Diddy is the American Dream
As shown by Diddy and others, the pursuit of the elusive American Dream can lead to a nightmare.
The textbook definition of the American Dream suggests that anyone can succeed through hard work. The term "anyone" emphasizes inclusivity, while "succeed" is subjective and often equates to a lifestyle of material wealth. However, as we’ve seen with Diddy and others the pursuit of the elusive American Dream can lead to a nightmare, especially for those in the wake of him and those of his ilk who have achieved “success” as defined by material excess.
Figures like Diddy, Bill Cosby, Jeffrey Epstein, Dan Schneider, and Harvey Weinstein exemplify how fame and fortune often come at the expense of others' suffering.
This pattern isn't new—it's been the norm for years.
It’s time for us to reimagine the American Dream.
“Trap”ped
In the past few years, I have been writing a doctoral thesis on trap music and one of the central questions I had going into it was raised after reading an article by music journalist Simon Reynolds in his article Trap world: how the 808 beat dominated contemporary music. To close his article Reynolds wrote:
If trap became the defining sound of the 2010s, it’s because it captured the pathologies of our era – the glamour of money, the lure of fame as an individualistic escape route, the decadence of self-medicating hedonism – and welded them to the ultimate party soundtrack. It’s fitting that the decade’s dominant and most addictive sound should derive its name from the place where drugs are sold. The irrepressible and inexhaustible generation of new flows, fresh slanguage, and startling production tricks collides with a stock set of themes and a beat that is instantly recognisable. Trap as the changing same, as a music that keeps reinventing itself even as it serves the base function it always has, is a fitting metaphor for our times.
If hip-hop with trap music as its lingua franca, had officially become the most listened to music in the world by 2019 and one of the defining sounds of the 2010s, what does its popularity and ubiquity say about us as a society? What can be illuminated from the music? As I stated in the introduction to my thesis proposal back in 2020:
In following the trajectory of the “American dream” in its rags-to-riches story, trap music has come to symbolize and celebrate the individualistic hedonism and excesses of extreme wealth. It has provided a mirror to our narratives of wealth and success in a society where the reality of such narratives have begun to collapse in an era of seemingly endless recession and looming economic crisis.
In recent months, this question has come to take a darker turn with the charges of sex trafficking, prostitution and racketeering being brought against hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs. As more information came out about the extent of his crimes and the crimes of those around him, also including forced labor, kidnapping, arson, bribery and obstruction of justice, I thought back to the relationship between hip-hop and the American dream.
Diddy has lived the lifestyle promoted in so many hip-hop songs. If one were to literally infer how one would sustain a lifestyle of endless alcohol, drugs, and sex, one would get something akin to the network that P. Diddy has built up. It has been in fashion for decades now to critique and criticize the rags to riches narrative of the American dream, but when placing Diddy into the context of other similar revelations such as those surrounding Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, R. Kelly, and Dan Schneider the “riches” part of the narrative begins to take on a darker tone.
These horrors are becoming less of an aberration - some rogue sick individual - as we’re constantly reassured by our media, and are beginning to take the shape of a feature of the lifestyles of the ultra rich and elites. When we are fed the implicit narrative of our culture to “make it big” and “get rich” we are being encouraged to emulate the lifestyles of the rich and famous, as they have become the “role models” of our society. As with many things in this world, the glamor of being amongst the ultra rich may not be all what it seems.
Déjà vu?
With the number of members of the elite and ultra rich whose crimes have come to light in recent years, it feels like a case of déjà vu whenever they are discussed. In the cases of Jeffrey Epstein, R. Kelly, Dan Schneider, and now Diddy, these things are literally déjà vu. All of them have faced either allegations or trials in the past.
