The Clive Davis Effect
You get something, but for that you make a pact with the devil. I’m scared. I I’ve said powerful people, greedy people. I’ve said people who don’t care about humans. Looks like a sacrifice to me. Blame for inventing Diddy. The devil comes. The devil comes to kill, steal, and destroy. And he’s not he’s not satisfied.
He doesn’t care about just one soul. He wants to take take down as many as he can. He wants people around to be miserable and unhappy, sad, whatever it takes. For over five decades, Clive Davis sat at the top of the music industry being the most powerful gatekeeper in the history of the music business. He discovered them, he built them, he made them legends, and then one by one they were gone.
Janis Joplin, Whitney Houston, Phyllis Hyman, Lisa Left Eye Lopes, Biggie, Sly Stone, Angie Stone robbed from Milli Vanilli, and the list goes on and on. Different eras, similar causes, but one thing in common. They all passed through the same door. Take a musical journey In order for me to sign my deal, I had to sit down at the table with Clive Davis, and I had to look at Clive and say, “What do you think about this?” That’s when he signed the check.
And then I had to go to like a bunch of parties with Clive Davis, like parties that I didn’t even understand. It was just like people that I didn’t know who they were. Just a bunch of like millionaires and billionaires and houses that didn’t even look real. And Clive Davis used to tell me, “Just You stand right here.
” Put his arm on my shoulder and say, “Don’t move.” I’m 16, 17, so I’m This is how it’s still kind of strange to me. Clive Davis built up and pushed these young artists, but always kept creative control over their careers through their contracts. Clive had a reputation for being overly controlling. Some of these artists spoke out against him, then Clive blacklisted them, and their careers would be over.
The best example of that would be Phyllis Hyman, who said she was terrorized by Clive Davis after she wanted to take her career in a different direction. Clive Davis taught me to never be afraid because I was so I was so terrorized by him. Whether he meant to do it or not, I’ll never know. But he sure taught me that if you try to terrorize me again well, we can’t say that on public radio what I may do to someone who tries to hurt me again in this business.
I’m not going I’m not having it. I should be respected as I respect and I will not have someone try to ruin my spirit and ruin my career. If if Clive Davis if his plan was to destroy my career it didn’t work. And in the entertainment field where both blacks generate billions of dollars we don’t often get the opportunity to reap the benefits from that money that we generate.
And considering that I generate part of that billion, I’m going to take it back to the community that put me here in the first place. That’s very important to me. It makes sense. It’s like adding one and one together. It makes two. Well, if the community put me out here, I’ve got to bring the community where I am. It’s that simple.
And it it makes so much sense to me. I don’t understand why others don’t do it more often. Well, I was going to ask you that. Why don’t you think they are? I have not asked any other black artist. Phyllis Hyman was dropped from the record label in favor of Whitney Houston by Clive Davis. She had long battled depression and passed away in 1995.
Official reports and public records claim that her death was a suicide resulting from an intentional overdose. Many of these artists died in similar overdose scenarios, which we will see later on. Unlike Phyllis, Whitney Houston was mostly cooperative with Clive Davis. He helped her reach global fame and superstardom.
But underneath the fame, there was an addiction problem severe enough to destroy everything. Whitney’s story would also end in a tragedy which would spark many rumors on what really happened. When they did her autopsy, they said there was nothing wrong with her throat. She her lungs were so damaged that she couldn’t fuel the notes.
The next thing you know, she’s Ray J. It’s Grammy time and her and Clive had a fight 2 days before. And from what I was told, Bobbi Kristina was present for some of that fight. And then the next thing you know, she’s dead. Ray J was the last person to see her alive. He let the drug dealer in, but she was sober, right? But he let the drug dealer in that gave her a shot.
Leolah has said Leolah Brown, Bobby Brown’s sister, has said on several occasions that her she was beaten. They saw her body. She didn’t just die in a tub. Like she was beat up. And Brandy was the one that found her. But you know, they they pledged allegiance to Clive, too. I just thought it was all kind of cheesy.
Um The official cause of death was accidental drowning with an overdose listed as a major contributing factor. 2 days prior to Whitney’s tragic passing, she appeared out of nowhere and interrupted a Clive Davis interview. She says, “I almost drowned today.” Gives Brandy a note.
