![]() ![]() “It was written like Nas, but it came from Quentin,” he says, referencing Quentin Miller, a collaborator of Drake’s who is rumored to be his ghostwriter. In “Infrared,” the final song on the album, Pusha likens Drake’s chart dominance to Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia. His aspersions are finely and wickedly cast. Pusha T fills them with his flawless enunciation, his serene kind of menace. The beats, produced by Kanye West in concert with Mike Dean, are shadowy and cavernous. How did we get here? On midnight last Friday, Pusha T dropped “Daytona,” his first release since 2015’s “King Push-Darkest Before Dawn: The Prelude.” The seven-track album is austere. Late on Wednesday night, in an Instagram story, Drake uploaded a lengthy note clarifying that, as many fans had suspected, the photo-one of a pair taken, in 2007, by David Leyes-was some sort of sophomoric satirical statement on the ways in which black entertainers are “stereotyped and type cast.” This was the genius of Pusha T’s attack: it disparaged Drake’s brand. The photograph itself was so outrageous that Drake responded not with the venom of a battle rapper but with the anxiety of a pop politician. Drake, the meme-maker, had been ruthlessly memed. Pusha T, the elder, had dug up the freshest poison. “These are his truths, see for yourself.” It was a reversal of wits. “I’m not an internet baby, I don’t edit images…this is a REAL picture,” Pusha T wrote, when he posted the image on Twitter. Drake wears a T-shirt with a Jim Crow illustration on it his face is painted like a minstrel, his smile wide and grotesque. On Tuesday, Pusha T issued the most vicious salvo yet, when he circulated the album art to a new dis track, “The Story of Adidon,” which featured an old image of Drake, somehow left sitting on an unknown photographer’s Web site. The hostility between the two rappers dates back years, but it had been more or less dormant for a while-recently, it has thawed, producing a beef somehow both transcendent and petty. ![]() Pusha T, by contrast, is a forty-one-year-old drug-rap classicist who first formed the group the Clipse, in Virginia Beach, with his brother, in 1992. The pastel video for “Hotline Bling” is, essentially, a sequence of GIFs. A lyric like “I only love my bed and my mama, I’m sorry” is, spiritually, an Instagram caption. Drake is an invincible god of the Internet, a puckish tinkerer of its tropes. Since then, the men have become messengers of two different rap paradigms. When Drake was a teen-ager, he spent two hundred dollars on a microphone that he believed was signed by Pusha T. ![]()
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