"Who wants this chain? Who wants this? I
don’t give a fuck.”
Puff Daddy is leaning forward over the front of the
stage at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, a choir of
outstretched hands reaching for the sky and
grabbing at the air close to his feet. Less than 10
minutes into his opening performance at the first
night of the Bad Boy Family Reunion, Puff has
already been relieved of the massive gold chain
that was hanging from his neck. It shook itself free
in the middle of a vigorous dance routine set to his
2015 song “Finna Get Loose,” one that included
vintage Puff Daddy dance moves backed by a
group of teenagers in all black. As the moment
came to a close, Puff noticed the chain near its
falling point, still somehow hanging to his shirt, a
child not willing to leave the arms of its father. He
snatched it off, held it in his outstretched hand,
and threw it into the crowd. A sacrifice, falling
almost in slow motion to the pit below.
The atmosphere outside of the arena a couple of
hours earlier felt like a late-’90s block party. At
least, a party where the main objective is standing
in one line in order to stand in another line. A man
walking around with three balloons shaped like the
letters “B,” “I,” and “G” shoved them into the willing
arms of anyone who would have them, took
pictures, gathered the balloons back from the
strangers, and walked on to another group. Cars
rolling down Flatbush blared a wide range of
classic Bad Boy hits, a bounty of slick samples and
slicker rhymes, shepherding us into the embrace
of the Barclays Center, tonight a safe haven to
celebrate a time long passed.
The thing about nostalgia is that, for many of us, it
acts as a mostly finished puzzle. All of the
remaining pieces needed can be selected from the
best parts of our memory, and they always fit right
where we think they should. I can think of the
spring of 1997 and not first remember the
Saturday morning in March where I woke before
everyone in my house and watched the breaking
news flash across the television: another dead
rapper, another car with a pattern of bullets
dressing its side. I can think of the summer of that
same year and not think of how I first learned to
understand death as something beyond the news,
something that moves out of the television and
hovers above a home, or a whole neighborhood of
slowly emptying rooms. Instead, I can think first of
Bad Boy’s impossible run of sample-drenched
radio rap, with Puff Daddy himself leading the
charge — how it pushed its back against the
levees and did not let the sadness through for a
few months when so many of us needed it at a
block party, or a cookout, or in the club, or in the
otherwise silence of a hot room where no one else
could see you dancing to 112 or Total or Ma$e or
the voice of Biggie Smalls, carried down from the
clouds. This is what I imagine carried so many of
us to Barclays to watch older, changed versions of
artists we once loved, bouncing around a stage
nearly 20 years after we were once so drawn to
them. The sound of the music itself gave us small
pieces of a puzzle to throw where we please. It let
us remember a time when we were sad and
needed something and found the Bad Boy sound.
This is perhaps a generous reading of someone
who is as rich and powerful as Puff Daddy is, but I
have always appreciated what appears to be his
ability to sacrifice himself for the sake of the
music. No Way Out , released in July of 1997, was a
massive undertaking of an album for someone
who, by almost every critical evaluation, cannot
rap. No Way Out didn’t try to fill the space left by
the Notorious B.I.G., and, despite its melancholy
tone, it didn’t sit in the explicit sadness of an
endless funeral. It celebrated in the best way
possible: with hits. Puff danced and rapped his
way through 17 tracks, some of them feeling like
an endless party. Rap music in the summer will
always mean something to many of us. The
summer is for rolled-down windows, pushed-back
sunroofs, cars pulled onto basketball courts with
open doors, trunks with massive speakers
weighing down a car’s rear end and rattling a
whole block’s windows. Even the most street of
street dudes in my neighborhood reveled in Puff
Daddy; even the ones who gritted their teeth at
“shiny suit rap” tapped their feet when “Mo Money
Mo Problems” spilled from a passing car. We all
knew what Puff Daddy has always known. It’s the
same thing that is known when black people
dance on caskets in New Orleans, or when dance
parties sprout up in the streets hours after a
funeral: There is so little black pain without black
celebration to push back against — to hold us up,
or to help us stand tall in the face of a world that
thinks we will shrink at whatever it has chosen to
throw at us. Puff Daddy, more than music, was a
producer of moments, ones that we could enter
and reenter, even today.