Jeffrey Epstein was brought to court in Florida in 2006 for procuring a minor for prostitution and solicitation of a prostitute, but as investigative journalist Whitney Webb wrote in it in her book One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein, he was given a slap on the wrist:
Alex Acosta, then-serving as Secretary of Labor in the Trump administration, had disclosed to the Trump transition team that he had previously signed off on Epstein’s “sweetheart deal” because Epstein “had belonged to intelligence.” Acosta, then serving as US attorney for Southern Florida, had also been told by unspecified figures at the time that he needed to give Epstein a lenient sentence because of his links to “intelligence.” When Acosta was later asked if Epstein was indeed an intelligence asset in 2019, Acosta chose to neither confirm or deny the claim.
R. Kelly had a whole host of sexual abuse allegations dating back to the 1990s but the most prominent case were the allegations he faced in 2002 of urinating on a minor, which took until 2008 for him to be found not guilty after the victim refused to testify. This was by no means the end of the allegations surrounding R. Kelly, but it wasn’t until recently with the documentary series Surviving R. Kelly, that they finally caught up to him and he was forced to take account.
The same thing can be said about Dan Schneider ’s allegations at Nickelodeon, but it wasn’t until Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV earlier this year that more concrete allegations began to stick.
The Fault in Our Memory
As a culture, it has become apparent that we collectively have a difficult time discussing crimes and atrocities. With regular exposure to the crimes of our government since the days of the Vietnam War, and accelerated by the internet, it becomes tiring to keep track of and properly reckon with the severity and the implications of them.
The way we tend to create a collective memory and define a societal form of remembrance also tends to abstract the severity and the reality of atrocities that those have suffered. German historian Reinhart Koselleck in 1993 made an argument against the notion of collective memory being the main form of remembrance. About this, historian Victor Neumann writes:
Koselleck’s critical reactions began with the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. In 1993 he participated in the debate on the monument for a reunified Germany. According to Koselleck, its dedication, “For the Victims of War and Dictatorship” (Neue Wache), was contradicted by the absurdity of the mass murders committed by the Nazis. In this context, Koselleck asked that the inscription be changed to: “For the Dead: Fallen, Killed, Gassed, Dead, Missing.” By doing so, he drew attention to the need to recognise different experiences and the importance of reconciling the plurality of Germany’s past. He argued for individual memory and against a collective memory of the past, criticizing the way the state, politicians, and shapers of civic opinion impose the meaning of history through an official politics of memory.
How often when you read about atrocities committed do you see that the language used to speak about them ends up relativizing the direct experience of them. You have to look no further than the Western media coverage of the genocide in Gaza and the Israeli bombings of principally civilians in Gaza, the West Bank, and now Lebanon.
People are never “killed”, they simply die. In speaking of the death toll, we even leave out those who are “missing” and unaccounted for. If this weren’t the case, the number of people killed by Israeli bombing alone would reach into the hundreds of thousands as the according to The Lancet. Koselleck wasn’t being pedantic when he argued that those fallen, killed, gassed, dead, and missing should have been included in the inscription for the remembrance of the Second World War.
In the United States, we tend to be more comfortable with blood and gore types of violence than with things such as human trafficking, sex crimes, and crimes against minors. Images of bloody violence saturate our media of course, whether it be the regularity of mass shootings and street violence amongst youths and organized crime, or whether it be the latest Hollywood movie or television series on a streaming platform. Violence is all around us and for the most part, we tend to accept this reality.
But when it comes to the crimes of someone like Jeffrey Epstein, that are of a sexual nature, whose scale and absurdity make them difficult to comprehend, it is hard for us to come to terms with the idea that we live in a society that would allow such a thing. No one wants to wake up in the morning and go to work with the acceptance that there are rich and powerful individuals who are regularly partaking in sexual crimes on an institutional scale.
This explains the internet’s impulse to clown and make fun of the absurdity of the crimes of Diddy. With terms like “the Diddler” getting “diddled” and the jokes about the sheer amount of baby oil he had in his house, it’s hard not to laugh at how ridiculous it all seems. But once it became clear the severity of the allegations of sex trafficking, and how institutional they were not only to his little fiefdom within the entertainment industry, but the music industry as a whole, the notion of Diddy being a sinister individual on the level of a Jeffrey Epstein stopped being as funny.
