, and even the most unsavory characters live by a particular creed. Latif is ordered to protect his boss's nephew, Hadi, an online pornographer who offers Halal certified smut. Hadi, played by Abu Bakr Ali, has run a foul of a local Christian pastor who's on a brutal anti-porn crusade. Played by a terrific John Cho, wearing gold dental grills in a cowboy hat, the pastor is one of the films more fascinating creations, a gum-loving ex-military man who shares Latif's belief in the cleansing power of violence. One especially chaotic scene takes place at a mosque where Latif and his kids have a run-in with the crime boss, the pornographer, and a van load of sex workers.

29:39In other words, Latif scolds his daughter, beautifully played by the actor Hadia, for having stolen some milk from the mosque for the baby. That leads to a tough conversation about their struggles with faith, including the difficulties of making dua or praying. You want to explain to me why you stole from the mosque? You want to explain to me why your homies brought hookers to the mosque? They were there to learn about Islam. You really want me to believe that? I love the turn-up heart. Instead of being judgmental, she makes dua for those sisters. Yeah, yeah, I make dua for it, huh? Like I make dua for Mama to come back. Tell me joke to you, right? That's funny. Yeah, people pray that nothing is funny, Baba, and I know you feel the same. You stop praying too.

30:40I pray. Oh, Baba, we didn't even go to June 1 today. Your mother, your mother, your mother has an interesting origin story. Several years ago, Tariq was set to direct Ali in a new movie about the Marvel comic book anti-hero Blade. But after numerous delays, Tariq left the production, and the film fell apart. Years later, the two have reunited on what feels like a more original version of the movie they planned to make. A thief may not hunt vampires as Blade does, but he's no less deadly with a knife. Nearly a decade ago, Ali became the first Muslim actor to win an Oscar for his gorgeous performance in Moonlight. It's great to see him play such an unconventional Muslim protagonist here, and to balance his quiet depth with a lethal display of action prowess. Tariq can stage a set piece with energy and verve, and there's something fitting about the way he uses violence to call out the blood that has been spilled in the name of religion.

31:44And it all builds to an undeniably gripping climax that reaffirms the power of faith and surrender. Even so, the action remains by far the most generic aspect of your mother, your mother, your mother, and I couldn't help but imagine a different version of the movie that didn't fall back on so many familiar hitman thriller beats. But perhaps those genre moves are what allow the movie's gentler, funnier moments to resonate. I'm thinking of Giancarlo Esposito's lovely performance as a mosque leader who disapproves of Latif's career and tries to steer him right. I'm also thinking of the story's most grounded and compelling subplot. For much of the movie, Latif is driving around Houston, desperate to find breastmilk for the baby who can't keep formula down. Fortunately, a lactating sex worker played by Tiffany Boone is on hand to save the day, which she does with the utmost generosity. In Taric's bracing film, Mercy can come to us all in the most mysterious ways.

32:51Justin Chang is a film critic for the New Yorker. He reviewed your mother, your mother, your mother. Coming up, investigative journalist Cheyenne Roundtree talks about her new book, Bad Boy for Life, The Rise and Fall of Sean Combs. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. This message comes from Instacart. Instacart makes grocery shopping easier, and just because you're not doing the shopping yourself doesn't mean you don't care how it's done. With Instacart shopper notes, you can add details about what you want right in the app, like extra crispy rotisserie chicken, or lettuce you'd pick yourself. Just leave a note so your shopper can get it right without having to ask. Download the Instacart app and shop today. You've got a lot of ways to get news, and a lot of podcasts in your feed that take a long time to get to the point. Here and now anytime gets to the heart of the day's big story, all in about 20 minutes every afternoon. Get smarter and expand your world fast.

33:51Listen to here and now anytime on the NPR app or wherever you listen to podcasts. This message comes from Workday, the Enterprise AI platform with a deep understanding of your organization's context and guardrails. So every AI action is permission aware, giving you the ability to get work done right. It's a new Workday. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. The 30 years Sean Combs was one of America's most visible men. As a producer, he helped shape Mary J. Blige's early sound, signed the notorious B.I.G. and built bad boy records into a powerhouse that carried hip hop into the mainstream. Then he turned himself into a brand as a rapper with a clothing line of vodka partnership, TV appearances, movies, and parties so lavish that President St. Berthay wishes. He even got the world to call him by a new name every few years. Puff, puff daddy, pee-ditty, ditty, and finally love.

