As folk singer-songwriter Shawn Colvin shuffled out of the wings to collect her Grammy for Song of the Year in 1998, chaos was already brewing. Wu-Tang Clan’s Ol’ Dirty Bastard made a beeline for the stage, beating Colvin to the mark. He appeared suddenly in front of millions in a brand new maroon suit, delaying her acceptance speech to protest Puff Daddy’s earlier Best Rap Album win for his debut, No Way Out, which defeated the Clan’s Wu-Tang Forever and The Notorious B.I.G.’s posthumous Life After Death. Bad Boy had dominated the rap Grammys that evening with wins in two of the three categories, landing nominations in each one, and scoring seven nominations total. Puffy, Faith Evans, and 112 were all winners. Biggie and Mase were both nominees. ODB had enough. “I don’t know how y’all see it, but Wu-Tang is for the children,” he said. “Puffy is good, but Wu-Tang is the best.”
The scene is among the most memorable images in Grammy history, despite the fact that the rap Grammys themselves were not televised that year. As if getting the last laugh, two new Bad Boy collaborations were in the Hot 100 Top 20 when the charts went live three days later: Puffy’s “Been Around the World” with Mase and Biggie and Mase’s collaboration with fellow Bad Boy signee Total, “What You Want.” The week underscored a key point about the label then: despite its opponents and skeptics, Bad Boy Records was a machine, and all it did was win.
Bad Boy's near-sweep at the Grammys capped a year of successes for the hit factory and for Puffy, who dominated the charts, the clubs, and the award ceremonies. But those fleeting highs were sullied by a far greater loss: the murder of Christopher Wallace. The specter of death hangs eerily over No Way Out, through near prescient verses delivered by Biggie from beyond the grave (“Niggas wanna hit me, if they get me, dress my body in linen by Armani”) and reflective odes bared by those living in the aftermath of his slaying. Puff explores paranoia, grief, and self-awareness in the wake of losing a dear friend, an icon at the peak of his powers. It's an album as much about celebrating and surviving as it is mourning, but more than anything, it’s a label compilation that bound its participants together, one marked by a refusal to stop winning—even when under the gun.
When Biggie was shot and killed in a drive-by weeks before the release of his sophomore album, it instantly made the Bad Boy modus operandi obsolete. They were a posse built around a transcendent star. Everything revolved around Biggie. He appeared in several Bad Boy videos. He appeared on singles and notable tracks for Craig Mack, Total, and 112. He was their face. He was the brand. In the long term, his death would create a power vacuum in rap Mecca—starting a turf war between would-be kings like Nas and Jay Z—but the immediate aftershock was felt more subtly within his camp, which was searching for a way to sustain without one of the most heavily felt presences in all of popular music. “After Big died, we were searching to see who was gonna carry the torch,” Mase remembered in GQ’s oral history of the Bad Boy run. “Everybody would’ve had the right to get out of contracts because of the violence. Instead, we rolled together. If I had a verse or beat that was better for you, I’d just give it up.” Mase’s verses for No Way Out were written in his Harlem bedroom long before he was signed. “I gave them to Puff, because he was the one with the hot hand.” Starting with Biggie’s Mase-featuring smash “Mo Money Mo Problems,” Puff’s hot hand would continue to deal hits at an unprecedented rate.
By ’97, Sean “Puffy” Combs had already established himself as one of the finest producers and talent scouts in the country. After cornering the rap market with Big and Craig Mack (with Mase and the LOX waiting in the wings), he diversified into R&B, signing new acts like 112, Total, Mario Winans, and Carl Thomas. He executive-produced Mary J. Blige’s My Life and co-produced Usher’s self-titled debut, and he scored credits on TLC’s CrazySexyCool. Along with his in-house production team, the Hitmen, he cut records for everyone from Jodeci to Mariah Carey to Aretha Franklin. Not long before his death, Biggie convinced Combs to try his hand at rap, and with his team surrounding him production began on Puffy’s debut. Taking the name Puff Daddy, he would adopt an uber glamorous image, helping to coin the term “ghetto fabulous.” Combs wasn’t a naturally gifted rapper by trade, but he had remarkable taste and a clear vision. His Bad Boy bio, shared in a ‘98 Vibe story, exposed his solo rap career as merely a means to further his roles as a premier impresario and tastemaker in true Puffy fashion: “I’m not an MC,” it read. “I’m a vibe giver.”
In January ’96, Puff Daddy set the tone for No Way Out with the Mase-featuring single “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down,” a body-roll-friendly jam that heavily sampled “The Message.” The video was a crash course in “new money” extravagance—silk pajamas, pristine white jumpsuits, action movie pyrotechnics, Eddie Griffin, driving through the desert in a drop top Rolls Royce, rapping about rocking Versace and Hawaiian getaways. The album was originally headed in a fun, glitzy direction, in the vein of “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down” and the forthcoming single “Been Around the World.” But Biggie’s sudden death caused Puffy to redo half the album, creating a party record spotted with bouts of depression and sorrow; coupling words from the deceased with remembrances of his life and the impact of his passing. “[The album’s] more serious now than when I first got into it,” Puffy told SPIN that September. “There are still days where I just wake up and feel like I don’t want to do this anymore. But it’s become a situation in which I have no choice. This is what I do. I have no way out.”
