Sean “Diddy” Combs has always had his fair share of critics.
Death Row Records founder Suge Knight famously called out the Bad Boy impresario for being “all in the videos” at the 1995 SOURCE Awards, and there were those who dismissed the-artist-formerly-known-as-Puffy’s forays into a solo rap career after the death of the Notorious B.I.G. But, according to Talib Kweli, there was one bit of musical criticism that apparently stung Combs the most back in the day.
Kweli told MTV that Diddy took offense to Kweli and Mos Def‘s interpolation of Slick Rick‘s classic “Children’s Story.”
After the Black Star duo of Kweli and Mos performed the song at a show back in 1997, Combs became irate. In the song, Mos Def rhymes that “He jacked another and another, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder/Sang some R&B over the track for ‘Deep Cover.’ ” Diddy believed the lyrics were a direct shot at him.
“It was a Lyricist Lounge event that night, and I think [the Notorious] B.I.G. had just passed away a couple of weeks before,” he recalled. “We were working on the Black Star album and Yasiin [Mos Def] jumped up and did a verse for ‘Children’s Story’ and Diddy was in the house.
“Diddy came through and he came and wanted to talk to me and Mos about [how] he felt a way about the record, about what Mos was saying onstage,” Kweli explains. “Mos told him, ‘It wasn’t directed at you personally. It’s directed at everything that’s going on in the business.’ That was one of the illest conversations that I ever seen.”
–stereo williams
