Sex, drugs and rock n roll, and hip hop, and RnB, and dance music...
...and Harrods, hot yoga, TV presenting, grooming gangs, taxi driving. If men were white goods or a foodstuff there would be a very worried product recall
TRIGGER WARNING: may contain peanut products, and men (and upsetting details of the endless sexual abuse women suffer at the hands of them)
I have Cassie’s album Dope n Diamonds here, I’m not really into RnB but the album had a skewed energetic to it that I found strangely compelling. I had never noticed the lyrics until now and with the arrest of her former boyfriend, P Diddy (real name Sean Combs) last week. I sat in bed, in the cupboard I currently call home, and listened. The album’s highly sexualised lyrics include references to kissing pearls, making you come, I wanna buck ya buck ya buck ya.
So far so 21st Century RnB, right, the genre that brought us Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin has all gone a bit, erm, R Kelly. (When invited to comment on Combs’ situation, Kelly, who hopefully will die in jail, said, “I don't believe none of this shit.” But who cares about a paedo who is in jail for coercing underage girls to sexually debase themselves by, among other things, smearing their faces in their own feces and pretending to be turned on by it).
And now Combs too is exposed for Racketeering ‘n’ Trafficking just like Kelly. This one though, is a little different. Because Combs was filming his sexual abusing and letting a select group enjoy the spectacle of what he called “freak offs”. The Combs case is going to require a lot of popcorn.
The Cassie album’s song titles look like and possibly were a cry for help in light of the lawsuit she filed November 2023 that prompted the federal investigation into Comb’s epic scale of abuse toward her and many others partly in the production of these freak offs (FOs he called them).
Song titles include “Numb” “Hungover” and there is no more telling song on Dope ‘n’ Diamonds than “Stamina”. “I know this room is full of spectators, some are haters, I bet they want to be invited, let’s get this room excited, …acting, this ain’t acting, get your camera, bring your stamina.”
Stamina is so sad to listen to as it, to me, describes the “freak offs” which she and other women would be forced into performing at and that apparently would go on for sleepless days and nights; for the women, unpaid, unlike the hired cock that was flown in to complete the display. One low rent actor, it is rumoured, would pay the bulk of his life expenses with a couple of freak offs a year.
The players in these “elaborate and produced sex performances” to quote one of the many lawsuit out against Combs, were fuelled, disinhibited and numbed by drugs that included cocaine, meth and oxycodone (brand name OxyContin® the strong and addictive pharma opioid) to coerce partygoers into sex and keep them, as Cassie describes it, "obedient".
There’s a small stupid part of me that thinks, briefly, oh, that sounds fun, until I remember, that kind of stuff really is not…