Pusha T Vows to Keep Up Fight Against Mass Incarceration in Trump's America, Shrugs Off Drake Diss
When he was 8 years old, Terrence Thornton knew that the quickest way to get his older brother Gene’s attention was to target what he prized most: his book of rhymes. “He wouldn’t pay me no attention or no mind, so I’d go straight for his rap book!” he says, acting out the scene with his now 39-year-old body, arms considerably longer and thicker, flesh tattooed. He makes his voice squeak a bit for greater effect. It’s a funny scene to imagine—first, because it’s hard to picture it ending with anything other than an ass whooping. But also because of the irony of Terrence growing up to become Pusha T, one of today’s best and most respected writers in hip-hop.
Pusha T has come a long way from ripping up rhyme books. He signed his first record deal at 19 years old, and in the two decades since, he has seen dizzying highs and lows. We experienced some of the highs—the classic bars and critically acclaimed albums—along with him. But it’s the lows that helped him grow up: the end of Clipse, the group he formed with his brother, now better known as Malice, and the incarceration of some of his closest friends on drug conspiracy charges—a fate Pusha and his brother managed to avoid, despite, if you believe their lyrics, their apparent close ties to the operation. That was seven years ago. Today, Pusha is a grown-ass man, president of Kanye West’s record label G.O.O.D. Music, and a rap Hall of Famer with a renewed purpose: working with politicians (he campaigned heavily for Hillary Clinton), activists like Dream Hampton, and director Ava DuVernay to end the system of mass incarceration he narrowly escaped and shut down the pipeline that shuttles children of color from schools to prisons—particularly in his home state of Virginia.
“He’s one of the people willing to do the work,” says Hampton, who recently collaborated with Pusha on the #SchoolsNotPrisons Tour and a PSA against draconian drug laws. “If you look at his catalog, the War on Drugs and mass incarceration are issues he has talked about for a long time.”
I moved to Virginia Beach, Pusha’s hometown, when I was 6 years old; I was a teenager when Clipse blew up in 2002 with its Top 40 hit “Grindin’.” The beat—replicable with just a balled-up fist and a hard, flat surface—became the soundtrack to every lunch period across the country that year. I had a chance to see Pusha, however briefly, back in 2003, when he made a visit to my high school.
We were a new school, having opened up just two years before, and we needed to get accredited by passing Virginia’s Standards of Learning standardized tests. As an incentive, students were told Clipse and its producer/mentor Pharrell Williams would attend our homecoming pep rally if we performed well. We passed, and they did. It seemed like the entire student body banged out the “Grindin’” beat from the bleachers while Clipse took seats on the football field and waved. Ten minutes later, they were gone.
Pusha doesn’t seem impressed with the story, though he’s generous enough to say that he vaguely recalls the visit. It’s not that he’s not into my memories of a 10-minute school visit he did more than a decade ago; he’s just not into wasting time—or words.
The night before Pusha sat down for this interview, Drake dropped a new song, “Two Birds, One Stone,” that contains what are most likely shots aimed at him, continuing a thinly veiled beef that began between the two in 2011:
But really it’s you with all the drug dealer stories
That’s gotta stop, though
You made a couple chops and now you think you Chapo
If you ask me though, you ain’t lining the trunk with kilos
You bagging weed watching Pacino with all your nikkas
The Internet’s rap pundits perked up when Drake’s OVO Sound Radio, on Beats 1, broadcast the song on October 24, the night of his 30th birthday. Pusha didn’t rush to record a response to Drake’s suspected subliminals; he’s more calculated these days. It’s also possible he was too busy. This fall, he hit the campaign trail with Clinton and her vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine, toured prisons, recorded both his next album and political PSAs, managed several businesses, and answered calls from his friends in federal prison, something he does every day.
When I tell Pusha I need to ask him about “last night,” there’s no need to elaborate. He drops his head, takes a peek at his fresh-out-of-the-box, white-on-white Raf Simons Adidas, chuckles, and replies, “You need that energy, man.” He laughs again. He’s not reacting—he looks like he’s plotting.
Or perhaps Pusha doesn’t have much to say about Drake’s seeming shots at his past because he has said so much on wax already. The story of his rise from drug dealer to world-famous rapper is now infamous. He repeats it anyway.
“For me and my friends, drugs was the mischief,” Pusha begins. “It’s what everybody did, it’s what kids did. You sold drugs. That’s what you were going to do.”
He doesn’t say this with any sense of pride or regret. He says it like it’s a fact, one that he’s only now starting to understand fully. “You didn’t make plans for that to be your occupation. It was just what you did, and it was easily accessible and in abundance.” And, if you’re looking to make money, it’s a lot more effective in the short term than music. “My friends weren’t into rapping. It was my brother and my select group of artistic buds. But outside of that, it wasn’t happening.”
Nonetheless, by the time Terrence was a teenager, he’d stopped tearing up Gene’s rhyme books and become captivated by his brother’s passion for music. Gene taught him that rap was more (and better) than MC Hammer, whom Terrence loved at the time. Terrence would skip school to hang out with Gene, his best friend Tracy (also an MC), as well as Williams and Chad Hugo, a.k.a. the Neptunes.
“One day, we were all over at [Tracy’s] house and I was like, ‘Man, I’ma write me a rap.’” Everyone liked it, and Williams came up with an idea: “Y’all should be a group!” Gene became Malice, Terrence became Terrar (and, eventually, Pusha T), and Clipse was born.
His origin story is well known, but Pusha, a natural and captivating storyteller, still makes it exciting. His signature braids whip around as he grows more animated describing road trips with Williams to go hear dope go-go records in D.C., and being inspired by the early Master P joints his friends brought back from the Jack the Rapper hip-hop conference.
