That story continues on It’s Almost Dry but it’s even more layered and personal. On the intro to his 2015 project King Push - Darkest Before Dawn: The Prelude, he sounds like a Gothic poet when he raps, “ Rinsed drug money, I done paid for my sins/Books and the lawyers, I done paid for my friends/Still held back, I done paid with my skin.” It’s all there: the drugs, the pain, the understanding of the societal circumstances that created it all, and where he fits in while trying to get his piece of the pie. But he uses his drug talk to paint a larger picture of how he defines himself as a Black man in America. Pusha T isn’t ever going to become a conscious rapper who talks about the Black Lives Matter movement, for instance (although he did broach the topic on his 2015 song “ Sunshine,” where he laments the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and compares police badges to nooses). “ Between God and where the Devil’s at, had to double dutch and double back/Then hopscotch through where the trouble’s at,” he raps on “ Hard Piano” from his 2018 album Daytona. In the years since, Pusha T has evolved as a lyricist, tapping into a more complex representation of the need to sell drugs to earn a living, but also the way that livelihood can tear you apart from the inside out. skits” from the song “ I’m Not You” on the Clipse debut studio album Lord Willin’, No Malice grounded the moment in the realness of an emotional indie flick: “ I feed them their needs, at the same time cry/Yes, it pains me to see them need this/All of them lost souls and I’m their Jesus.”
While Pusha T could sometimes treat drug dealing like a blockbuster action flick with lyrics like, “ Cars turn tricks like them Ringling Bros. In the early Clipse years, Pusha T would hop on songs taking on the role of the younger, more brash, charismatic counterpart to his brother No Malice’s more emotionally resonant, descriptive lyrics. … I used to get upset about, ‘Oh, that’s coke rap’… when it’s like, man, nah, that’s all you hear?” “I feel like the drug references are the common thread that really encompasses everything culturally that’s going on, what’s going on in the streets. “People take the coke talk as … a surface level way to describe what it is that I do,” the rapper said on Desus & Mero in April. Related Story Requiem for a hustler Read now And if you look at Pusha T’s lyricism and, in particular, his flow, he’s grown tremendously over the past two decades, perfecting his craft within his chosen genre of coke raps. Evolution can come in many forms, more than just subject matter changes. But asking him to stop rapping about drugs is to fundamentally change who he is as an artist. I understand the sentiment: At some point, it might be refreshing to hear something new from Pusha T. It’s been a constant point of contention about Pusha’s music, as he’s been answering questions about growth ever since he went solo a decade ago. … Pusha fails to push himself into new territories, making the entire album feel safe, rather than an attempt at growth,” argued writer Kyle Eustice. “A disappointing conclusion considering the married father presumably has so much more hard-earned wisdom to offer his fans.
Recently, Variety pondered why Pusha T wasn’t dropping gems about his actual life at 44 instead of dwelling on his past street life. But those posing the question are misunderstanding what it means to evolve and from whom evolution is expected. And at this point, it’s pretty clear Pusha T will always be rapping about drugs, prompting some to question whether the Virginia emcee will ever evolve. His latest album, It’s Almost Dry, doesn’t divert much from that overall subject matter. Ever since Pusha T emerged on the rap scene in the early 2000s as one half of the sibling duo Clipse, he’s been known as a “coke rapper.” Almost every bar he’s spit since then has been related to the sale, consumption or spoils of drug dealing.