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Diddy’s Open Secrets
The rap mogul shook off decades of rumored bad behavior with wholesome PR revamps.
By the end of the ’90s, with the launch of his clothing line Sean John, Diddy entered the same precarious entrepreneurial ascent as Jay-Z: They started small, founding businesses that succeeded at marketing a rapper’s cool to the masses, just as Run-DMC had parlayed a love of Adidas into music’s first sneaker deal. When Vanilla Ice claimed that Death Row Records founder Suge Knight shook him down on a balcony in the early ’90s, and when Jay-Z was accused of stabbing rap exec Lance “Un” Rivera in 1999, the hip-hop community viewed the incidents as evidence that those men would stop at nothing to get their way in a business relationship. In the fallen, gutted hip-hop press of this decade, beset by merchants of misinformation, the closest it seems we might get to a reassessment of Diddy in the short term is this deluge of jokes about latent homosexuality circulating among everyone from zoomer streamer king Kai Cenat to veteran frenemies 50 Cent and Ma$e.
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