For many years, the hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs has been some of the influential males within the music {industry}. Final November, the singer Cassie Ventura, Combs’s former associate, filed a staggering 35-page lawsuit accusing the rapper of raping, drugging, and bodily abusing her over the course of a decade. He and Ventura settled the go well with out of courtroom simply sooner or later later, with Combs not admitting to any wrongdoing. Six months later, after CNN revealed a graphic hotel-surveillance video that exhibits Combs assaulting Ventura in 2016, he claimed “full duty.”
Within the weeks after Ventura’s accusations got here out, a number of different ladies filed lawsuits accusing Combs of sexual assault, which he categorically denied. And in September, the singer Daybreak Richard, a former member of two musical teams began by Combs, filed a 55-page lawsuit accusing him of sexually assaulting her, depriving her and her fellow Danity Kane bandmates of fundamental wants whereas requiring them to stay below his watch, and routinely refusing to pay his artists wages or royalties. (In a press release responding to the lawsuit, one among Combs’s attorneys stated Richard had “manufactured a collection of false claims all within the hopes of making an attempt to get a payday.”) Final month, Combs was indicted and arrested on federal fees that embrace intercourse trafficking, compelled labor, kidnapping, and racketeering. Combs, who pleaded not responsible to all the fees, is now detained in New York Metropolis after being denied bail twice.
Central to Richard’s lawsuit is Combs’s alleged conduct throughout Making the Band, the competitors collection that he produced and hosted from 2002 to 2009. The MTV collection attracted thousands and thousands of viewers throughout its run; Richard’s lawsuit references quite a few incidents that had been filmed for the present, and included within the remaining product. Together with Ventura’s allegations, the go well with prompts a broader reassessment of Combs’s cultural energy—and pushes audiences to rethink the hostile conduct that he typically willingly broadcast to the general public.
Although the worst of Richard’s allegations about Combs’s conduct weren’t depicted on Making the Band, the collection did assist lay the groundwork for most of the invasive, burdensome expectations of the trendy music {industry}. At this time’s younger artists readily anticipate that their followers—and, extra urgent, their document labels—need them to entertain the plenty with their lives, not simply their music. Nevertheless benign a viral TikTok pattern could seem now, Making the Band was an early experiment in coaching audiences to take pleasure in watching simply how a lot management document labels wield over weak musicians. The collection laundered Combs’s open hostility towards a bunch of younger ladies he was liable for as an eccentric type of artist administration—and his label, Dangerous Boy Information, profited from viewers’ curiosity in his abrasive shows of authority.
By 2005, when Richard joined Making the Band 3, Combs had already shaped (and disbanded) a coed group that featured in an earlier iteration of the present. In the course of the first run, Combs subjected contestants to outlandish, demoralizing duties that had nothing to do with making music. One, which was later parodied in a well-known Chappelle’s Present skit, required the artists to stroll greater than 5 miles to fetch him cheesecake from a Brooklyn restaurant. “Actually, my toes felt damaged and my knees felt like all of the cartilage was gone,” one former band member informed Essence in 2017. After they returned to the Midtown Manhattan studio to seek out that Combs had left, she stated, “I wished to cry.”
With Making the Band 3, Combs tried, for the primary time on the present, to create an all-female group—and his ruthless strategy to artist growth appeared to take a darker flip. Richard’s go well with contends that the present’s atmosphere enabled Combs to keep up alarming management over the younger ladies, and {that a} TV-friendly model of his cruelty was projected to thousands and thousands of viewers. One accusation is that Combs routinely made “disparaging gender-based remarks similar to calling them ‘fats,’ ‘ugly,’ ‘bitches,’ and ‘hoes’” all through filming and after the group was shaped. Revisiting the present and the way Combs promoted it on the time, I’m struck by simply how typically Combs tossed round comparable language. Even when he used much less objectionable phrases, he nonetheless conveyed the message that the ladies weren’t his equals. “I don’t assume no human being has been capable of simply determine the girl,” he informed the Related Press forward of a season premiere, including that he anticipated nice TV as a result of the feminine rivals would all have to cope with “having their month-to-month cycle coming collectively, and feelings and moodiness and competitiveness.”
Making the Band 3 spent an inordinate period of time specializing in the younger ladies’s our bodies, and the way Combs noticed them. He handled the contestants’ bodily presentation as alternately a disqualifying embarrassment, a mirrored image of his personal star-making prowess, or an invite to leer. The very first time Richard seems on-screen, throughout a bunch audition, Combs factors to her as if he’s eyeing a romantic curiosity. “With the denims on—she’s distinctive,” he says. After each stage of the choice course of for the woman group, which ended up being referred to as Danity Kane, Combs tried to police how the ladies regarded. For instance, as soon as the contestants made it previous auditions and right into a smaller cohort, the remaining contenders had been consistently corralled into the health club, having meals taken away from them, and belittled for not having six-pack abs. (It’s notable that not even 5 minutes into the primary episode, one younger girl swears, “I’ll work out ’til I kill myself.”)
