Puff Daddy to Diddy to Love – Sean Combs Discusses The significance Of His Name Changes

Sean Diddy Combs is on the cover of Vanity Fair giving details about everything from, what drives him, what each name change means and how he is defining his next era.

We have highlighted a few significant parts of the conversation below, via Vanity Fair.

Impeccably groomed, he still walks like a Harlem dude. It is an attitude as much as it is a rhythm, although he does move like a gymnast or dancer.

Combs is wearing the classic hip-hop uniform that he helped enshrine in our popular imagination: white tee, track pants, and diamonds.

A nameplate necklace with “Love” in bejeweled rose and white tones glimmers like neon pop art. He welcomes me and my assistant with a bear hug.

When I mention it is one of my first hugs since COVID-19 made human contact feel dangerous, he comes back in for another. Sean Combs likes to spread the love.

About where he is mentally and his name changes

“I am the happiest I’ve ever been in life, I laugh the most, I smile the most, I breathe the most,” he tells me. In a word, Combs has love on his mind.

L”ove” is Combs’s latest nom de plume. Born Sean Combs in Harlem in 1969, the 51-year-old businessman has had several names through the years. His staff talks about these as eras.

I ask Combs if that is how he thinks of them. “Yeah, I do,” he says without hesitation. The name changes are about the almost-billion-dollar brand he built.

Each one signals an ideology and a strategy. Combs calls them off easily enough. “You have the Puff Daddy era, that’s like this young, brash, bold hip-hop, unapologetic swagger on a million and just fearlessness and really doing it for the art and rooted, the only thing I know is hip-hop.

I don’t know about changing the world or anything like that as possible.” The Puff Daddy era is not just Combs’s cultural foundation, it is also a defining moment for pop culture.

As the late 1990s were giving way to the 21st century, Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs had taken hip-hop iconography to scale. Much has been made about the shiny suits and over-the-top videos that made Bad Boy Records, Combs’s eponymous record label, a massive hit factory.

The Diddy era was an homage to his brother Biggie, who clowned him about his rhythmic “diddy bop” swagger. “Then after Biggie, I just, and after all of that, I wanted to get into other businesses.

And so Biggie had called me Diddy because of my bop, the way I walk, my swagger, and they got something called the diddy bop, that just, it just happens to, it’s not me, it was something before me. That’s the diddy bop. It’s the way a brother would walk around, walk down the street.”

About his Legacy and what inspired the LOVE era

As private traumas brought Combs closer to God, the public traumas that define the 2010s—police brutality, civil disobedience, and political retrenchment—forced him to take a hard look at his legacy.

I am amazed when he brings up #MeToo before mentioning Black Lives Matter. “If you living on this earth and you trying to keep on dealing with this shit, that ain’t the way we going to live.

And people out there that are tired of it. And it’s not just a Black and white thing. You know what I’m saying? It’s just tired of the way that it doesn’t have to be.

Like when they said it was over—when they said in the #MeToo, when it was over, it was over,” he says emphatically.

Combs sees #MeToo as a qualified sign of progress and evidence that celebrities can change the world. “The #MeToo movement, the truth, is that it inspired me. It showed me that you can get maximum change,” he says. What Combs wants now is for that maximum change to come for his tribe. Enter the Love era.

“My people taking time to feel like it’s all right to love. Take time to huddle up your tribe, take time to communicate and know your power. Take time to heal. You know what I’m saying, [taking care of] yourself without feeling like, oh, you’re going to be labeled a racist now because you talk about taking care of yourself.”

About Negative Critism He Faces

For his part, Combs tells me that he is not worried about bringing along those who disagree with him. “I can’t get caught up in that.

I know where my heart is at, and you can’t just do it alone with just Black people. You got to have all types of allies.

And that’s one thing I’m good at, I’m good at being a unifier, but I’m not going to be in a room with other tribes that protect themselves and make sure that they straight and not make sure that we straight.

But also, I’m not a politician, I’m not trying to be the king or the dictator of somebody. I’m a boy from Harlem that came here to make a change. We all have our story.”

Read the entire Vanity Fair editorial here.