It’s official: Puff Daddy is in, Diddy is out. Sean Combs has announced that he will be dropping his new thug-fest single, Big Homie, as Puff Daddy. He has not released an album under the moniker since 1999, having changed his stage name to P. Diddy in early 2001.
Actually, according to the man himself (we will call him Sean Combs for the purposes of this article), you’re imagining things. The last 13 years of his career, and your life, have been called into question by a single tweet.
Combs put out some of his best music as Puff Daddy, so the change is welcomed by many. But a lot of things have happened since 2001 that we’d like to stay the same. The world was an interesting place last time we saw Puffy. And by “interesting,” we mean “a nightmare of flip-phones with antennas.” Check out the leaps and bounds humanity has made since P Diddy took over.
Oh my god is that, kill it.
Wikipedia wasn’t a thing…
The time/life-saving global encyclopedia was just coming together in 2001. If you wanted to look up Puff Daddy, you had to do it the old fashioned way: on Geocities or Angelfire. Sure, the information couldn’t be edited by literally any idiot with a computer. But we liked it that way.
…And neither was iTunes
When it launched in late 2001, iTunes was the craziest shit. People were just getting over the whole Napster thing. If you wanted to download an awesome Puff Daddy Song , you had to buy the CD. Or you could just get it off Limewire, although there was like a 75% chance it was a virus. Or porn. Probably both.
Weird Al Yankovic was very popular
He played the accordion and made fun of songs we liked. It was funny at the time.
Actually that’s pretty awesome.
Everybody could smell Dwayne Johnson’s food
When the Scorpion King came out, it was like “what? that wrestler guy from The Mummy got his own movie?” He also had the weirdest catchphrase in the world. Add all the quotation marks you want, Dwayne. Nobody will ever forget what you were cooking: a shockingly illustrious career.
The world was just super different
I don’t want to be a downer, but last time Combs was Puffy was before 9/11. Coincidence? Almost definitely. But maybe there’s an alternate universe where he decided to stay Puff Daddy and averted geopolitical catastrophe through the butterfly effect.
