One of the great paradoxes of rap music today is that the biggest success story of 1997 is certain to be the music empire built on the stardom of a burly rapper who died nine months ago.

The shooting in March of 24-year-old Christopher Wallace, also known as ‘the Notorious B.I.G.’ and ‘Biggie Smalls’, has not slowed the ascent of businessman/producer Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs’s company, Bad Boy Records.

In fact during the summer, most of the songs on the upper reaches of the music charts were either by, featuring, or about Biggie Smalls!

Combs and Wallace, joined by 19-year-old New York rapper Mason ‘Mase’ Betha, were at the top of the charts for the past few months with their song ‘Mo Money, Mo Problems’, the chorus of which – “The more money we come across, the more problems we see” – gained poignance from the death of the rapper who wrote it.

Biggie Smalls also shares one other distinction: He and Diana, the deceased Princess of Wales, both had the honour of having hugely popular songs written to commemorate their lives on the pop charts. Diana, of course, was the subject of a revised version of Elton John’s song ‘Candle in the Wind’, performed at her funeral to pay tribute to the princess whom John called ‘England’s Rose’.

The more personal tribute, however, was paid to Wallace, who was the subject of the equally prominent elegy, ‘I’ll Be Missing You’, which was performed by Combs, Wallace’s estranged wife Faith Evans and the soul group ‘112’.

Combs’s affection for his musical colleague and business partner showed a personal intensity rare in modern music: “It’s hard for me when you’re not around/ Though I know you’re in Heaven, smiling down/ Watching us while we pray for you/ Every day, we pray for you.”

The other key to the song’s popularity, as with many of Combs’s hits, is its familiarity: Just like John’s Diana tribute is a variation on his earlier ballad to Marilyn Monroe, also called ‘Candle in the Wind’, ‘I’ll Be Missing You’ borrows freely from a 1983 ballad by ‘The Police’ called ‘Every Breath You Take’.

Ironically, while ‘Every Breath You Take’ was a song about sexual paranoia — its chorus told an errant lover, “I’ll be watching you” — the updated version has Faith Evans, whose relationship to Wallace seemed as tumultuous as any in Hollywood, pledging her eternal devotion.

The other odd thing about the ascent of the New York-based Bad Boy Records, which is affiliated to the larger Arista Records, is that it has encountered criticism not so much for its tough ‘gangsta rap’ lyrics as for Combs’s fondness for interpolating the choruses of old pop hits.

All of the big Bad Boy albums this year — Biggie Smalls’s ‘Life After Death’, Combs’s own record with the Family, ‘No Way Out’, and Mase’s debut, ‘Harlem World’ — offer standard gangsta topics: songs about wealth and materialism, harsh ghetto life, the threat of violence and explicit sexuality. But each one also offers the nostalgic thrill of revisiting songs from the heyday of disco and of 1980s pop music.

Besides ‘Every Breath You Take’, recent Bad Boy hits have lifted choruses or rhythms from songs by Diana Ross (as on ‘Mo Money, Mo Problems’), Gloria Estefan (on Mase’s new hit, ‘Feel So Good’), David Bowie (on Combs’s ‘Been Around the World’) — and even the theme music from Sylvester Stallone’s movie ‘Rocky’!

Such expansive borrowing has given Puffy Combs and Bad Boy a friendly, non-threatening air, allowing their raps to be cheerful boasting (along the lines of “Bad Boy makes more money than you can count”) rather than the nihilistic, violence-filled raps of Bad Boy’s California-based rival, Death Row Records.

Still, critics have attacked Combs from all sides. Rap purists have taken offense at the high level of Bad Boy’s musical interpolations, accusing Combs of being little more than a plagiarist. Others have argued that Bad Boy songs like ‘It’s All About the Benjamins’ (Benjamin Franklin’s face is on the one- hundred-dollar bill, and the song is a series of boasts about money) are a low point in rap materialism.

Some feminists are also divided on the contribution of Bad Boy’s reigning ‘bad girl’, rapper ‘Lil Kim’, whose overtly sexual songs and outfits have inspired a debate over whether she contributes positively or negatively to the role of women in rap music. Nevertheless, Bad Boy is clearly the champion of the modern rap world for 1997, with Mase’s first album at the top of the charts and the Family’s ‘No Way Out’ not far behind.

For a company whose star died tragically, this has been a time of extremely mixed blessings – or, as Biggie Smalls would rap, of ” mo’ money, mo’ problems.”