Next month, the great Virginia Beach rap duo Clipse will finally release Let God Sort 'Em Out, their first album in 16 years. The great lead single "Ace Trumpets" came out on Friday. They recorded it at Louis Vuitton headquarters in Paris, and their old associate Pharrell Williams produced the entire thing. People have been waiting on the Clipse reunion album for a long time, and it looks like label issues might've been one of the things that delayed the release. In a new GQ profile, Pusha T drops a bombshell: Def Jam, originally slated to release the album, didn't want Kendrick Lamar's feature to appear on one of the tracks. As a result, Clipse are no longer on Def Jam.
For a long time, Pusha T has been signed to Def Jam through his deal with Kanye West's G.O.O.D. Music label. That has come to an end because of Kendrick Lamar's verse on the final version of "Chains & Whips," a song that Pharrell teased during his first Louis Vuitton runway show in 2023. According to GQ writer Frazier Tharpe, Universal Music Group, Def Jam's parent company, didn't want to get behind a record that featured Kendrick and Pusha, Drake's two most prominent enemies, in the midst of Drake's lawsuit against the label. Pusha, who last collaborated with Kendrick on the classic 2013 track "Nosetalgia," says that the issue was "stupid," especially since the song takes no shots shots, subliminal or otherwise, at Drake. (The article also quotes one line from Kendrick's verse: "Therapy taught me how to open up/ It also showed me I don’t give a fuck.")
Here's how Pusha explains it: "They wanted me to ask Kendrick to censor his verse, which of course I was never doing. And then they wanted me to take the record off. And so, after a month of not doing it, Steve Gawley, the lawyer over there was like, 'We'll just drop the Clipse.' But that can't work because I'm still there [solo]. But [if] you let us all go…" As a result, Clipse and Pusha both became free agents, and Let Got Sort 'Em Out is coming out on Jay-Z's Roc Nation.
The GQ article mentions one other guest who will appear on the Clipse album, the Syracuse rapper and Griselda affiliate Stove God Cooks. Pusha also gets into the "foolishness" surrounding his old comrade Kanye West:
It's like, bro, you've been mentioning me, screaming about me… you got every soul believing that I've done such a great injustice to you. And that's a lie. He goes on his rants. The one thing that I can say about him is that he knows that every issue that he's having and crying about online right now, I've told him distinctly about those things, distinctly. So when he gets up there and with his KKK mask and he's screaming behind it like a pro wrestler -- he got to scream behind a mask. He don't talk to me like he talks to others...
We made some great shit, bro. We did. But… let me tell you something. He's a genius. And his intuition is even more genius level, right? But that's why me and him don't get along, because he sees through my fakeness with him. He knows I don't think he’s a man. He knows it. And that's why we can't build with each other no more. That's why me and him don't click, because he knows what I really, really think of him. He's showed me the weakest sides of him, and he knows how I think of weak people...
He's sick, I do believe that much. You're sick, but you're also very calculated. And if I take your sickness and take how calculated you've been and disruptive you've been and tried to be to me, then it cancels itself out. I can't look at it as sick, because you're detrimental. You're detrimental to everything.
Let God Sort ‘Em Out is out 7/11 via Roc Nation. Read the GQ profile here.