Then 2 days later ends up dead from accidental drowning. By now, sadly, you’ve all learned of the unspeakably tragic news of our beloved Whitney’s passing. I was informed about this just a few hours before my dinner. Literally, I was in shock. Everything stopped. So, everybody was wondering like, all right, is will the pre-Grammy go on? You know, I think a lot of people, you know, that were there, they felt really weird about what was going on, but it was something that we had to deal with and we wound up, because of Clive,
dealing with it as a musical family all together. And I tried to determine what would be the right thing to do. I felt that the show must go on. I felt in the tradition of music and show business that the show does go on. Whitney was there for that show. She would want it to go on. Three years later, her daughter died.
Almost exactly the same way as Whitney. Found in a bathtub, overdosed. In this tough business, you can never really rest on your laurels. If you’re an artist, you have to keep at the cutting edge. You have to come up with hit after hit after hit. And if you’re an executive like me, you have to keep reinventing yourself.
Going from rock to pop to urban crossover to street. Clive, you for inventing Diddy. you for letting that out of control whack-ass whoremonger and sodomite just run rampant all over this business. you for that. And Clive Davis, it’s rare in this industry that you get somebody to really ride with you.
Imagine going through some ups and downs like that and having somebody stand by your side when the whole world’s turning their back on you. Somebody that believes in you. Somebody’s going to be there for you in your darkest hour. That’s the type of man Clive Davis is. It was very special meeting Sean puffy Combs.
He had a very specific vision. Yeah, one of my big pitches to Clive was that hip hop is an international mainstream art form. The records that I was making and the artists that I was putting out could really take over and change the sound of pop radio. Puffy came up and played for me Craig Mack flavor in your ear.
And then he played me three or four cuts from an artist that he was grooming. And to my untrained ear, it was special. When I first played Clive my music, nobody had heard what I was working on. We just talked for hours about music and his knowledge about music and hip hop and the things that I produced it was just mind-blowing and and he understood he was hearing something special.
He knew he was hearing a new sound. To this young man has got the goods and I made a deal to finance Bad Boy Records. Clive Davis and Arista Records initially invested $1.5 million then later another $10 million into Bad Boy Records. Bad Boy’s flagship artist The Notorious B.I.G.
was killed in a drive-by shooting in 1997 becoming yet another artist to join the Clive Davis curse. Clive and Diddy made huge profits from Biggie’s death. In retrospect from a business standpoint, Clive Davis was to Bad Boy Records what Jimmy Iovine was to Death Row with one major difference and that is Clive kept a much lower profile than Jimmy involving hip hop.
I’ve been his competitor. I’ve been his friend. These next artists didn’t die in a drive-by shooting. Their destruction came from a different kind of bullet. Public humiliation involving the scandal from which they never recovered. Two unemployed dancers from Germany were the biggest pop duo on the planet.
Milli Vanilli won a Grammy and sold millions of records worldwide. Global superstars signed to Arista. And then the truth came out with the infamous lip-sync scandal when their backing track malfunctioned and started skipping during a live performance. They hadn’t sung a single word on their album. Clive didn’t hesitate.
He dropped them immediately and deleted their album and its masters from the record label’s catalog entirely. Their Grammy was revoked. You can’t judge protect the fame. And if people are there who said you suffer this, you get something. But for that you make a pact with the devil. Mr. Clive Davis knew a lot of advance in before the Grammys what is here the case.
The record company, not only here in America, knew about what kind of game was here played. We ended it. Rob and Fab ended Milli Vanilli, not Frank Farian. We told him if we can’t sing on our record, you have to you have to go on the person say that we don’t sing because we couldn’t break out of our contract. Just the producer can stop the contract.
We didn’t want this Grammy because look, we were under extreme pressure. And the people who really were involved like Arista, like Frank Honestly, for me it’s now for me it’s a very sensitive situation now because I upset a lot of people now in the business. I upset big people. I upset powerful people. I upset greedy people.
