1.
Last year, Diddy donned the Puff Daddy moniker once more for the Bad Boy Family Reunion Tour, a mobile mega-concert looking back at the biggest hip-hop label ever. Of the 52-song setlist, Diddy performed the first seven and returned to feature on six more. Both New York City dates sold out within seven minutes.

2.
Last Train to Paris is enough of a who’s-who that the Drake feature, obligatory even in 2010, feels tacked on. In a little over an hour, absolutely everybody shows up. And do they ever show up. On Shades, Lil Wayne drops a sort of doppelganger of Andre 3000’s legendary International Player’s Anthem verse over what sounds like a beat from Oneohtrix Point Never, setting off an unbelievable ensemble jam featuring perfect performances from Bilal and James Fauntleroy and a verse from Justin Timberlake that, like everything besides FutureSex/LoveSounds and Ayo Technology, we really ought to pretend never happened. It’s not entirely clear when Chris Brown’s two appearances happened, but I’m hoping like hell it was still ok to like him when Yesterday was recorded.

Perhaps even more remarkable is the success that some of the album’s bit players would find later in their career. The Dirty Money portion of the extremely strange artist name refers to the duo of Kalenna Harper and Dawn Richard, the latter formerly of Danity Kane and currently something of a cult heroine of r’n’b whose sound is basically the Last Train to Paris Expanded Universe. I Know features a truly incredible amount of Wiz Khalifa’s laughter, but even that can’t mask the backing vocals from Seven of RichGirl, who would later become Sevyn Streeter of It Won’t Stop. Buried in the credits, one discovers that J. Cole wrote on Coming Home, which makes sense given that the rapping portions of the track are absolute garbage.

3.
I hate this thing where you write a bunch of numbered vignettes in lieu of actual transitions between paragraphs as much as you, but it’s real hot right now and I wanted to give it a try.

4.
Absent from the virtually non-existent critical discourse on Last Train to Paris is any mention of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The two came out about a month apart and, honestly, have no business being considered independently of one another. I almost prefer to pretend that Diddy just had to have him one of them and arranged the album’s recording in a matter of days, but that’s obviously not the case - instead, we have a Newton-Leibniz scenario where two minds arrived simultaneously yet individually at a single point, that point being the most grandiose vision of pop imaginable. The two are not so much comparable as they are similarly beyond comparison: the outros of Your Love and Ass On The Floor are not reminiscent of specific tracks from MBDTF but rather impossible to imagine on any other album but these two.

Ostensibly, Paris’s narrative is more robust, although one could be forgiven for not realizing that the songs were in any way thematically connected (here’s what I’ve gathered: at the end Diddy comes home, either from or to Paris, and somewhere in the middle there are asses on the floor). Instead, the album functions as an alternative approach to Kanye’s mildly over-appreciated point: fame’s not that tight. How could Diddy’s itch for recognition possibly remain unscratched? How dire was the situation that having a hit song was worth yielding its actual performance almost entirely to other artists?

5.
A lot of notably bad writing has been published through vanity presses. Born of an author-publisher dynamic that became obsolete with the propagation of the printing press, paying for publication soon became the exclusive domain of those convinced that their brilliance was held back only by their inability to convince anybody else of it. I’m not sure if it’s common for the owners of vanity presses to publish their garbage through their own businesses - the easier route would be to rest satisfied that your genius had finally been realized as a business acumen merely misdiagnosed as latent writing ability. Diddy had no such reservations; perhaps he was just bored. While DJ Khaled is perhaps the best example of the phenomenon of artistry-by-association, he can at least plausibly profess to remain in the empire-building phase. By the time of Last Train to Paris, wealth can’t possibly have been anything but an abstract concept to Diddy. If it wasn’t, the album wouldn’t have flaws - a claim made credible by the astounding work that a veritable army of collaborators and features did here. By contrast, Diddy’s contributions are in an enviable position; where listenability is lacking, a believable sincerity fills in. And when Diddy actually shows up, it’s so surprising that I can say this honestly: he fucking snaps. If ever Rick Ross’s reference track for that verse leaks, it won’t hold a candle.

6.
Brian Eno’s Music for Airports birthed the genre of ambient music. While its scope has grown to include consideration of active listening, the idea back then was a functional music that would accentuate but never disrupt or seize control of a room’s central, non-musical purpose. The hustle and bustle of a crowded airport would be eased by the soothing piano loops, a little peace amongst a natural state of turmoil.

Just a week ago, Norwegian Air announced a new direct route from Denver to Paris. There’ll be a couple departures a day, the last of which is a killer red-eye departing at 2am. I’ve been there (not Paris, but DIA in the early morning). It’s not a pretty sight, or an anything sight - for all of the city’s massive population growth and tourism industry, the airport’s reliably empty in the wee hours. What a place to listen to Last Train to Paris.