Even after the ultimate group was chosen, Richard alleges, Combs continued to exert authority over the musicians’ our bodies. When she or “her Danity Kane bandmates requested meals or relaxation, Mr. Combs refused and chastised them with derogatory feedback like ‘you bitches don’t need this’ or ‘y’all aren’t hungry sufficient’ or ‘I’m paying you bitches to work,’” the lawsuit claims. Though a few of his belittling feedback made it onto the air, Combs’s informal supply belied the obvious severity of his off-camera management over the ladies’s fundamental wants: Richard alleges that Combs typically despatched his associates to wake the Danity Kane members in the midst of the night time in order that he may watch them rehearse; the studio periods generally went on for 3 to 4 days, throughout which the singers felt compelled to decide on between consuming and sleeping.
A part of why Combs’s televised mistreatment of Making the Band contestants didn’t draw a lot mainstream pushback on the time is that he was hardly alone in his valorization of laborious work—and he was adept at reframing office abuse by way of the language of creative self-sacrifice, typically by referencing his personal profession. “It’s a blessing to be within the recording {industry} … however there’s loads of misconceptions,” he says at one level. “Lots of instances when individuals get into this, they don’t notice how laborious they’re gonna should work to realize the aim.” As Combs’s enterprise empire expanded within the new millennium, he offered himself because the bootstraps exemplar—a poor Black boy from Harlem who’d hustled his approach into turning into a multimillionaire. (In a press release issued after his arrest, Combs’s attorneys leaned on a few of these tropes, defending their shopper as “a music icon, self-made entrepreneur, loving household man and confirmed philanthropist who has spent the final 30 years constructing an empire, adoring his youngsters and dealing to uplift the Black group.”)
On Making the Band 3, Combs generally praised the contestants’ vocal talents—however extra typically, he reminded them that any pure creative inclination mattered far lower than a Sisyphean work ethic. By making a false dichotomy between expertise and dedication, Combs justified the present’s grueling calls for of contestants, his position as their kingmaker, and his explosive anger when the ladies failed to satisfy his expectations. Combs appeared to relish the chance to degrade the ladies, typically criticizing them in entrance of each other after which pausing to let the tough phrases sink in for the entire group. “A few of you’re gon’ be damaged by yourself; a few of you’re gon’ step as much as a problem and shine,” he warned them after exhibiting up unannounced of their dormlike residing quarters one night time.
Making the Band purportedly supplied the younger ladies a transparent, albeit grueling, path to stardom. However in apply, the present appeared to prioritize offering Combs entry to them: In his host commentary, Combs gleefully remarked on the truth that he had “19 ladies below one roof!” In hindsight, his blithe supply accentuated his seeming confidence that neither MTV executives nor the present’s viewers would increase vital considerations about his televised mistreatment of the younger musicians. In the course of the present’s run, Combs’s on-screen cruelty was all however unremarkable: Hip-hop, and the music {industry} extra broadly, has a protracted historical past of devaluing ladies as expendable intercourse objects. Girls who increase objections to alleged abusive circumstances have typically been met with indifference, skepticism, or outright hostility, together with being shut out from work. When Combs equated the breaches of his artists’ autonomy with the pressures of constructing it in music, he performed straight into this acquainted dynamic.
Competitors exhibits similar to Making the Band additionally tapped into a way more widespread perception that fame—or the prospect to realize it—justifies any pains that could be suffered because of this. When the collection premiered, it joined a rising variety of reality-TV applications that drew viewers in by glamorizing the benevolent tyrant chosen to host—and by disguising the soul-crushing takedowns they frequently meted out to contestants below the guise of constructive criticism. Richard’s go well with alleges that Combs’s conduct created “an environment of uncertainty and intimidation.” That evaluation may have been utilized to different reality-TV judges, on exhibits similar to America’s Subsequent Prime Mannequin, The Apprentice, The Largest Loser—and there’s no scarcity of clips by which a bunch excoriates a younger participant over one thing trivial.
For viewers who consumed a relentless stream of media that surveilled and antagonized celebrities, maybe the judges’ remedy of the creative hopefuls appeared to be a part of life within the public eye. A few of these viewers attitudes persist at the moment, regardless of the proof of how damaging such environments may be for contestants: Former forged members from a number of trendy actuality collection have filed lawsuits alleging that the manufacturing workers on their respective exhibits subjected them to inhumane working circumstances, depriving them of sleep, meals, and different fundamental must make them extra weak to camera-friendly battle. Now, 15 years after Making the Band ended, it’s clear how the collection—and Combs’s star energy—was key to ushering in an period of leisure predicated on humiliating younger individuals as they pursued their creative ambitions.
Combs’s obvious disdain for the aspiring musicians on his present nonetheless pervades a number of spheres of tradition, together with newer platforms. Audiences who tune in to vocal-competition collection could not run main document labels, however they’ve their very own sort of energy now: As a result of algorithm-driven social-media feeds operate as de facto audition phases for entertainment-industry hopefuls, particular person listeners can change the trajectory of an artist’s profession simply by proselytizing on-line. And devoted followers aren’t the one ones wielding these newer instruments. Stirring up detrimental sentiment about an artist, particularly by way of baseless mockery, has turn into its personal pastime, rewarded by the joys of a detrimental suggestions loop. And on trendy reality-TV exhibits, individuals typically discover themselves navigating damaging circumstances optimized to extract drama for viewers’ amusement. If there’s something that Making the Band proves now, it’s that struggling is simple to disregard when a whole {industry} treats it like a joke.
