Bad Boy: The Influence of Sean "Puffy" Combs on the Music Industry

This is a tale of friendship, greed, and betrayal in the music industry—and a definitive history of America's biggest rap mogul.

No one knows more about creating hits than Sean “Puffy” Combs. For years he virtually ran hip-hop. It seemed the perfect arrangement: “Puffy” provided the sounds and obsessive attention to detail while the Notorious B.I.G. promoted an image that kept rap fans happy. It should have lasted forever, but “Biggie” was murdered at the height of his career—and “Puffy”'s ascension to superstardom ushered in an age of disloyalty and deception that exploded into one of the greatest debacles in the history of the music industry.

Through interviews with label insiders, grand jury testimony, and other sources, America's preeminent rap journalist Ronin Ro

-reveals the true story of “Puffy”

-addresses the larger issues that shaped the man and the industry

-explains how Bad Boy both helped and destroyed hip-hop and R&B music

-details why some artists “Puffy” created ultimately left his Bad Boy family in disgust.

At once an intimate history and a portrait of an era, Bad Boy shows readers exactly how Combs lost his strangle-hold over the multibillion-dollar rap music industry.

The story of Bad Boy Entertainment is the story of the American Dream, an up-close and personal account of the people, the money, the creative process that made it all come true, and the young mogul who caused the dream to fall apart. In this hip-hop tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions, readers finally learn the story that Sean “Puffy” Combs does not want them to know.

Ronin Ro is a journalist as well as the author of Gangsta: Merchandising the Rhymes of Violence; Have Gun Will Travel: The Spectacular Rise and Violent Fall of Death Row Records; and the novel Street Sweeper. A former rapper, he has written for such publications as Vanity Fair, The Source, SPIN, Rolling Stone, USA Today, Playboy, and Vibe. He has appeared on CNNfn, Bloomberg Network, National Public Radio, ABC Radio Network, BET, VH1, and the Fox News Network. He lives with his wife and daughter in New York City.