Cocaine Rap’s Last Stand
Pusha T has staked his claim on powder mountain and he isn’t getting down any time soon.
Evolution states that you have to adapt to survive. Our whole human existence has stemmed from a process of natural selection that ensures that only the best and the brightest have what it takes to make it through generations, mate, pop out a bunch of mini-mes and ensure the consistence perseverance of the human race. While this process is currently under severe reexamination due to the U.S. Election Cycle where a cartoon villain with about -3 desirable human traits is running for president, it is easily applicable to other aspects of life, such as music.
We have gone through many stages of hip-hop. From gangsta rap, to R&B, to pop rap to whatever it is mumble-rap is. Consistently, music has evolved to accommodate either technology, methods of delivery, musical talent (or lack thereof) or a combination of things. We have arrived at an era of over saturation, over-production and under performance. One might argue that we live in a post lyrical worlds where the only cadence you have to adjust to the beat is the bemused groans of your nasal cavity that only remotely sound like words. Even giants such as Kanye West can’t help but unceremoniously push the cart forward, consistently changing up their styles for what’s to come. Only Pusha T (and partially the Game with his latest 1992 sample-galore album, but about that later this week) has decisively staked his claim on what made him famous and stayed there.
The Clipse really, truly arrived in 2002 and Grindin’, a smash hit that, if you’re anything like me, wore down your play/pause button since every line was literally like Pusha or Malice going scorched earth over a Pharrell beat.
Let me digress for a second, because the beat is still fire. The beat sounds like something you could come up with sitting in a high-school cafeteria and banging against the tables. It’s like taking a baseball bat to a garage door. It’s the essence of sound colliding with your eardrums at a 100mph. It’s one of the grimiest beats ever made.
The sheer raw power of the beat was closely matched with tight metaphors turned punchlines turned drug dealer manifesto. Pusha T and Malice fed off each other’s energy which in turn fed off the streets that raised them to provide what read like a street hustlers confession. It was, at the time, the return of gangsta rap and everything that came with it, mainly the drugs and the currency.
Since then, Clipse unceremoniously pushed out more albums but never really deviated from the theme. It worked, why would they. I’m sure a cursory search of most used words by Pusha T would reveal that he says “pyrex” quite a bit, which not to provide too much of a chemistry lesson here goes hand in hand with the “Drug Dealers Anonymous” lifestyle.
Even as the times moved on, the Clipse didn’t, no matter how much the times tried to move them along. The group fell apart. A drug charge and an un-timely arrest of a close friend and confidante shook the the pair, Malice turning to religion (rebranding himself No Malice and putting out another album), Pusha staying firmly where he was. If the law couldn’t buck him off his path, neither would the evolution of music before him.
Instead of switching up his style, like many other artists, Terrence Thornton doubled down on cocaine rap. He signed with Kanye’s G.O.O.D. Music and got to working on solo records, an unceremonious autobiography of the streets in progress. No matter the apparent theme of the song (Kanye infamously stretched the very last of Thornton’s talent while recording “Runaway”) narcotics were never too far out of sight or out of mind. Even his most used stage move (as an attendee of upwards of three Pusha T concerts I feel qualified to make this assessment) is a circular counter-clockwise motion of the wrist indicating stirring of the pot (similar to James Harden although I hope entirely different metaphorically).
Pusha T has been able to survive the changing of the tide for two very simple reasons. One, his bars are immaculate. Few rappers have the capacity to melodically dance their punchlines across bars much like Pusha does before he accentuates everything with a staple YUGH. He blurs the line between spoke word and song, it’s like Hood Def Poetry Jam. While everyone’s act gets a little too artistic, a bit more distant from the “streets” with every bar, Pusha remains never more than an arm’s reach away. You can just reach out and touch him.
Much like in his latest track, Pusha T flattens his delivery across tracks, getting the most out of a track. He is best on tracks that punctuate his flatline delivery with loud, almost explosive base lines and snares. He is able to keep his voice flat while delivering metaphors at a mile a minute, almost always leading back to the same place — the drug game. While rap has long ago made braggadocio an art form, Pusha T makes it his masterpiece, with every line the building block of an almost Beowulfian face-off.
The second ingredient in this continued success is his ability to align himself with the right producers who are able to stretch the most of his seemingly one-dimensional (although anything but) talent. Pharrell seemed to be at his best next to Pusha, finding the right beat for Pusha to unload his cocaine-laden how-to manual. Eventually, he has found himself in Kanye West’s stable as the go-to artist. Next to Kanye’s beats, Pusha’s relevance is most tested. West is notorious for continuously attempting to stay ahead of the production curve, mastering the layering of beats on top of another like some sort of mosaic discernible only to his ear. Kanye’s progress is in direct juxtaposition to Thornton’s insistence to stay in one place, his commitment to the craft.
In many way’s, Pusha’s reliance on the same trope over the years has been a constant against which to measure the evolution of rap, in particular when he ends up on tracks with the some of the newcomers of the genre:
You can nearly predict his cadence line to line, as you should. After all, it’s been 14 years. What is more evident however, is how much of Pusha T is still in the new generation. The sounds, the yells, the almost inaudible vocal missteps from actual words. The “auwwww” the “yugh”. Self-limiting in his own subject matter Pusha has managed to push his style forward using anything but words. Much like the beats he rhymes on, his audible ad-libs have become a definition of who he is and how he raps. While rap changes and evolves, Pusha T perseveres.
