He’ll be who? Joe Jonas just changed up a famous lyric in his song “Cake By The Ocean.” Fans of the Jonas Brothers noticed that he purposefully skipped it over amid the record mogul’s arrest.
For context, Sean “Diddy” Combs was arrested in New York on September 16, 2024, and charged with sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution. He pleaded not guilty to all charges and was refused bail. Allegations against the Bad Boy Records CEO date back more than a decade, but as more evidence came out about his behavior, many celebrities have chosen to omit references to him.
Joe Jonas and his band DNCE released the song “Cake by the Ocean” on September 18, 2015, and the song peaked at No. 9 on the Billboard 100 charts. During the chorus, Joe sings, “I’ll be Diddy, you’ll be Naomi, woah-oh” referring to Diddy’s short-term relationship with supermodel Naomi Campbell. The band also posed with Diddy for a photo shortly after the song came out.
What did Joe Jonas change his Diddy lyric in “Cake by the Ocean” to?
At a Jonas Brothers concert in Paris’s LDLC Arena on September 28, 2024, Joe Jonas decided to replace the name “Diddy” with something else. The actual name isn’t clear in footage, but many fans have speculated that he’s saying “Watts” instead of Diddy in reference to actress Naomi Watts. Other fans believe he sang, “Martin,” but no one is quite sure who Martin is referring to.
The Paris show is the first time that Joe Jonas made the change to the song. Even after Diddy’s arrest, Joe seemed to still sing the Diddy line in his concerts in London and Vienna the week before.
Joe isn’t the first artist to change their Diddy references. When Reneé Rapp brought out Kesha during her Coachella set in April, she changed the lyrics to her 2010 song “Tik Tok” from “Wake up in the mornin’ feelin like P. Diddy” to “Wake up in the mornin’ like f—k P Diddy.” Maren Morris also omitted Diddy’s name in her song “Rich” during a performance at the Bourbon & Beyond music festival in Louisville, Kentucky in early September 2024.