Produced entirely by the Neptunes, Clipse’s first proper release, Lord Willin’, went gold. They went out on tour with Jay Z and 50 Cent, and even performed at the MTV VMAs with Justin Timberlake. All of this turned Pusha and Malice into superheroes for hip-hop fans back home. It also made them world-famous rap stars.
The music business, however, is far from kind. In 2004, a merger between Sony Music Entertainment and BMG forced the brothers to move from Arista to Jive, while Star Trak, the Neptunes’ imprint, moved to Interscope. The label reshuffling effectively put Clipse on hiatus until 2006, when it was finally able to release its critically acclaimed sophomore album, Hell Hath No Fury. In an industry, but especially a genre, where new stars push out the old before they even get a chance to burn, four years between releases can be a death sentence. Rap money isn’t guaranteed; drug money, on the other hand, is easily accessible and abundant. Pusha found himself, in his words, “double-dutching between rap and the streets.”
“Sales wasn’t cracking in 2006,” he says. “What do you think that was like? For three years?”
By the time Hell Hath No Fury was released, Clipse was already on its second label and heading to its third.
“My mindset was that I didn’t believe in music,” Pusha says.
The streets, on the other hand, were insurance against the fickle nature of the music industry. Until they weren’t.
In 2009, the duo’s manager, Anthony Gonzalez, was charged with operating a multimillion-dollar drug ring. A year later, he was sentenced to 32 years in federal prison. (When Pusha raps about “Tony” on songs like “40 Acres,” from My Name Is My Name, and “Blow,” from the Fear of God mixtape, he is referring to Gonzalez.) Several other of Pusha’s associates were also arrested; prosecutors said Gonzalez was at the head of an operation that distributed literal tons of marijuana, cocaine, and heroin throughout the Northeast. According to his 82-count indictment, Gonzalez laundered the proceeds through a number of legal businesses, including Soul Providers Management, Clipse’s booking agency.
“Everybody that I came into the music game with in ’97, and I’m talking about my friends that I was with every day, seven of them are locked up in jail,” Pusha says. “From 10 to 34 years now. First-time offenses for most of them.”
At the same time his friends were getting locked up, Terrence’s brother quit Clipse. Malice changed his name to No Malice, reconnected with his Christian faith, and disavowed rapping about drugs and violence. Rap was never Pusha’s dream, always his brother’s. Terrence started out shooting down that dream, tearing up the rhymes a teenage Gene held so dear, because he wouldn’t pay his younger brother enough attention. Terrence had a change of mind, followed in his brother’s footsteps, and got his wish; he could now spend every day with Gene. And then suddenly, that was over. Pusha T found himself alone and at a crossroads—double-dutching seemed more uncertain, and more dangerous, than ever. With the pressure on, Pusha chose music.
“I just dove in head first,” he says. In 2010, Pusha signed to West’s G.O.O.D. Music label after the two became close on West’s Glow in the Dark Tour. Pusha delivered two verses for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, including “Runaway,” and then set off to define his solo sound via a string of mixtapes and an EP. My Name Is My Name, a full-length released in 2013, and King Push—Darkest Before Dawn: The Prelude, released two years later, can be described as the grim soundtrack to a dope boy’s nightmares. “Drug Dealers Anonymous” and “H.G.T.V.,” two 2016 releases, suggest that King Push, his upcoming third solo album, will deliver more in that vein. Whether West's recent battles with paranoia and depression will affect the album's release remains to be seen. The day after West checked himself into the UCLA Medical Center, Pusha commemorated the six-year anniversary of MBDTF with a post on Instagram, thanking West for the opportunity to contribute to the album. However, in a follow-up interview, Pusha tells me he hasn't spoken to West since his hospitalization, and declines to speculate on his condition.
In the meantime, as Pusha continues to refine his unmistakably ominous approach to coke rap, he’s also taking on an executive role with his work as president of G.O.O.D. Music, a position he was appointed to by West in November 2015. Proving he has an ear for what’s next, he signed 19-year-old Brooklyn rapper Desiigner, of the Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 “Panda.” You might be one of the people who’s mad at Pusha for that, one of the people who complains that Desiigner sounds too much like Future, or is just plain unintelligible. Pusha doesn’t care.
“My past is cemented.
My past happened.
Like slavery happened.”
“I don’t subscribe to anything or anybody who speaks ill of anybody on the label, especially Desiigner,” he says. Pusha’s been in this game for nearly 20 years, and he knows that in order to survive you can’t be resistant to change. “I want ground-breaking creativity,” he says, and he feels he has found that in Desiigner. “This is another moral obligation that I feel I need to bring to the game.”
His other moral obligation is speaking up about mass incarceration. After his journey—one he says he's lucky to have survived—it's personal. “It’s probably the single most [pressing] issue that I’ve seen affect my demographic, my people, my culture,” Pusha says. “I lived through it.”
A few years ago, Pusha got in touch with Hampton, who had already launched effective social justice campaigns with artists like Jay Z and John Legend. Hampton says Pusha was looking for a way to connect a song he was writing to a campaign to help recently-released prisoners reenter society. “He’s a smart guy; he studies,” Hampton says. “It was easy to bring him up to speed on what the movement was about.”
Through conversations with Hampton, President Obama, and DuVernay—whose documentary 13th, which investigates the connections between slavery and the prison-industrial complex, proved eye-opening for the rapper—Pusha began rethinking the “mischief” of his youth and the deeds outlined in his catalog. What he once accepted as just the way things are, what led to the incarceration of some of his closest associates, was part of a larger, more nefarious system.
