9/2/2023 0 Comments Puff piece rhythm doctor![]() Puffy became a pariah in the New York tabloids, but Andre Harrell stood by him and even hired lawyers for him. Outside of a celebrity basketball game at City College of New York in 1991, a crowd crush killed nine people. He was an ideas guy, and he’d tell his team how he wanted records to sound - the Damien Hirst model of putting your brand name on your underlings’ work.) While working at Uptown, Puffy also continued promoting parties, and one of those parties ended in tragedy. (As a remixer and then a producer, Puffy rarely did the nuts-and-bolts stuff. He’d remix their tracks, putting their voices over ultra-recognizable rap beats. These were R&B singers, but Puff had them dressing, walking, and acting like rappers. Puffy quickly became director of A&R at Uptown, and he guided the hugely successful early careers of stars like Mary J. I don’t have a publication date yet, but that book just went into production a couple of weeks ago, and one of those 20 songs is “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down.” The single didn’t change pop because it’s a great song - it’s really not - but because it came along at the right time and announced that the playbook was different. I’ve mentioned this in past columns, but my first book is coming out later this year, and it tells the story of 20 #1 hits that shifted the course of pop music. Twenty-four years later, rap still occupies the center of popular music, and it’s hard to imagine a future where that won’t be the case. When “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down” reached #1, it kicked off one of the most dominant pop-chart runs that we’ve ever seen, and it marked the beginning of the time when rap occupied the center of popular music. Puff and Mase were really just talking about themselves, but you could extend their flossy shit-talk to their record label, to East Coast rap, or even just to rap itself. “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down” is a flex of a song, an ostentatious display. A good handful of rap songs reached #1 before “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down,” but Puff’s first chart-topper represents a whole different era. Puff Daddy had ascended to the very top of the music business, and he’d done it by proclaiming his own splendor and superiority at every available opportunity. The point, more or less, was this: “Puff make his own laws, n***a - fuck your rules/ Goodfellas, you know you can’t touch us dudes.” That abandoned Rolls, which my friend Shea Serrano highlighted in his extremely fun history tome The Rap Year Book, stands as a symbol of beautiful, pointless fuck-you excess. Puff and Mase used that car to prove their point, and then they proved that point even further by leaving that Rolls Royce behind, ignored and forgotten. The Rolls just sits there, shimmering in the heat, no longer necessary. Midway through the video, the two of them stop the car, get out, and start walking. ![]() Through the first half, we see Puff and his young protege Mase driving a Rolls deep into a desert. The sensational, nonsensical video for “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down,” the first-ever single from Bad Boy Records founder Sean “Puffy Daddy” Combs, is a visual feast of luxurious living and defiant splendor. Pop epochs almost never have definitive beginnings or endings, but if you’re looking for the kickoff date of rap’s proverbial Shiny Suit Era, it might’ve happened the day that Puff Daddy and Mase abandoned their Rolls Royce. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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