Forever

FOR SUCH a small guy, Puff Daddy pisses an awful lot of people off.

The US entertainment-biz establishment resent his sudden pre-eminence at the top of the music industry tree. Old-skool hip hop fans loathe his money-saturated lifestyle and his gaudy videos. Rock fans despise his dominance of the American charts in one guise or another.

On the evidence of Forever, little has changed. Essentially, what we’ve got here are 73 more minutes of mostly lame, commercially-driven hip hop, badly rapped and averagely sung, with the usual nods to AOR and old-school soul. Add to that some admittedly inspired flashes and shimmers of mixing-desk genius, and the gunshot sound-effects and gangster-movie monologues (in this case, Al Pacino’s ‘I’m the bad guy?’ speech from Scarface) that you just knew were going to be there, and you’ve got Puffy’s new album.

Much of the record exposes one of Puffy’s worst traits: his habit of leaving his samples untouched instead of doing something interesting with them. On ‘Angels With Dirty Faces’, for example, a huge chunk of Earth Wind & Fire’s ‘Fantasy’ is reeled in, uncut and wholesale, for Puffy to recite his typically mumbling rap over. At the other end of the stylistic spectrum, meanwhile, ‘Pain’ is an unconvincing attempt at Wu-Tang style horrorcore.

In Puffy’s defence, it must be pointed out that there are far fewer cheesy MOR cover versions on Forever than on his first album. The only real instance of that sort of material here is ‘Best Friend’, a cloying religious hymn which lifts the riff from Christopher Cross’ soft rock classic, ‘Sailing’.

Moreover, Forever has too many neat little production flourishes and frills to be a truly appalling album. Some of the early tracks, like the crystalline hip hop of ‘What You Want’ and the languid, gleaming ‘Do You Like It . . .’, are proof of what the guy (or his hired producers) can come up with when he’s on top of his game. The minimalist cover of Public Enemy’s ‘PE 2000’, though spoiled by Puffy’s passionless delivery of the original’s furious vocal, is another enjoyable highlight.

But five good tracks out of 19 aren’t enough to make this even a reasonable album. Reviewing No Way Out a couple of years ago, I mused that Puffy was on the point of turning into a Nineties version of either MC Hammer or Quincy Jones. For the vast majority of Forever, he merely confirms that he now embodies the worst attributes of both.