Bad Boy Forever

I still remember hearing Ready to Die and just—having to listen through it, not being able to do anything else. Notorious B.I.G.’s voice did that, made everything around it sound small. Bad Boy Records was basically the whole thing you wanted to hear about in the 90s. The label had the artists, had the production, had something that felt like it actually mattered.

The documentary about the label, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, premiered in London and it’s hitting Apple Music on June 25th. The event was the usual thing—lots of famous people, photographers—but apparently everyone was actually loose about it, actually having fun, which you don’t always see at these premieres. That’s not really the story though. The story is Bad Boy Records starting in 1993 and everything that came after.

No Way Out, Ready to Die, Black Rob—the records genuinely held up. You can hear where the money and attention went, but you can also hear that there were real artists in the room, real care in the production. Puff Daddy understood how to make something feel iconic before it was finished, but the records themselves had weight. That’s the tricky part—most people can hype something up. Very few people can hype something up and also make something that still sounds good twenty years later.

I’m curious what the documentary does with all of it. Whether it’s a victory lap or whether there’s some actual retrospection in there. Those records are still the thing to check if you want to know what that era sounded like, and they’re still better than they have any right to be.