Still though, the jokes have and will always persist. They have begun to serve more as a societal trauma response more than anything. Dealing with trauma through humor is an indirect way of disarming the cause of the trauma, but it also avoids fully processing it.
But the media also bears responsibility for the sensationalizing of the salacious details of Diddy’s sex parties, euphemistically described as “freak offs” by Diddy himself. On one level, one cannot fully blame them for the sensationalizing as the details and allegations themselves are sensational. It’s easy to draw in readers and viewers this way while still getting the information out there. But on another level, this too contributes to the relativizing of the experiences of those who have suffered at the hands of P. Diddy and those in his network. It is of course too early for us to get many of the first hand testimonies of the victims themselves, but it also may be that we might never get these accounts in the same bandwidth of coverage as we are getting the sensationalism. By that point the moment will have passed and we as a society will have moved on to the next shocking event that occupies the airwaves.
The Simulation of Scandal
Another one of the inherent reasons we find it difficult to properly discuss such crimes publicly also has to do with the nature of “scandals” themselves. Jean Baudrillard in his analysis of Watergate, likens the spectacle of the public scandal to a simulation, no different than Disneyland. The scandal as a concrete event does not exist in reality.
Watergate. The same scenario as in Disneyland (effect of the imaginary concealing that reality no more exists outside than in side the limits of the artificial perimeter): here the scandal effect hiding that there is no difference between the facts and their denunciation (identical methods on the part of the CIA and of the Washington Post journalists) . Same operation, tending to regenerate through scandal a moral and political principle, through the imaginary, a sinking reality principle.
The denunciation of scandal is always an homage to the law. And Watergate in particular succeeded in imposing the idea that Watergate was a scandal-in this sense it was a prodigious operation of intoxication.
Watergate as a scandal only exists as an event in our minds, when in reality, it was how the government operated, an open secret that was constantly concealed from the public. There is no morality until the “facts” and the “actors” manifests in the form of the scandal. The scandal as performed by the “actors” and received by society, is the form in which these facts can be processed by the public as a moral event and the commonly agreed upon laws of decency and morality can assert themselves as principles within politics. Nixon by apologizing affirmed his transgression of these morals and laws and the outrage heaped upon him by the Washington Post stood as the conduit for the public shock and anger. This reaffirms the existence of the “good” and the “moral” in politics and consequently reaffirming the public’s belief in such things.
The public scandal thus is a form of simulation. None of it actually exists in concrete reality. The actors like Nixon, and those in-the-know of his paranoid surveillance, as well as the system of US politics and the US government itself do not hold themselves to these so called “laws” of decency and morality that the public perceives them to operate behind. The only thing they care about is power and money as a means of power. Before the scandal these facts simply existed in concealment only for those in certain positions to know. As Baudrillard states:
“Watergate is not a scandal, this is what must be said at all costs, because it is what everyone is busy concealing”
In this way as Baudrillard stated public scandals are nothing more than abstract Disneylands for the public to reaffirm their commitment to belief in the society, its laws and its morality.
This line of thinking can equally apply to the revelations about Diddy. It’s not a scandal but rather as Baudrillard stated, “what everyone is busy concealing”. These things were open secrets in the music industry that occasionally leaked out into public knowledge.
Australian DJ Havana Brown in an interview on Hit WA’s Allan & Carly said that:
“It’s not a secret in the industry at all, what was happening… Absolutely everybody in the industry knew what was going on…I don’t know why it was so kept so secret and why no one said anything about it. Like everyone knew about these freak-off parties. Everyone talked about it.”
Dorothy Carvello, a talent scout for a big name record label in the 1980s, who has been involved in launching a lawsuit against Atlantic Records and its executives had this to say about Diddy and the music industry:
“How did we get Diddy? Everybody in the music business knew about him. It will come out who enabled this,” she told The Sunday Times. “Money is God in this industry. It doesn’t matter who is sacrificed along the way.”
Diddy has become the newest figure in which our society perfomatively and ritualistically shames and draws the distinction between the “moral” in our society and the “immoral”. After successive scandals though, this façade of us existing in a “moral” society begins to wear thin. How much outrage do we actually have left within ourselves if this is being revealed to us is a modus operandi of our elites.