No Way Out is a living document of the most tumultuous period in Bad Boy’s run. It embodies the complex mix of emotions felt while persevering through great trauma amid triumph. It's a record that splits itself in two trying to capture a gaudy lifestyle and the devastation of loss all at once, equal parts funeral pyre, signal fire, and beach luau. One minute they’re jet-setting around the globe with Big in tow, the next Puff is alone peeking over his shoulder for armed assailants, contemplating his final hour. Samples of Marvin Gaye’s “If I Should Die Tonight” and New Edition’s “Is This the End?” become vehicles for distress and alarm, as he prepares his last will and testament. But a song like “I Got the Power” reestablishes control: “I be that nigga that yo niggas can’t fuck wit,” he raps. “That nigga that'll die for his main man/That nigga with the gettin' money gameplan.” For its somewhat whiplashing nature, everything the album does is packaged neatly, spotlighting Puff as its star while exalting a slain legend and comrade and reassuring Bad Boy culture stockholders that the remaining roster was ready to carry the mantle. This is the all-conquering rap debut of a production and marketing guru.
With production from the Hitmen aces—Puffy, Stevie J, D-Dot, and Amen-Ra, in particular—and a host of talented role players, namely Big’s widow Faith Evans, his mistress Lil Kim, the star-to-be Mase, The Lox, and more, No Way Out crafted a near perfect Bad Boy time capsule, capturing the label’s highs and lows of ‘97. From the agony of “Pain” to the celebrity-critiquing “Do You Know?,” it chronicles every natural reaction to Big’s shooting dutifully and without fully compromising Puffy’s Bad Boy mission statement: make feel-good music that tops the charts.
Puff Daddy proves himself to be a more than capable leading man, talking his shit with supreme confidence one minute and humbling himself at the altar of his fallen friend the next. He’s among the most believable boasters in rap history—“You ain’t gotta like me, you just mad/‘Cause I tell it how it is, and you tell it how it might be,” he raps on “Victory”—and he’s his own best hype man who’s equally enthusiastic stumping for others. But for the most part, No Way Out pivots on its exceptional Biggie cameos. His aura lingers. There’s a slickness to his bars that’s unparalleled, that fills up all the surrounding space with brio. He makes a seam-splitting Jay Z verse seem pedestrian (“Young G’s”) and brings half the fun to “Been Around the World” with his goofy rendition of Lisa Stansfield's “All Around the World.” On the slow-building “Victory,” he trades verses with Puff, backing his play. (The song’s final verse, the last Big ever recorded, is believed to be a reference track for Puffy.) The remix to “All About the Benjamins,” a chief among posse cuts once deemed by XXL the second best rap song of the ’90s, is among the last truly great artifacts of the Bad Boy era: the perfect blend of varying personalities and top notch performances all winding around the same axis: Biggie and the mutual appreciation of stunting.
“Statistically, this was one of the best years of my life,” Puffy told Rolling Stone in December ’97, “but personally, it was one of the worst. I would rather not have this. I would do anything—I would turn the hits into negative hits if I could just be with Biggie again.” Biggie was gone, though, and the hits kept coming. Puff Daddy’s first two singles topped the charts and his next two peaked at No. 2. No Way Out set the stage for Mase’s hugely successful debut Harlem World later that year, and the next year it was the LOX’s turn. As the run continued and the accolades kept mounting, Puffy became rap’s unexpected celebrity executive, notching more No. 1’s than any rapper in history to that point. But there’s something singular about No Way Out, which somehow feels like both a cautionary tale and an affront to mortality: The Notorious B.I.G. had been assassinated by his enemies, but his legacy was eternal. The album remembers him, not as man but as myth.
There’s something fascinating about following a song as mournful and self-serving as “I’ll Be Missing You”—which turns “Adagio for Strings” and the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” into a rousing eulogy with Puff and Big at its center—with a song as triumphant as “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down.” The transition seemed to build the strength necessary to overcome tragedy. With or without Biggie, their superstar and genius, the Bad Boy machine would continue to roll. Nobody—not even the ghost of an all-time great—could hold Sean Combs down. When the dust settled and No Way Out was on its way to going septuple platinum, SPIN ran a January ‘98 feature titled “The Mourning After,” taking stock of the post-Biggie Bad Boy climate and wondering at what point public grieving became shameless promo. “Marketable mourning,” as Sia Michel called it, contributed at least in part to the ongoing sales spike. Martyrdom is misery porn for some. But No Way Out is more than just the commissioning of lifeless tributes or some flagrant attempt to merchandise tragedy; it’s an attempt to do the most difficult thing in adversity’s wake: keep going.
