Diving Into the Past, but Definitely Still in the Present

Sean Combs was dancing: slow, deliberate, slightly awkward movements on a big stage, illuminated only by angelic light from the screen above, which was flashing slow-motion clips of the Notorious B.I.G., a k a Biggie Smalls.

“I’m going to take my time with this,” Mr. Combs said before somberly rapping “I’ll Be Missing You.” “Bear with me as I get through this.” Obscured by his abundant gift for triumph is the fact that Mr. Combs — once Puff Daddy, then Puffy and Puff, and now Diddy — is fluent in pathos and has been since he recorded that tribute song for Biggie.

Mr. Combs was 27 then, and the most polarizing figure in hip-hop. Now he’s 41, and still innovating. Last year he released “Last Train To Paris” (Bad Boy/Interscope), his first album with his group Diddy-Dirty Money, an unexpectedly wound-opening — and wound-healing — record that’s among the most intimate things Mr. Combs has ever done.

On Friday night at the Hammerstein Ballroom, rendering his inner hurt on a major scale, he showed that his then and his now weren’t all that different. Diddy-Dirty Money, which also features the singers Dawn Richard and Kalenna Harper, is an experiment in dance-oriented hip-hop, a group that builds in the R&B hooks that are usually outsourced or sampled. It’s also the umpteenth turn in the surprisingly versatile career of Mr. Combs, who began as a promoter and producer, not a performer.

His lack of specific talent makes him a chameleonic force, never worrying about what might violate his principles, because his only principle is success. That was clear from this almost-two-hour concert, a Madison Square Garden-worthy show packed tight into a medium-size room. While “Last Train to Paris” has been well received, it’s only been a modest commercial success in modest times for the record business. But Diddy himself is still an outsize presence, and he compressed arena extravaganza — moving video screens, band members, backup singers — into cramped quarters.

For the first part of the night he stuck largely to Diddy-Dirty Money material: throbbing, emotional numbers like “Your Love,” “Angels (remix)” and “I Hate That You Love Me.” Here Diddy rapped and sang, or at least appeared to sing, while Ms. Richard and Ms. Harper acted as anchors.

After “Loving You No More,” they segued into a breathy if needless take on Sade’s “No Ordinary Love.” Song guests — Chris Brown, Rick Ross — delivered their parts in taped videos. Sometimes, Diddy and his two singers would all sashay side to side like the Temptations.

This was the pretense, though, the necessary nod to the present that allowed Diddy to dive headlong into the past. The second part of the night was devoted to past victories: “Bad Boy For Life,” “I Need A Girl (Part One),” “Mo Money Mo Problems,” “It’s All About the Benjamins.”

Through remix verses or sheer force of will, he claimed other people’s hits as his own: Jim Jones’s “We Fly High,” 50 Cent’s “I Get Money,” Waka Flocka Flame’s “O Let’s Do It.” And he brought out some of the old Bad Boy team, Black Rob and Faith Evans — “You know I ain’t do it by myself,” he said — as well as Q-Tip, “a true friend.”

After that came the Biggie memorial, with Mr. Combs lost in a reverie until the D.J. began playing some of Biggie’s biggest hits — “One More Chance (remix),” “Juicy,” “Hypnotized” — which turned into rap-alongs, opportunities for full-room catharsis.

Still, after Biggie, Mr. Combs was always his own biggest product, and the managing and processing of his anguish was the thing that propelled him to stardom. He comes full circle on the haunting “Coming Home,” the biggest hit from the Diddy-Dirty Money album, which came just before the end of the show. People “got the nerve to blame you for it,” he rapped, “And you know you woulda took the bullet if you saw it.” And then he began to spin, dancing in a solemn circle.

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