Cassie was on her way to massive pop stardom. Then she met Diddy.

There’s a tacit expertise we demand of pop songs — the implicit assurance that, for the next three or four minutes, our dopamine levels are being manipulated by vetted professionals. But more than that, we demand excitement, and we don’t really care how we get it. Sometimes, a miracle happens. A song that has very little of the first thing generates wild amounts of the second thing, and through that tiny window of time, life shimmers with possibility.

In the summer of 2006, the song was “Me & U” by Cassie, a 19-year-old J.C. Penney model from Connecticut who seemed to be singing down to us from the Earth’s exosphere, where the air fades into nothingness and gravity lets go. She sounded so cool out there, radiating either sang-froid or innocence, the sweetness and thinness of her voice making it tricky to tell which. There wasn’t anything combustible in her delivery, no rocketing crescendos or roller-coaster runs associated with the R&B that preceded her. Instead, Cassie was resourceful, always picking the exact-right notes within her limited reach — flawless melodic choices she made alongside rookie songwriter-producer Ryan Leslie, who recorded “Me & U,” along with the rest of Cassie’s self-titled debut album, on a desktop computer in his Harlem apartment.

That approach isn’t so novel these days, but in 2006, homemade pop singles didn’t hit No. 3 on the Hot 100. And on “Cassie,” there were 10 more tracks where “Me & U” came from, all of them sounding as if they were made by angels learning how to chew bubble gum and program synthesizers at the same time. You could hear little glints of ’80s electro, Latin freestyle and wannabe crunk in this music, but above all, “Cassie” felt inventive by necessity. Together, the duo had something better than expertise. They had intuition.

And compared with the contemporaneous maximalism that Timbaland and Justin Timberlake were flexing on that summer’s zeitgeist-devouring “FutureSex/LoveSounds,” the songs on “Cassie” seemed diminutive, but focused, as if she and Leslie were squinting harder at a more translucent vision of a deeper future. As influence goes, though, Cassie’s future would arrive first. It’s easy to hear the icy minimalism of “Me & U” forecasting the generational chill of the Weeknd, Frank Ocean, Kelela and other singers in the greater R&B tradition who continue to prioritize mood over big-note catharsis. As for the rest of us, few listeners might volunteer “Cassie” as one of the best pop albums of the aughties, but revisiting it now, even fewer could argue that it isn’t among the decade’s most singular.

It stayed that way. Cassie never released a sophomore album — something that felt weird and inexplicable until only recently, when a harrowing spate of news stories began to hint at why. Apparently, it began at the beginning. Cassie Ventura met Sean “Diddy” Combs while recording her debut album. She was 19. He was 37. She signed to Combs’s Bad Boy Records, then became his protégée and romantic partner. As a celebrity, she rose to girlfriend-of-a-household-name status, but as an artist, she derailed into record-biz purgatory, promising the world a new album that kept slipping through everyone’s fingers. In 2008, she was calling it “Connecticut Fever.” In 2009, she was calling it “Electro Love.” Before long, she wasn’t calling it anything at all.

Cassie finally ended her relationship with Combs in 2018, after more than a decade together, and in November, she filed suit against him in the state of New York — where the Adult Survivors Act allowed abuse victims to sue beyond the statute of limitations within a limited window — accusing Combs of more than a decade of physical abuse, sex trafficking and rape. Combs settled out of court literally overnight, a tactic that, for many, raised even bigger flags. Now, Combs is the subject of a federal sex-trafficking probe, with the music industry hyper-mogul maintaining his innocence after investigators raided his homes in Miami and Los Angeles in March.

In light of these stomach-twisting allegations, it suddenly doesn’t take much to imagine Cassie’s artistic limbo as something far more nightmarish. “I was being pulled in so many different directions, I needed time,” she told Interview Magazine back in 2013, as if explaining her absence from the limelight in code, presenting her steeliness as more of an aesthetic choice than a survival mechanism. “... I try to be as much of an enigma as I can.”

Musically, she hasn’t been totally silent. Over the course of 18 years, she has released more than 20 official singles, a 13-track mixtape in 2013, and handfuls of lost gems that still sparkle in the wilds of YouTube. “Don’t Go Too Slow” picks up where her debut left off, minimal and mood-forward. “Activate” is a twitchy starburst so bright, Björk reportedly used to drop it in her DJ sets. Spend a few minutes with these disappeared songs, and it’s easy to lose hours imagining an alternate timeline in which Cassie’s music intertwines with Drake’s broodiness, Rihanna’s Sphinx-iness, Beyoncé’s futurism. Had Cassie been supported by a team that fostered her pop intuition all along, who knows where it could have guided her, or even pop music writ large? In this timeline, however, she seems to have lost more than a decade of her creative life to a man who allegedly used his formidable star-making powers to inflict an inverse harm.

So instead of pondering what could have been, we’re now asked to think about what will be. Combs’s image will undoubtedly be rewritten as this investigation unfolds, and sadly, so will Cassie’s. It’s likely she will transform from one of pop music’s great shoulda-beens to a powerful man’s victim. She’s far greater than either of those personifications, of course. In the public imagination, she deserves to be recognized as an artist, foremost and forever. It feels like something between an absurdity and a catastrophe that there’s only one proper Cassie album out there to prove it — but one is more than zero, and the future is something we can still squint into.

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