Diddy Dirty Money is a collaboration between Sean Combs, also famously known as P. Diddy, former Danity Kane member Dawn Richards, and singer-songwriter Kalenna Harper. The group’s first album, Last Train to Paris is also the fifth studio album P. Diddy produced. In interviews, Diddy describes this album as an electro-hip-hop-soul-funk type of album, and the songs featured certainly prove so. In Last Train to Paris, the listener not only gets a feel of the usual hip-hop genre, but it also expands into R&B, electronica, techno, and pop, covering pretty much a majority of musical genres.
While the title of the group may say otherwise, Diddy Dirty Money is actually not about illegal money, or drugs, or anything negative. The group sings of a love story that shows two different sides – the man’s and the woman’s. The songs are placed in an order that tells a narrative of Diddy’s alter ego as he travels on tour from London to Paris and finds the woman of his dreams before losing her, finding her, losing her once more, and finding and reuniting with her at the very end of the album with the concluding song, “Coming Home.”
I honestly have mixed opinions about this album.
I love how each song in the album adds a spin to the love story being told by Diddy Dirty Money, so the order in which the songs are placed are not random. Instead, they fade, to signify an end to a chapter, before increasing the volume and introducing the listener to a new chapter in the story. It’s basically like reading a novel, except instead of words and eyes, you use your ears to find the story through the music.
Aside from the album being a lyrical and musical story, some of the songs, like “Yeah Yeah You Would” and “Strobe Lights” give you a feeling of dancing and having fun at a nightclub. But instead of anything sexual or derogatory towards women, these songs just give you a “let go of life’s problems and just have fun once in a while” type of emotion. And this was the main purpose of Diddy’s new album. In an interview with MTV, he states that this “…was the most vulnerable album I’ve ever been involved in. It’s raw emotion – you get a feeling, a vibe.”
My favorite song overall would be “Coming Home,” which was the fourth single released from the album, and preceded by “Angel,” “Hello Good Morning,” and “Loving You No More.” The song, “Coming Home,” gives the listener a feeling of blissfulness as the novel of a love story comes to a positive end.
While I did like the album, there were also things I didn’t like about it. I loved the songs that featured guest artists such as Skylar Grey, Usher, and Trey Songz, but I felt as if Diddy’s choice to feature Li’l Wayne wasn’t all that great. For one, Li’l Wayne barely made a contribution to any song he was featured in, while the other guest artists made the featured songs their own. Second, I found Diddy’s rapping to be unoriginal. He sounded as if he was trying too hard to be a combination of Lupe Fiasco and Kanye West. It was a relief that the majority of the songs were taken over by the guest artists.
Overall, I thought the album was decent. If I had to rank it, I’d give it about three and a half stars out of five. The beats were great, the order in which the songs were placed to tell a story was amazing and unique, and the line up of guest artists (minus Li’l Wayne) was a good choice on Diddy’s part.