There are plenty of moments during Bad Boy’s
family reunion at Barclays. There is Faith Evans,
singing as perfect as always while Puff Daddy
collapses at her feet, feigning shock. There is
Usher, flying up from under the stage and
standing perfectly still with a hat over his eyes
inside a cloud of smoke for several seconds while
the audience tries to piece together who he might
be, before extending his right arm and letting his
signature “U” chain hang from his hand while the
audience explodes in rapturous applause. There is
Jay Z, doing “Public Service Announcement” in the
house he helped build. There is Nas, rapping his
verse in “Hate Me Now” wearing a mink coat a
half-mile long, being trailed by two people holding
it up. There is Mary J. Blige, dancing like your
beloved auntie at a cookout, dancing like can’t
nobody tell her nothing because nobody can,
dancing like I did back in 1997 in one of those
rooms where no one could see me. There is Ma$e
rapping through “Been Around the World” with
Puff, the once unstoppable duo back on stage
again. There are Lil’ Kim and Puff, awkwardly but
endearingly getting through 1996’s “No Time.”
There are Busta Rhymes and Spliff Star. There is
Rick Ross with an arm around French Montana.
There are the LOX, Total, 112, Carl Thomas, Mario
Winans, everyone just as perfect as we left them
in our fondest memories.
As the clock speeds past midnight and we sit, or
stand, firmly in Saturday’s infant hours, the first
hours of what would have been the Notorious
B.I.G.’s 44th birthday, Puff Daddy begins pacing
the stage like a preacher. He talks about his brief
time as an employee at Uptown Records in the
early 1990s: “I had no idea what I was doing. I was
walking around the offices with my shirt off,
cussing out white people.” He talks about the
people who arrived to believe in him, time and
time again. And just as he gets as worked up as
one can get at 12:30 a.m. after performing for
nearly three hours, the music begins again. The
iconic Diana Ross sample kicks up followed by the
voice of B.I.G. delivering his “Mo Money Mo
Problems” verse, the second time we’ve heard it
tonight. It is one of many B.I.G. verses that tons of
people know all of the words to, but no others are
as exciting, as gleefully interactive as this one. I
have rapped this verse in its entirety for years in
the backseats of cars, in diners, in schools, and on
sidewalks. It is the kind of verse that exits the body
as it is rapped, then crawls its way back in upon
the finish, waiting until the next needed moment. It
is the B.I.G. verse that will never die, even after the
generation that loved it most is cast away. No one
around me appeared to have on a Rolex watch and
yet, as always, when we hear B.I.G. say the iconic
line, “Where the true players at? / Throw your
Rollies in the sky / Wave ’em side to side and keep
your hands high,” there we were. All of us,
throwing our wrists from one side to another, even
if they were dressed in nothing but our naked skin.
Nothing speaks to the night more than this: a
touchable entry point for all of us, as simple as
hands raised in unison, waving to some words
that we’ll never forget.
Grief is a country that we are all eager for a map
out of. It gnaws at you with various levels of
ferocity, yet it gnaws nonetheless. Once you have
placed your fingers around the casket of someone
you loved and carried it, once you have looked
plainly into the depths of loss, it does not undo
itself from your body, regardless of how hard you
may try to dance it away. Like Puff Daddy’s gold,
grief clings to its owner. But with enough people
tethered to each other, dancing at once, the
swelling of happiness can overwhelm all else. And
so at the end, when it was all over, Bad Boy’s
entire roster of performers stood on the stage,
hugging each other while Puff danced softly and a
gospel choir sang “I’ll Be Missing You.” As the final
chorus rose, balloons and confetti rained down
from the sky, and we playfully batted them at
strangers and laughed with each other. This was
the good kind of laughter, the type that comes
when you are young enough to know so little of
pain that everything feels like a type of magic. I
escaped during a standing ovation to beat the
crowd, walked out into the Brooklyn air, and felt
lighter. I felt as if I had torn an impossible weight
from my neck and cast it into a crowd of eager
ghost.
