Best New Tracks - Pitchfork: Pusha-T: “The Story of Adidon”

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Pusha-T: “The Story of Adidon”

• Pusha-T

“The Story of Adidon”

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VIA SOUNDCLOUD

Drake inherited his beef with Pusha-T from Lil Wayne, and the two have been trading potshots for years, but in a post-“Two Birds, One Stone” world, in which Drizzy questioned the validity of Pusha’s drug dealing past, the Virginian seems to have a newfound fire for his younger rival. Taking on rap’s biggest star has become a point of pride for him. “Let’s deal in real truths,” Pusha told Vulture. “My truth was questioned, and I’m gonna deal in truths all summer long.” With his latest Drake diss, Pusha-T runs an exposé on the Graham family, claiming the Toronto rapper is an absentee dad.

“The Story of Adidon,” rapped over No I.D.’s beat for JAY-Z’s “The Story of O.J.” with artwork taken from a photoshoot of Drake in blackface, is at once a three-dimensional chess move and vicious sucker punch. (As the Nina Simone sample yelps, “My skin is black!” you stare directly into Drake’s charcoal-covered face; the racially charged cartoon caricature on the Too Black Guys tee he wears calls to mind both JAY’s animated “Story of O.J.” visuals and Pusha’s “Infrared” line: “I don’t tap dance for these crackas and sing mammy.”) The specific reasons for the shoot remain unclear, but out of context images can tell their own stories, and Pusha uses this one to frame Drake as uncomfortable with his blackness.

Both Drake and Pusha-T are noted students of JAY, and they’ve each ripped pages out of his playbook for battle strategy. Drake’s “Duppy Freestyle” took a calculated, debater’s approach à la “Takeover,” rebutting Pusha’s “Infrared” claims, preemptively explaining away old Clipse fandom and building what then seemed like an ironclad defense against future salvos. Pusha-T changed the state of play, jumping straight into “Super Ugly” levels of rudeness and boundary crossing, essentially bringing a gun to a knife fight.

In keeping with the Pusha mandate, “The Story of Adidon” is a ruthless diss track: If Drake’s tactic was merely comparing résumés, then Pusha’s is character assassination. These aren’t his sharpest raps because they don’t have to be. Since Drake presents the realm of his songs as an endless string of missed connections for which he is rarely responsible, it feels damning to learn he is allegedly leaving a family behind. Pusha’s talk of living in “truths” informs the diss, which is damaging to the longtime narrative Drake has constructed for himself. It does what no other opponent has ever managed to do: make Drake look bad. The man who sees himself as a master schemer and duelist has been caught flat-footed.

Pusha’s talking points are well-thought-out, researched, and coordinated: He implies that Drake’s dad leaving broke something in him, which is presented as the crux of an identity crisis (“Afraid to grow it ’cause your ’fro wouldn’t nap enough”) and used to explain why his music is so “angry and full of lies.” The subtext is that Drake’s subtle misogyny stems from seeing his father mistreat his mother, and that those same wounds are perpetuating a cycle of fatherlessness to which he has now fallen victim. “You are hiding a child, let that boy come home/Deadbeat muthafucka playin’ border patrol,” Pusha raps, going from life coach to arbitrator.

There is a sense of lawlessness and vitriol to all of this, which is something we should probably expect from someone who has rapped unregretfully about selling coke for two decades. His barbs about Drake refusing to own up to having a child with a former pornographic film actress are tinged with an odious sense of slut-shaming. And he mocks Noah “40” Shebib’s multiple sclerosis, as if to suggest it’s selfish of Drake to have an ill man making his beats instead of on bedrest. This ableist bit, where he counts 40’s days and derides his disability, has been publicly condemned by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. (Coincidentally, today is World MS Day.)

It is startling to hear him spit such cruel things with a sort of demented glee. “How dare you put Ye in my verses?/I’m selfish, I want all of the curses,” he snarls, damn near foaming at the mouth. “I’m pre-bookin’ the churches/Me versus three hearses/If we all go to hell it’ll be worth it.” With “The Story of Adidon,” Pusha takes us into uncharted territory in this era ruled by rap kayfabe. In so doing, he’s created a new truth for all of us: a world in which Drake has the higher ground but is somehow less secure for it.