It’s Bad Boy For Life? Artists Whose Talents Are/Were Wasted Under Bad Boy Records

Carl Thomas

I used to LOVE Carl Thomas, and in fact, I still bump his platinum selling Emotional to this day. Thomas was the perfect act for Bad Boy, a strong R&B crooner who wasn’t caught up in group or rapping, but could still sell albums just off of good song writing and a wonderful voice. I first heard him doing his thing on the remix for Diddy & Mase’s “Been Around the World” way back when, but when he came out with Emotional, which featured hit singles such as I Wish,  and Summer Rain, Thomas wasn’t a featured artist anymore–he was a star.  But after the death of his step-brother around the release of his second album, Let’s Talk About It, Thomas took a sabbatical from music and didn’t do promotion for the new disc. Once he returned to the music scene in 2007, he was with a new label and putting out music under the radar. Why Bad Boy didn’t try to keep the talented singer on their label, I’ll never understand, but it possibly could have been because the direction they saw Thomas’ career going and the direction he wanted it to go were different. As the singer said in a recent interview about his time with the label, “I wanted what I wanted for my career and for myself before there was even a Bad Boy. My walk is my walk, and there walk is their walk.”