There are no rules in rap beef because there are no longer any rules at all. Our society is built for branding geniuses who understand the power of the grift. As long as you’re convincing, conviction is irrelevant. The truth is built on shifting sand. You can be the greatest rapper of your generation and you don’t even need to write. You can be from Toronto, but also from Houston, Memphis, Atlanta, Tottenham, Kingston, and the Meat Show. You can be Wheelchair Jimmy with Mob Ties. You can steal sauce, flows, and entire songs from fledgling talents and pass it off as “putting them on.” You can dodge tough interviews for an entire career because who needs press when a streaming company, partially owned by your label, can turn over the entire machine to you. And you have an exclusive deal with the other one. This isn’t God’s plan because there is no God. But it’s a clever Instagram caption, I guess.
Pusha T is 41-years old. The first lines of his career were “playas we ain’t the same, I’m into ‘caine and guns.” His brother followed it up, 90 seconds later, by bragging about helping their grandmother import yay from the Bahamas. Terrence Thornton grew up seeing Biggie and Puff outside of Virginia Beach clubs, hearing rumors about the D-Boys who made them to perform, security concerns or not. I doubt that he’s played
Fortnite and his definition of twitch is surely distinct from yours.
By constitution, he is diametrically opposed to Drake. The 32-year old that still goes by “the boy” does most musical things modestly well. Pusha does one thing—and one thing only—as well as nearly anyone to ever do it. Drake is a politician with villainous sympathies. Pusha is an avowed villain, but people actually describe him similarly to the greatest victim of rap beef: “he’s nice, but that’s on the low though.”
Who cares what these two were originally bickering about? It was mostly inconsequential, a series of trivial feuds sparked by other members of their camps. Drake and Pusha hated each other because some people are just supposed to hate each other. They believe in different ideals, their visions of the world are in natural conflict, that’s how art is supposed to work. You can make this about rap, but artists in all mediums are infamously petty. fukk a rap song. Novelists have devoted entire books to settling scores. Michelangelo stopped Da Vinci in the streets of Florence to diss him for never finishing a statue of a horse in Milan—presumably in the cadences of the “Duppy Freestyle.”
Every line of “The Story of Adidon” is a guillotine blade severing a jugular vein. It’s not for everyone because it’s the audible version of
Red Asphalt. Or maybe it’s the Red Wedding of rap. It never wound up a surgical summer because the operation was too effective on the first go-around. Run through the greatest rap disses of all-time, and this is easily Top 5. I’ll give you “No Vaseline” and “Takeover,” but then what? “Ether” can’t compare because half of it is tasteless homophobia. Pusha starts this off by spotting Drake the ghostwriting fiasco. He doesn’t need to bring in Sauce Walka’s claim that T.I.’s friend pissed on him in an Atlanta movie theater.
He’s fighting with one hand behind his back, and he never flinches.
Don’t tell me that it’s not great because it’s someone else’s beat, because so was “Hit Em Up.” Even the selection was artful and pointed, somehow re-contextualizing Jay’s best song of the decade. Don’t tell me that the artwork wasn’t a knockout punch off top because of Drake’s Instagram explanation. It’s not that a very young and naïve Drake made a foolish mistake by trying to be edgy, it’s that he was corny and lame enough to do it in the first place (
and think that people wouldn’t once again notice he was biting Phonte).
Every line is an individual decapitation. Pusha drops the best music criticism of the year (“your music is angry and full of lies.”) It features the year’s best investigative reporting
(“You are hiding a child” makes “you are not deep” look like “you are the sunshine of my life.”) He mocks the unpaid royalties and tithes that Drake has had to pay to burnish his credibility. And Dennis Graham will never look at his suit closet the same way again
It’s not merely that Pusha exposed Drake for being a deadbeat dad or his desperation to keep up the gilded public image that disguises a seedier side. It’s the sardonic tone and caustic contempt you hear in his voice. He backs Drake so deep into the corner that no response was actually possible. He’d have had to go even more scorched earth, which would have done more damage to the America’s sweetheart image that he rigorously cultivated. Pusha doesn’t have to go on
Ellen.
Every syllable is sneer delivered through fanged teeth: the middle point between “Takeover” and “Hit Em Up” without any of those bullshyt Outlawz verses.
It’s brilliant because it exposes the inner rot behind the façade, the hall of mirrors that Drake has so brilliantly, emptily constructed. The most painful insults aren’t supposed to be mean; they’re supposed to be true.
The only ontological philosophy unifying millennial life is that nothing matters. Our society was always hideously flawed and grotesquely hypocritical, but it inevitably aspired towards a certain rudimentary logic: authenticity was important, honesty was essential, and making money wasn’t intrinsically synonymous with success. Once upon a time, post-modern theorists and Adam Smith flunkies viciously attacked those ideas with polemical screeds. Now you just get a LOL emoji.
In a world where the truth has never mattered less, Pusha reminded us for three minutes that there are still those who hold some things sacred. It held up Drake under an ultraviolet light so you could see the stains. What kind of a sociopath unveils their baby to promote a new line of sneakers? Whatever happened to those Adidon shoes anyway?
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Jeff Weiss
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