Pusha T’s talking shit, Drake. How do you respond?
That’s the question on everybody’s mind since Pusha dropped “The Story of Adidon” in response to Drake’s “Duppy Freestyle” diss track. The more you look at it, the less it seems like Drake can come out of this one alive.
Previously, it wasn’t clear if Drake could even lose a rap beef. He tussled with everyone from Joe Budden to Common to — most famously — Meek Mill and came out unscathed. He’s more popular than any battle rapper, and he’s embraced the aspects of his persona that would otherwise make him an easy target for a diss track.
But the decades-long beef Drake has reignited with Pusha T is already on a different level. If you look at all the famous diss tracks in rap history, there don’t seem to be a lot of angles Drake can come back at Pusha from.
Pusha T has seniority on Drake, having gotten into the game much earlier. In fact, Push has been beefing with Cash Money Records longer than Drake has been rapping — the beef reportedly started in 2001 when Birdman, the label’s founder, didn’t pay Pharrell for producing a Clipse song Birdman was featured on, and things escalated from there.
The whole time Push has been in the game, he’s been a hit critically and commercially. Just last week, he dropped a new album, Daytona, which has received “universal acclaim” according to Metacritic. So Drake can’t pull a “Had a spark when you started, but now you’re just garbage/ Fell from top 10 to not mentioned at all,” which Jay-Z said to Nas on “Takeover.”
Drake can’t claim Push doesn’t write his own rhymes by saying “No matter what, you still window-shop for lyrics” — like GZA said to 50 Cent on “Paper Plate” — without bringing unwanted attention to his own history with ghostwriters.
Even if he exaggerates how much he used to sell cocaine, as Drake claims on “Duppy Freestyle,” Push is certainly not softer than him. This rules out anything from “Hit ‘Em Up,” where 2Pac claimed people who beefed with him were liable to be murdered — no one would believe that coming from Drake.
Throughout his rap career, Drake has tried to ride a lot of waves, from patois to dancehall to the triplet flow to grime, but he hasn’t really started any waves of his own. Push, on the other hand, has actually made a mark — on “Mr. Me Too,” he even claims he and his brother No Malice influenced Lil Wayne, the man who signed Drake. That means the 6 God can’t pull any lines like Nas’ “I am the truest/ Name a rapper that I ain’t influenced” on “Ether” (itself a response to Jay-Z’s “Takeover”).
In his beef with Young Money, Push has repeatedly claimed signees to the label are getting less money than they deserve, most notably on “Exodus 23:1.” Push has no such problems himself at GOOD Music, so it’s unlikely Drake can respond with something like “No Vaseline,” on which Ice Cube told his former group mates in N.W.A.: “‘Cuz you’re getting fucked out your green/ By a white boy, with no Vaseline.”
So what is there for Drake to come at Pusha with? That weird “both hands up over his shoulder” dance thing he does all the time in his music videos?
As weird as it may seem, it would’ve been easier for Drake to beef with Kendrick or J. Cole or a more famous rapper in this case, since he hasn’t already used up all his ammo with them. Kendrick is never going to be Pac no matter how badly he wants to be, and don’t think Drake doesn’t remember that C4 mixtape, which was just a 12-track impression of Lil Wayne. J. Cole is only popular because of kids in the suburbs and so on and so forth.
But Push just told the world that Drake is hiding a child and was going to announce its existence via an Adidas collaboration. And he brought up the blackface stuff. And he hit at Drake’s parents and said his friend was going to die soon. What can Drake possibly come back with now that Push hasn’t already addressed in this beef?
Tick tick tick. How much time he got?
