When an artist—especially an established one—releases a "mixtape," it's typically an album in all senses but the price tag. And free music is never a bad thing; it keeps news cycles busy and 7-Zip installed on your computer. But why did Puff Daddy release MMM as a mixtape? At 44 minutes and containing at least three great songs, with a concept to boot (MMM tangentially tells a story loosely based on the movie Paid in Full), it has enough weight and heft that it could have served as a direct sequel to Diddy Dirty Money's enduring 2010 album Last Train to Paris. Instead, it lives in a low-stakes no-man's-land between Mixtape and Album (despite being free on Datpiff, it was somehow released in an "Edited" version), eliciting slight confusion.
MMM has been publicly hyped since at least this summer, but from the first track, Puff Daddy is already shouting out his "real" album No Way Out 2, ostensibly forthcoming sometime soon. What follows is 13 tracks of sometimes great, sometimes anonymous music. Obviously an abundance of free "good enough" albums is a First World Problem to the nth degree, but the glut of them this year in rap is symptomatic of over-consumption by the listeners. Shouldn't we be thrilled Puff has, in effect, finally followed up Last Train to Paris? Is it churlish to complain about free music? But the fact remains, if you subtract three filler tracks and a song not credited to Puff (closer "Blow a Check", by Zoey Dollaz) what you have are nine new Diddy songs that add up to "OK."
However, to stress: MMM is not bad. Its concept provides a coherence that keeps the album interesting even when suffering through an interminable Wiz Khalifa guest verse. After the intro, an ominous, low-end rattling Chromatics sample breathes life into the album on the second track, "Harlem", a thrilling moment that establishes Puff Daddy's spin of his home neighborhood as a strange, almost dystopian urban setting, which is befitting a sample most closely associated with Drive and that movie's vision of seedy, night-time Los Angeles.
True to Puff form, MMM does a great job of gathering veteran New York voices and pulling decent performances from them. Between his frequent toasts to Biggie and the appearance of 2/3 of the Lox, Lil' Kim, and DJ Brucie B, MMM qualifies as something of a throwback late-'90s New York album: the whole crew (including several new voices) trade verses with Puff, including the Lil' Kim-assisted "Auction", one of MMM's brightest highlights, constructed on a bombastic sample recalling the best, most classically-maximalist Diddy productions, somewhere between No Way Out and Press Play.
The best song here is "You Could Be My Lover" featuring Ty Dolla $ign and Gizzle, which prominently samples Cody Chesnutt's "Boylife in America", cleverly and subtly drawing a connect between two generations of off-kilter, non-traditional R&B artists. It's a springy, sprightly track, stunning in its warm analog simplicity and also for bursting out of the album's brooding, synth-heavy palette. It also in some ways recalls the giddy highs of Last Train to Paris, which a half-decade ago pretty much perfected a potent and prescient mix of blunt romanticism and inspired, indelible production, and a knack for getting the right guest verse, the right hook, the right tone at the same time—just ask Jeremih, or revisit Trey Songz's overlooked 2014 record Trigga.
The song also contains what ultimately redeems MMM—Puff Daddy's fountain-of-youth charm. On "Help Me", he says "young nigga told me I'm old, I said 'old and rich.'" From someone else, this line doesn't add up to much, but from Puff, it banks its charm on his reputation as a no-apologies capitalist. On "Workin'" he says, "if you see us in the club with Ciroc by the tub we workin'," then right after that "in the DJ booth like an independent group like 'look at this record we workin'". That is the appeal of Puff Daddy right there—the personable opportunist that recalls American, Gatsby-ian myths of self-made success, and then his obsessive love of music. He's "old" now, but to many still the guy in a shiny suit somewhere. Puff released MMM as a mixtape because he loves making and releasing obsessively fussed-over music as much as keeping his stock high. He still commands attention from hip-hop heads and the casual music fan alike. That's worth something.
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