October 9, 2001

P Diddy & The Bad Boy Family : The Saga Continues

Puffy and 'fam' in mammoth return

4 / 10 Believe us, saga is the operative term. While the sticker on Jay-Z[/url]'s
concise new album rightly proclaims 'Nuthin' but smashes!',
P so-called Diddy[/url]
slips us something of unmerciless length - 25 tracks and 77 sodding
minutes. Rap's always been a macho game, but someone should tell him
that size really isn't everything (especially now
J-Lo's off the scene, haw haw). For someone who made
his name by isolating the best bits of other people's records
and sampling them for his own, P, er, Diddy[/url]
has a strangely cavalier attitude to editing his albums.

But then P Diddy[/url] is the daddy, who wouldn't be in charge if he didn't live
LARGE. Abetted by a new family comprising established names like
Black Rob and Faith Evans as well as
new stars Kokane, Big Azz Ko and the
delightfully monikered Loon, P Di... - oh, fuck it, Puff
Daddy[/url]
- serves a varied but ultimately indigestible banquet. After the
inevitable melodramatic prologue, 'The Saga
Continues...' gets well underway with the great, air-punching
single 'Bad Boy For Life', while the poppy
'That's Crazy' evinces an impressively flippant attiude
to the Diddy[/url]
man's recent, well-documented problems.
But oh, what a surprise, here come The Neptunes, for what seems like the
millionth time this year, sounding like a one-trick pony heading rapidly towards the glue factory.

Between tracks 12 and 20 (yes, really), 'The Saga
Continues...' hits its stride - certainly it's a better effort
than Combs' last effort, the diabolical 'Forever'.
'Where's Sean?' is a welcome sliver of succulent funk,
'Child Of The Ghetto' prowls along on an almost avant-garde string bed and 'Lonely' offers cold, surgical
beats. But by the time the syrupy R&B ballad 'Can't
Believe' (track 23) rolls around, you're full up, and then
some, the line "We can't be stopped" taking on ever more unwelcome
connotations.

But end it does - thanks more, you suspect, to the limitations
of a CD than from any creative decision. Rarely have the words "We
out" sounded so sweet. Along the way, we've learned, among other
things, that the deliciously camp 'What's up, playboy?'
is the salutation of choice among Puffy[/url]'s Hamptons set, but precious little about the real dramas that have
occupied his life. It's just bluster and bombast, piss and wind - and it
takes too damn long to blow over.

Alex Needham