I upset people who don’t care about humans. I upset people who don’t care about what’s with Rob and Fab. So, I’m scared. I’m scared now, but we are finally we are finally happy that it’s over. Every time lying. Every time lying even to our families. Clive Davis knew, Mr. Mr. Clive Davis knew. He promised me, he promised us.
He promised us to help, to persuade Frank to sing on the record. He promised us, he gave us the word. And you see what he did now. He turned around because for money. We were scared. People threatened us. We have evidence for that and we’re happy that it’s over, you know. Clive Davis gave his word to Milli Vanilli that he would fix their situation.
Instead, he cashed in on them, dropped them from a label, and erased them from the record label’s history entirely, as if they never even existed. In 1998 at the age of 33, Rob died from an accidental overdose. Working for years under Clive’s record labels, she never said anything publicly. She followed him everywhere, made music, and played the game.
It was only decades down the road in 2024 and later on that Angie Stone began speaking out and detailing how the music industry had been robbing her this entire time. One thing about me, I haven’t done a biopic because everybody that wants to do a biopic, my story is so deep that it will uncover layers and layers, and I’m talking about layers of truth.
And I think people are really afraid because they know they know. I’ll share a couple of things with you that are going to be shocking. Everybody don’t wish good things for you. Some people wish bad things. Uh the devil tried to stop that, it was snatched down, then it was put back up. Uh you tried to, of course, blame it on me, but it wasn’t my fault.
However, as I was coming through all of this, I [snorts] soon found out that one of the biggest companies that I was with, Universal Music, we began to research things to check on my royalties and my statements and things that uh of that nature only to find out a lot of my publishing, a lot of my royalties, my mechanicals, they have all pretty much been stolen.
Uh as I begin to find out things that I never had to look into because when you hire a team of people that to some degree supposed to have your back, you’re thinking that they’re getting it all together for you, you know. Then I let a lot of important things slip through the cracks only because I didn’t know any better.
At the end of the day at after 40-something years in the business, I’m like, “Well, why? Where are my royalties going cuz I’m not getting this?” Come to find out Universal Music has been receiving all my royalties. All my mechanicals. They’ve taken pretty much everything. They’ve stolen. They have basically absorbed in that company and even though there’s several class-action lawsuits, people that were working on my behalf never even registered the songs all the songs that I’ve done, I’m only coming to find out they were not properly registered by the
companies that I signed over to. I should have been able to retire 20 years ago with the money I’ve made. But there are key people that have been driving the ships. And what they’ve been doing is improperly representing me, improperly stealing from me, taking things in their own hands, changing and switching lanes because they knew I didn’t know that part.
See, I’m not an attorney. I don’t know everything. What I learned how to do was go out, work. They’re always going to make it confrontational when it doesn’t suit their liking. But I don’t care about that. I got to pass all of that. So, I’m just here to let you know one way or the other, Universal Music, you’re going to have to give up my coins.
And so, what I’m doing now is whatever is necessary to make sure they pay me for the legacy of my life, for my children and my grandchildren. They’re going to have to give me my money. I don’t know what they might do to keep from paying me all the money they owe me. New details in the tragic death of Grammy-nominated R&B singer Angie Stone.
She died in a car accident. Her children have now filed a lawsuit claiming Stone survived the initial accident and was trying to escape the van she was riding in with her bandmates. It claims that she was killed when a tractor trailer crashed into the van. The lawsuit blames the drivers and owners of both the vehicles, along with the collision system in the truck saying it failed to stop or detect the van.
It looks like a sacrifice to me. Why do you need an NDA for an accident? If it’s an accident, it’s an accident. Lot of people GOING MISSING. THAT DRIVER’S missing now, too. Angie Stone was the only person dead out of nine people in the van. Lisa Lopes passed away in a very similar situation.
Again, the car flips over and she was the only person dead out of eight people in the vehicle. Allegedly, Lisa had a heated argument with Clive Davis about TLC being broke despite selling millions of albums. She was leaving Arista to sign with Def Row, but also she was working on a documentary about the music industry. Both women worked for Arista.
Both died in very suspicious similar ways. Over the years, many names piled up and all of them had one thing in common, working with Clive Davis. On June 22nd, 2026, some would say the devil finally came for his receipts and Clive Davis died at the age of 94.
