“Diddy Opens Up About Biggie’s Death and the Secret Project He’s Working on With Jay-Z”, 2018-03-19 ():
…He is called Love now, or Brother Love. Not Diddy or Puffy or Sean or any of those. He will still answer to them, though. He is not a snob about names. But he would prefer now that people call him Love, because that is what matters. “Even people like me?” I asked, meaning God knows what. “Yeah”, he said. “I like re-inventing. That’s probably why I have so many name changes. It’s why I follow David Bowie and Madonna.”
Dictating what others call you is an expression of power, and the control Love exerts over his world helps explain the longevity of his career. Think of how many celebrities start clothing lines. Now think of how many of those are operating 5 years after they appear, forget about the 20 that Sean John has been around. Love also gets paid every time they play a Bad Boy Entertainment song on the radio or in a commercial. He is making money by the minute. He is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Get this: He was the highest-paid American musician of 2017, and he did not release any original music last year.
…the show was how a lot of people, including me, first got an up-close feel (albeit simulated, exaggerated, packaged) of Love’s personality, his style of relating, which I would describe as friendly and sly and quiet—in a way that makes you wonder if he is cocky or shy; the quietness seems to contain both qualities—then sometimes suddenly firm and cold. Mainly, though, he seemed nice. When you are about to spend the day with a famous person, it’s one of the first things you wonder: Will he be nice?
…Love’s seriousness of demeanor was probably the thing about him that took me the most aback. He was almost somber. Not slow to smile—he didn’t look depressed (and I know he still parties; his doctor had recently told him he “goes too hard”)—but there was a singularity of focus. He’s almost 50 now. It’s the age of: Give it all or retire. He seems totally uninterested in and possibly even unaware of the option of retirement…I mentioned I’d spent a couple of hours the night before looking at his Instagram, and a lot of the “inspirational quotes” that Love had chosen to feature in his feed seemed like the kind of quotations a man would choose if he had been doing “some work on himself.” An example is this, from Maya Angelou: “Each one of us has lived through some devastation, some loneliness, some weather superstorm or spiritual superstorm, when we look at each other we must say, I understand.”
…At times Love fell prey to the feeling he didn’t try hard enough to persuade Biggie to leave.
I asked if he talked to a therapist about this stuff. “Nah”, Love said, “I haven’t dealt with any of that yet. I try to get into it, but…that’s something that just hurts so bad. That’s a time that’s still suppressed.”
He said that two and a half years ago, he had become depressed. He’d developed an addiction to his phone. He felt “far away from God.” He went to Sedona, Arizona.
“Where the vortexes are?” I asked. “Exactly”, he said, smiling. In Sedona he reconnected with his magic. He was hearing new songs in his head. “I’m not 100% knowing how to come up with the sounds yet”, he said, but he felt almost ready to compete on the radio again.
…“When I was growing up”, he said, “there were 4 magazines I wanted to be on the cover of: Essence, Ebony, and Jet. And GQ. When I’m there today and doing a fitting for GQ, I’m like, ‘Wow…dreams really do come true.’” This was a moment for Love. It slapped me into realizing I’d been viewing the day thus far with a jaded eye, or not jaded but feeling like we were all in on a joke or performance together, but it had been more real than that.