Last week I invited RWS scandalous book fans to join me in reading Mark Curry’s Bad Boy Records tell-all ‘Dancing With the Devil: How Puff Burned the Bad Boys of Hip Hop [click here if you missed that].'
So lets get to it…
Mark Curry’s tale is a very familiar one in the music industry.
It starts with Mark explaining how he blew off his education, dropping out of high school, to follow his music dreams in Atlanta.
Mark talks about hustling to make ends meet before hooking up with Puffy and even brags that the best job he ever had was as a luggage handler at the airport because of all the money he made stealing from luggage. At that point it was kind of hard for me to have sympathy for him getting ripped off in the end. Sorry, but not sorry.
Anyway, according to Mark, he like everyone else on Bad Boy, signed a contract with Diddy giving the Bad Boy CEO half his publishing rights after having the contract looked over by lawyers recommended to him by Diddy.
Big mistake. It was a wrap after that.
Diddy used Mark to write many of his hits including Go with Me from the Godzilla soundtrack and Bad Boys for Life, while never putting out Mark’s album like he promised.
The worse part is it took Mark 10 whole years to realize Diddy was playing him even though he watched Diddy do it over and over again to other artists on Bad Boy, including Love and Hip Hop Atlanta star Stevie J.
Mark goes into great detail about a lot of well known incidents involving Puffy including his attacking Steve Stoute over the Hate Me Now video, his fist fight with the late Shakir Stewart over Kim Porter, the infamous club shooting involving Shyne and Jennifer Lopez and Biggie’s murder in LA.
In the end Mark ends up broke, homeless but not bitter and says if he can help at least one music industry hopeful not end up like him then his suffering was not in vain.
