Puff Daddy couldn't rap. That was always the standard line during the era when Puff was dominating everything. He was a monotonal mushmouth with no particular sense of rhythm or flow, and he always sounded like he was about to fall asleep. He'd grunt a lot, and it wasn't a triumphal, pre-verbal expression of his own badassery; it was more the sort of noise that you might make if you were taking a shit. He didn't even write his own rhymes, something that he bragged about -- through rhyme -- a few years later. (I always wondered whether Puff actually wrote his "don't worry if I write rhymes, I write checks" line or whether he wrote the check for it.) And he pushed an aesthetic of substance-free flash to rap dominance, becoming a much bigger star than any of the much more gifted rappers -- writers and technicians and enormous personalities -- who were peaking around the same time. All that is true enough. But one of the greatest skills that a rapper can possess is the skill of self-aggrandizement. And if you look at it from that angle, and that angle only, Puff Daddy was one of the greatest rappers of his era.