34:54My guest today, Cheyenne Roundtree, is an investigative reporter for Rolling Stone, and in her new book, she examines whether those reinventions also helped Combs make a fresh start, a way to make the public forget about the scandals that came before. A note to our listeners, before we go further, this conversation includes descriptions of sexual violence, drug use, and other adult subject matter. Combs is now serving a four-year federal prison sentence. A jury convicted him last year on two counts of transporting people for prostitution. The trial centered in part on what Combs called freak-offs. In his days long, drug-fueled sexual encounters involving his girlfriends and male escorts that he directed and often filmed. Jurors acquitted him of the more serious charges of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy. The federal investigation began after his former girlfriend, Cassie Ventura, filed a 2023

35:55lawsuit describing years of beatings and sexual coercion. Her account of one beating was later corroborated publicly when CNN aired Hotel Surveillance footage showing Combs attacking her. In May 2024, Roundtree and her colleagues at Rolling Stone published a six-month investigation into Combs' history of violence. They contacted more than 300 people and more than 50 agreed to speak. The book builds on that reporting with more than 100 sources, along with police and FBI records, court documents, text messages, and emails. Her book is called Bad Boy for Life, The Rise and Fall of Sean Combs. And Cheyenne Roundtree, welcome to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me. One big truth is that he was extremely powerful in the music industry and entertainment overall. How much of Combs' behavior was kind of like an open secret within the industry?

36:56It seemed to be this background music to whatever he was doing. I think the spectacle of P.J.D. Pup Daddy was bigger than these incidents that were popping up along the timeline with him. He was able to overshadow any of these accusations, any of these lawsuits that came up or police reports of minor infractions and it just kept getting bigger and bigger. It was one of the things that really surprised me throughout my reporting was the amount of things that were well documented either in the press, newspapers or little police reports that just disappeared one away and there wasn't really much mainstream attention put on it. You actually call Combs one of the original influencers. This is long before social media because he didn't just know how to promote a record or throw a party. He seemed to understand how to control a story, how to turn attention into power.

37:59Even the story of how he got the name Puffy continually changed throughout the course of his career, especially early on, is that one of the earlier signs of his skill at being I guess kind of like a myth maker? I think so. I think it was the first instance that he created Persona around himself and his first explanation was really early on and it was explained as he just had a temper and he ballooned up an anger and then at some point he didn't even want to talk about the origin of it. And it's a question mark of it's kind of an innocent nickname really when you think about as a kid. Why would you tell Oprah that you can't talk about it? So it feeds into this mysteriousness that he cultivated at an early age or in his early 20s and then how he was able to shed that as time went on and he just really had a great handle on who he wanted to be seen as and the biggest shift we saw was when he went from Puff Daddy Puffy to Diddy which came after the criminal trial in 2001 when he was accused of carrying a firearm

39:04into a crowded nightclub where people were injured and he actually says at one point you know no more Puff Daddy I'm going by Diddy and that was a turning point for him kind of being this mogul business type figure versus this hip-hop music executive. What's interesting about that is there are just so many stories that are happening underneath their whisper network even some of the executives who worked with coms and complained about him still wanted to get into his parties and those parties became places where music, nightlife, and celebrity all came together. What did coms understand about access creating this type of environment as a form of power? He was the gatekeeper to culture in New York City at that time and he was able to kind of leverage these connections of going to a cool party controlling this

40:07guest list that it's not just music people that wanted to be invited to it was power brokers it was models it was actors and being able to control that environment and curry favor with people just to have access to these spaces he was able to leverage into business deals later on and to be this guy that everyone wanted to be in his good graces so they can have fun and yes people were drinking and things might have gotten a little bit crazy but it was all done at first under this guys of just having a good time and letting your hair down with people in your social circle and later on that became more called into question and you know there was civil lawsuits filed that claim that that's where they were sexually assaulted but in the beginning it was just people coming together to have a good time. I mean by the 2000s he wasn't just selling records he had his clothing line and vodka and restaurants and television and movies and one pattern in your book is

41:16and it's very much in line of someone that you write about he greatly admire and that is are now president Donald Trump because it seems like with every scandal he not only survived it he often came back bigger I mean that's the case like in the early 2000s with him changing his name after that criminal case but was there a point when success itself started to protect him? I would say the success always protected him at his earliest encounter with kind of a scandal was the city college of New York tragedy where there was a stampede at a charity event he hosted. It was because he already was proving to be successful at uptown records that that institution protected him. There was insurance and it obviously there was a lot of civil lawsuits that came later about finding blame or who was responsible for this tragedy because people died but there was

