SEAN COMBS

Before he was a world-renowned hip-hop impresario and multi-hyphenate businessman with designs on starting a political movement, Sean “Puff Daddy/Diddy/Love” Combs got his start A&Ring R&B acts like Jodeci and Mary J. Blige at Uptown Records. For his next endeavor, he’s getting back to those roots, as he told Vanity Fair in the magazine’s upcoming September issue. Although he did previously announce he was putting out an R&B album, here he goes a step further, announcing that he’ll be starting a new, R&B-centric record label as well.

And before any of his many critics could point out that his previous label, Bad Boy, has a less-than-stellar record in how it treated its artists, Combs explained that he’s doing things differently this time, explaining that he wants to get back to R&B because “I feel like R&B was abandoned and it’s a part of our African American culture,” he says. “And I’m not signing any artists. Because if you know better, you do better. I’m doing 50–50 partnerships with pure transparency.”

He also elaborates that his purpose in launching such a label is so “we can own the genre; we don’t own hip-hop right now. We have a chance to — and I’m going to make sure that — we own R&B.” Although he hasn’t announced any projects or even a name just yet, it may be interesting to find out whether or not he can be the person to drive innovation in the music business.

You can read the full profile here.

Whether you grew up calling him Puff Daddy, P. Diddy, or Sean “Diddy” Combs, the entertainer variously known as all three is officially “Sean Love Combs” on his driver’s license, which he shared on Instagram earlier today (forgetting to blank out his address and other identifying details — although, it’s hard to imagine he’d be hard to find if one wanted to do so in the first place). Diddy previously “joked” about changing his name to “Brother Love,” then just to “Love” a few years ago, but as it turns out, he was dead serious — in a way.

Of course, the name change to a more positive moniker hasn’t cleared up very much of the confusion around his stage name; on DJ Khaled’s recently released 12th album Khaled Khaled, Combs is still credited as “Puff Daddy” on “This Is My Year” which also features A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, Big Sean, and Rick Ross. And while Puff Daddy closes the track with much of his signature big money talk, his trademark motivational mouthiness has drawn criticism elsewhere, as fans took issue with his open letter to General Motors chastising the auto manufacturer for exploiting Black artists — a practice he’s been accused of himself multiple times over the years.

You can see Diddy’s new license reading his updated name here.