Music Review: “King Push - Darkest Before Dawn: The Prelude”.

Pusha T clearly enjoys being the villain of mainstream rap. He exudes little in the way of regret or repentance, cackling with every perfectly-calibrated cocaine punchline and practically sneering with defiance in turn, daring you to condemn him. He thrives off disdain, off hate, off the jealousy of others. The newly minted president of Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music imprint, Pusha is coasting off the heady fumes emitted by his major-label debut “My Name is My Name”. That record — its title taken from a particularly ominous quote from “The Wire’s” Marlo Stanfield, the show’s most heartless and loathsome character, a remorseless drug lord with a reptilian view of humanity — was pretty lead-hot, save for a few made-for-radio duds and the inclusion of lesser guest MCs like 2Chainz and Big Sean. Filled with bonkers, off-time beats and the vicious, focused bragging of a young man who’s smart enough to know better but not moralistic enough to follow his more noble impulses “My Name is My Name” was, to quote a lyrical couplet from Pusha’s new sort-of EP, “Darkest Before Dawn,” “anti-everything”. Anti-everything as in anti-fake, anti-morality, anti-anyone who is not Pusha T, really. His gifts as a rapper and a storyteller are hard to dispute — he’s a much better MC, for example, than Kanye West, though West’s real genius lies behind the boards — but his nihilistic worldview and monomaniacal subject matter (read: profiting off cocaine) can be a hard thing to warm up to.

“Darkest Before Dawn” is, as its title would suggest, darker, uglier and ultimately far more compelling than “My Name is My Name” because it’s Pusha T stripped bare of his lofty hubris, expanding his artistic identity while retaining the indomitable shit-talk and coke talk that made him famous and working with a who’s who of the industry’s best producers, including West, Timbaland, J. Cole and Q. Tip (!!!). As always, Pusha is formidable, determined, pragmatic. He never flies off the leash the way someone like, say, Future might — he’s too much in lockstep for all of that. And yet the braggadocio-spouting young hustler of the Clipse has grown into something more intriguing over the course of his surprising and successful career: a sort of weary, wizened elder statesman. I’m not fully suggesting that King Push has mellowed and abandoned all talks of bricks in the ceiling and whatnot, but he has broadened his horizons, tackling more diverse subject matter, even if a significant degree of his worldview still feels repellent when not taken as fiction. It’s a pretty good look for the 38-year old MC, and if “Darkest Before Dawn” really is just the appetizer for the full-course meal that will presumably be “King Push,” then it’s a hell of a way to get things started.

“Intro” starts over creeping “Blade Runner” synths and a mangled voice that sounds like it’s caterwauling from the inside of a black hole. The drums then drop like the feet of elephants and Push instantly launches into his first scathing verse, imploring listeners to know just what they’re in for (“Leave your conscious at your door/we done left the monsters in the floor”). “Untouchable” flips a Biggie sample into something weird and curdled and creepy, like a serial killer lullaby, or nu metal if it were actually, you know, good. Push still sounds angry as hell here (“I am like Bono with the Edge/In Mexico/Fuck Donald and his pledge” ), and it’s not until the third track that we even get something even loosely resembling a radio rap single in the form of his menacing collaboration with The Dream, “M.F.T.R”.

“Crutches, Crosses, Caskets” with its swirling, seasick strings and unfussy production sounds like a lost cut from the Clipse’s trunk-rattling debut “Lord Willin’,” although the one identity that doesn’t look so good on King Push is the Grumpy Old Man of rap. Still, he has a bit of mean-spirited fun at the expense of younger, wealthy rappers who he feels are falsely victimized, and the inherent inauthenticity of the lifestyle they are peddling. He even gets in some uncharacteristically surreal, Ghostface-style wordplay (“Mildred’s in the Bahamas/for the month/she probably sittin’ in her pajamas/havin’ lunch/swordfish/my reality is More Fish/banana clips for all you Curious Georges”) that’s a far cry from the fatalistic and deliberate flow he’s employed to such devastating effect on past records.

“M.P.A.” which, you guessed it, stands for Money, Pussy, Alcohol, is unexpectedly the album’s best track, as well as its saddest. Far from being a high-spirited toast courtesy of three very rich, famous and gifted cats who are indisputably at the top of the rap game, “M.P.A.” is a self-loathing apology, a lament draped in expensive designer wares and drunk off its own sense of engorged, sprawl. It opens with an ebullient, otherworldly electro-lullaby that sounds straight off of “My Beautiful, Dark, Twisted Fantasy” — as it should, since West produced this cruel number. He lends the song, which details the crushing plight of an insecure woman’s ritual debasement at the hands of rich assholes, as she tires of romancing drug dealers and reprehensible criminal types and sets her sights on a more heightened, if not necessarily brighter, existence. It is a gorgeous shrug of a song, with a profound core of self-hatred and yes, regret. It’s not an emotion that we typically associate with Pusha, and the switch-up in “M.P.A.” turns the song, which features vocal contributions from West and Harlem’s A.S.A.P. Rocky, into a hazy, drugged-out eulogy for decency and for a better life. It is only matched by the album’s closing salvo: that would be “Sunshine,” featuring the gorgeous voice of Jill Scott, wherein our callous cocaine cowboy takes aim at the greater injustices plaguing America and, in his own twisted, self-serving way, makes a plea for a better tomorrow. He name-checks Freddie Gray and decries police brutality WITHOUT somehow digressively endorsing Colombian marching powder- yes, you read that correctly. It is here that Push sketches his most vivid and startling tales of inner-city strife, with a remarkable verisimilitude and an attention to detail that’s worthy of KRS-One (“In order to be me/You gotta see what Chief Keef see/Brenda’s baby next door to the candy lady/Same project as the candy man/where they still doin’ hand-in-hands/Sunday to Sunday/Pastor only want one day/Grandma praying someday/But God Can’t hear it over gunplay”). It may sound hyperbole in regards to a guy who is undeniably a part of the popular (read: inferior) rap zeitgeist, but in this case, it’s well-earned.

Lamb of God frontman Randy Blythe wrote a pretty great review of “My Name is My Name” wherein he praised Pusha’s lyrical abilities and top-shelf production but lamented the rapper’s seeming inability to move beyond what he believed was a one-note and morally irresponsible subject: the selling of drugs, and the cartoon-villain lifestyle that comes with it. So yes, for those curious parties: he still raps about coke. It’s a miracle that the conceit itself hasn’t gotten entirely tiresome yet. Push has not entirely abandoned that world, and he never may — this is, after all, an album that features a song called “Keep Dealin’” (one that features Beanie Siegel, because duh). That song, however, is the least interesting thing on the album and that’s because one gets the sense over the fleet ten-track runtime that Push is genuinely trying to expand his artistic horizons and thus, his identity, while still retaining the fearsome degree of credibility that he’s earned from his street releases. He says it best himself on “M.F.T.R.”: “This is old dog in the courtyard/you wonder why I’m still here?/I’m America’s worst nightmare”. That’s worth about a hundred “yeuchs” for ya. B+