To further hammer this home, Whitney Webb in the introduction to her book, had this to say about Jeffrey Epstein.
Indeed, it was later stated by Cindy McCain, wife of former Senator John McCain, that “we all knew what he [Epstein] was doing” at an event in January 2020, where she also claimed that authorities were “afraid” to properly apprehend him. If he was such an anomaly and a stand-alone con artist – how was he singlehandedly able to intimidate the law enforcement apparatus of an entire nation for decades?The claim that Epstein did not have powerful backers and benefactors stands on incredibly shaky ground.
The exact same thing can be said about Diddy. It will try to be argued by some that Diddy was a sordidly evil individual who corrupted all of those that touched him. In the name of protecting themselves, those involved will condemn him and distance themselves from him and this “scandal” will be memory holed which is what tends to happen, until the next scandal appears.
Diddy and the American Dream
At the very heart of the allegations against the likes of Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffery Epstein, R. Kelly, Dan Schneider and P. Diddy is control and exploitation, particularly of the vulnerable. These two things are at the very center of what it means to be among the ultra rich elite and what the American dream has always been built upon. Western society has been shaped by this hunger for control and the need to exploit.
The wealth of European empires was built on the exploitation of the riches of the Americas, African slave labor, and the natural resources of Africa and the Middle East, and the riches and labor of South Asia. Without the Americas, there is no Spanish or Portuguese empires. Without Africa, France ceases to be a power. Without India, the pearl of the British empire, the empire does not recover as well from the loss of the 13 colonies. Without the American global hegemony that enables the country access to cheap oil through the patronage of the Gulf State monarchies and the divide and conquer strategy that keeps the Middle East in a state of crisis and war, our modern society will cease to function with the same levels of comforts and conveniences afforded to us.
In the same way that our political and financial elites have shaped the world and our societies through exploitation, Diddy kept his tiny slice of his own personal fiefdom through tightly knit webs of exploitation of people and their bodies for the consumption of those in his network. When we aspire to be amongst this upper echelon of society, as the American dream has been sold to us today, this is ultimately what we’re aspiring to be. Diddy is the modern American dream.
The sad thing about our modern society and what will be lamented by future generations is how we have lost sight of the achievements and ideals of our society that were truly worth being proud of and worth defending. The idea of the sovereignty of the human individual which led to the establishment of the idea of inalienable rights, is something to always hold up and aspire to. Even though these ideals have always existed in tension with the reality of how Western societies have treated those outside of it and exploited the weak and vulnerable within it, does not make it any less noble.
On the contrary, it makes it more of an imperative that we take these ideals to heart. In 1948, 48 countries from all regions of the world assembled to affirm the United Nations “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” and within it, “their faith in the dignity and worth of all persons.” These ideals have grown far beyond Western society and given the state of the world today, we are in great need of an earnest belief in and application of them.
Historian James Truslow Adams, in his 1931 book The Epic Of America first coined the term, “the American Dream” and he defined it as such:
The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement….It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.
Adams was not referring simply to the acquisition of material wealth or the opportunity upward mobility. His vision of the American dream resembles more the vision of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in its belief in a society that upheld the “dignity and worth of all persons”. In the context of our world today, this belief should not just be extended to those who have the wealth and power to be considered a person worthy of dignity and inalienable rights, but to every individual regardless of their circumstances of birth or position in the world. If we live in a world where our governments and our societies can exploit those outside of its borders, what stops this same exploitation from occurring to us?
For this reason we cannot stand by idly as we are more regularly exposed to the depravity of our elites. The revelations of the crimes of people like P. Diddy have to be wake up calls for us to snap out of our state of déjà vu and performative outrage and actually demand accountability and consequences that extend beyond these individuals who ultimately become scapegoats in society’s need to affirm itself as “moral” and “good” in the simulation of scandal.
These incidents are not aberrations but rather are features of a society that has long departed from its ideals and has institutionalized the depravity of power in its place.