Puff Daddy - FOREVER

Though hostile nations surrounded me, I destroyed them all in the name of the LORD.
-- Puff Daddy, "Forever (Intro)"

Rap is the least fascist contemporary music form. It began as the simple, portable music of an oppressed minority. Can't get less fascist than that! Even most "bling" rappers of the late 1990s, like Master P, were overcompensating for profoundly hardscrabble roots. Preposterous bragging via Pen-and-Pixel displays of cigars and rubies does not a fascist make.

So it takes a lot to come up with a fascist rap album. The deck is stacked against you. Puff Daddy nailed it.

Start with that cover. Classic white-on-white Diddy chic, but sunglasses and that expensive (and heretofore unseen) gray overlay? Ooh, a darker Did rests within. He was in prayerful sepia mourning with The Family on his previous album, No Way Out, but he had a reason: Big died. Why is he vaguely prayerful here? As for the no-text cover, you know who it is, and if you check into it (like at the top of the Billboard charts MOTHAFUCKAAAAA!), you'll see that Puffy has kicked The Family to the curb for this disc.

The music itself is halfway awesome but allway fascist. The holy+confrontational pose Did assumes on the cover extends to every track. It's the 2-minute choral intro from "I'll Be Missing You" in extended play. But instead of mourning Big, he's extolling himself as some kind of bedeviled Messiah -- an "Angel with a Dirty Face," to quote one track's title. Granted, this was de rigeur in late-90s rap: 2Pac started it, Ja Rule did it (of course), DMX did it. But when you aren't actually a troubled soul -- Puff was a Howard business major and record exec straight enough to date Jennifer Lopez at the time -- then your self-immolation is mass manipulation.

The skits take some legitimately funny premises from No Way Out, like the Mad Rapper, and blatantly appropriate them. He even steals from every other rapper ever by doing a weird impression of Scarface. Classic fascism. While the skits weren't bad, highlighted by the hilarious "ad-lib Puff," retreading everyone's favorite tropes was cynical as hell.

And, of course, there's Diddy's favorite weapon, the sample. Whenever rap touches into fascist territory, it is inevitably coincident with excessive sampling, like Puff or Will Smith. "Best Friend" will knock your socks off, whether or not you know it's basically a note-for-note sample of "Sailing." He's appropriating the powerful creativity of others for his own gain; pure fascism.

Finally, there's the repetitiveness. While Forever is actually kind of a good album, its droning nature -- within certain tracks, not track-to-track -- is its worst quality. Would-be hits "Do You Like It... Do You Want It," "Fake Thugs Dedication," and "Angels with Dirty Faces" are undone by repetitiveness, but the nadir -- and one of the most droning songs of all time -- is the actual hit "P.E. 2000." The song was 99% terrific, including that weird lady hypeman, but the 1% killed it. GET OFF THAT NOTE!!!!!!!!!!