BET
I laughed. Hard. When I saw Puffy fall through that trap door as Jadakiss earnestly rapped his verse to the legendary Bad Boy single “All About The Benjamins,” I nearly fell from my couch with amusement. I replayed the moment repeatedly using my DVR in the few brief seconds before Black Twitter’s elite team of GIF and Vine experts rendered it unnecessary. I pressed play and laughed some more until I saw Puffy get up, with a huge smile, and keep performing as if nothing happened at all.
I’m 100 percent sure that if I’d have fallen into a hole on stage while a crowd that surely included several comedians from Shaq’s All-Star Weekend making mental notes for their upcoming shows at Ha Ha’s Laugh Shack in Westbubblef*ck, USA, I would have pushed past Jadakiss and made a beeline for backstage.
That’s the difference between Puff and the rest of us. The whole “we won’t stop” mantra is more than words to him. It’s an ethos. Getting up after a hard fall comes as naturally to him as Mase’s easy smile, or Faith Evans’ smoky vocals.
So was there any doubt that when he lost control of that motorcycle in 1997 that he would get up? Puffy’s solo debut, No Way Out, was released on July 1, 1997. After he dusted himself off and left that bike somewhere in the middle of the desert, he rode a Sting sample into multi-platinum fame. Of course he got up, when no one believed he could stand again, and delivered a classic album as the specter of a lost friend haunted him with thoughts of “What if?” and what was. It’s Puffy. He told you that he won’t stop, and he didn’t.
The album produced a never-ending barrage of hit after hit after hit. There was dance floor ready nostalgia (“Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down” and “Been Around The World”), an unfair exercise of lyrical prowess by his fallen mentee (“Victory”), the hybrid tribute and pop juggernaut (“I’ll Be Missing You”), and the beat that fueled New York radio and mixtape freestyles for what seemed like a decade (“It’s All About The Benjamins”). Five singles that will make people of all ages get up from their seats this Fourth of July weekend, and for Fourth of July weekends decades into the future. That doesn’t even include album cuts like the Jay-Z featured “Young G’s” or Twista’s career-making performance on “Is This The End?”
Puffy doesn’t just get up from a fall. He rockets to the stratosphere. He got up back in 1991 when nine others could not, and were trampled under a throng of bodies, unchecked greed, and unfettered ambition. He got up in 1993 when that ambition rankled a mentor enough to take him down several pegs and fire him from the last job he would ever work for someone else.
Think about it. This album was released nearly twenty years ago, and it was already at least the third time when people counted Puffy out forever. Every time we do, he responds by making history. So yes, I laughed. Hard.
But I refuse to count Puff out. Even when thoughts of kettlebells, Da Band, and that terrible “Big Homie” song dance through my head, I know that betting against Puffy is an exercise in futility. You can’t keep a Bad Boy down.