42:18that backing and support that he had from a record label because he was proving his work at that time and by the time the case was kind of wrapping up he was working on Mary J. Blige who became obviously a superstar but I would argue that his success has always protected him and it's always carried him through to the next tie. That event at city college he helped promote that it was oversold it was a charity event as you mentioned a basketball event to raise money for HIV AIDS nine people as you said died. Did he face any consequences at all? There was an investigation and he was assigned partial responsibility for not having enough security there but in the end he did pay out a significant amount of money to the victims' families but in terms of his reputation and in terms of his career nothing really happened it was kind of business as usual and then it was a few years

43:26after that that he founded Bad Boy. In the book you go back to Sean Combs before the fame. His father was killed when he was a toddler his mother moved him out of Harlem to Mount Vernon. She was determined to give him opportunities but you actually spoke to people who also said another mission of hers was make him be tough and there's one childhood story that seems to capture that toughness from his family. His grandmother sent him to the store for cigarettes and he tells this story as a tale of just how his family kind of built fortitude within him. What happened? So the story was that he was sent by his grandmother to go by cigarettes from the corner store the bodega and along the way he encounters this bully who basically snatches the cigarette money from him and he goes back home and his mom Janice tells him you are not coming back into this house

44:31until you get that money back kind of installing this idea of you're not to be a pushover and he went back got beat up by the bully but he was able to get the cash back but he told the story of kind of how he learned to toughen up at a young age but he kind of says my mom would have let me slept out on the street all night like I had to come back that facing the bully was better than facing Janice. There's also this story he actually talked about it on fresh air with Terry Gross when he did an interview with her some years ago that when he learned that his father had been involved in the drug trade he said I'm definitely like him but I'm just doing it in a legal way what did his father's story come to represent to him? He idolized him but he also viewed him as this cautionary tale of why he didn't want to get involved in the street life he saw himself as

45:37being a hustler, being charismatic, being a go-getter but doing things a different way so that meant through music, through music entrepreneurship, through businesses but he idolized his dad. There was a point that he started wearing a medallion with his face on it and there was this kind of remorse he had for not being able to have a father's own relationship that he really seemed to crave throughout his life. What's your relationship to the music to the persona of Colmes? I grew up in the 90s 2000 so to me he's always been diddy he made shake your tailfather BTUK bum bum bum bum and obviously he found it biggie but he's kind of always been part of the culture of my relationship with music listening back to the music as I was working. The songs are

46:39incredible and they still stand the test of time and it has been hard to listen to some of that music and his direct influence especially some of the songs like last night where he's in the outro kind of referring to a bust up between him and a girlfriend about not answering his phone call so you're listening to the music with fresh ears especially with his most recent album homecoming where he talks about Cassie saying Cisi come home the whole album is meant to to BS soundtrack to a freak off so I don't know where I kind of land on some of the older music and how I view him in relationship to it. For 30 years like we've all consumed the music and the movies and the shows and we've been fans and but in many regards so much of this was in plain sight and it's the same way with our Kelly you know it's the same it's the same thing happening and it's disturbing it's

47:45hard to wrap your head around and as someone who came of age with diddy's music it's almost overwhelming to think that something like this could continue to be pervasive and we all just kind of accept it. Yeah I think that's the hardest like reckoning kind of beyond this is just like was I complicit did I even recognize the signs that are in front of me or you know there's interviews that he was kind of telling on himself about certain things and when you see all these things stacked up and this this temper and like we didn't have the full picture once you have the full picture you're horrified and a lot of people also that had seen maybe these early burst of domestic violence not with Cassie but with another woman they thought it was a one-time thing and I think again when instances like our Kelly and John Combs that there are master manipulators

48:47and not to say that that's a pass for people not saying something but again they are cultivating this dynamic where you do you think that this is a one-time thing or that you actually didn't get the whole grasp of it I don't know what's understanding I'm just going to take their word for it and I think it's a lesson for everyone that you know when they think something's wrong to find an avenue to say something about it or to confide in someone else about it Combs is currently projected to be released sometime in early 2028 what did you learn about maybe even the next reinvention already beginning there was a Netflix documentary that came out at the end of last year 50 cent produced it it recently won an Emmy for editing I believe and there is this remarkable footage of real-time right before he's arrested in September of 2024

49:53and he is planning a dock of his own and his own comeback story and it just reinforced this idea that he has always been it firm control of his image and we should expect no less whenever he is released and there was reports recently about he was trying to talk to a digital Combs person to keep a finger on the pulse of his public perception on social media so he's very attuned to what people are thinking and saying about him and I have no doubt that eventually whenever he is released that he will come forward and he will say everything he has to say over these past few years shy and round tree thank you so much thank you for having me shy and round tree is an investigative reporter at Rolling Stone and the author of Bad Boy for Life the rise and fall of Sean Combs

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