After more than 15 years, fans of the Clipse, the legendary Virginia-based sibling rap duo, are finally getting a fourth studio album: Let God Sort Em Out. Known for hits in the early 2000s like “Grindin’” and “When the Last Time,” and the acclaimed 2006 album Hell Hath No Fury, brothers Malice and Pusha T—now better known for solo work—split up following the 2009 release of Til the Casket Drops, their third album.
The new album, already a critical success, is set to release Friday and features production from longtime collaborator Pharrell Williams, whose iconic production as part of the Neptunes helped define early Clipse hits, and guest verses from Nas; Tyler, the Creator; and Kendrick Lamar. But that Lamar verse led—reportedly because of a reference to Donald Trump—to delays and attempts at censorship, the group has alleged, that ultimately led them to leave Universal Music Group (UMG).
The track in question, “Chains & Whips,” released a day before the album on Apple Music; under an intense mix of guitar riffs, drums, and horns, its hook, “Beat the system with chains and whips,” alludes to the US’ dark past with slavery while serving as a double entendre for the jewelry and cars the brothers have been able to purchase with the millions they’ve made.
Pusha T and Malice deliver hard-hitting bars about the pursuit of wealth and death with lyrics like “Richard”—in reference to the luxury watch brand Richard Mille—”don’t make watches for presidents. Just a million trapped between skeletons.” Lamar immediately sets the mood for his verse, rapping, “I’m not the candidate to vibe with. I don’t fuck with the kumbaya shit.” In a verse featuring a rhyme scheme with an impressive number of words that start with “gen,” he raps about genocide and gentrification before capping off the verse with “God gave me light, a good year full of free will. Trump card, tell me not to spare your life.”
According to Pusha T, the group’s label, Def Jam, part of UMG, singled out that lyric and demanded the duo censor or remove Lamar’s verse. “The phrase ‘Trump card’ was used, and they said that they didn’t want any problem with Trump,” he told the New York Times’ Popcast in June.
“Rap music has provided opportunities for artists coming from marginalized backgrounds to express their hopes, their aspirations, but also their frustrations [and] their political views,” says Chad Williams, a professor of history and African American and Black diaspora studies at Boston University. Williams, who previously taught a course on hip-hop history at Brandeis University, says political messages have been a vital part of hip-hop for most of its history. He points to groups like Boogie Down Productions and Public Enemy, which made political messages central to their music in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and says artists were able to find success with such songs only until hip-hop became more mainstream and labels consolidated into a few major players—when political hip-hop took a back seat to other styles.
Williams sees the Pusha T situation as a consequence of that corporate consolidation, where artists have fewer options for distribution, allowing labels to exert more influence—which he finds especially troubling in a political climate where “retribution has become an explicit part of the Trump administration’s political agenda and you could potentially see economic repercussions for major corporations.” Still, Pusha T told Popcast’s hosts that he didn’t believe the label really objected to the Trump line; instead, he argued, they didn’t like the optics of two rappers coming together on a song after beefing with Drake, who in January filed a defamation suit against UMG, also his longtime label, that accused the company of siding with Lamar in the beef.
Many in the hip-hop community criticized Drake for the lawsuit: Legal action over losing a rap beef?” the rapper Rapsody wrote in a now-deleted post on X. “My my my. Not like us at all.” Williams describes the lawsuit as “one of the most un-hip-hop things in hip-hop history,” adding that “Drake really demonstrated how out of touch he is with hip-hop culture.” He says it could lead to labels being even more restrictive about the music they allow rappers to put out.
The lawsuit also raised concerns around other court cases involving rappers. A group of professors from the University of California, Irvine School of Law filed a brief in the case in May, calling Drake’s arguments “not just faulty” but “dangerous.” The professors write that lyrics in diss tracks should not be taken as factual statements, but as “hyperbole [and] bluster” used to entertain audiences, warning that the case could set a precedent for the controversial use of rap lyrics in criminal court, which the professors say has introduced racial bias in multiple cases and has created a “chilling effect across the industry.”
Pusha T criticized Drake’s lawsuit in an interview with GQ last month, saying, “The suing thing is bigger than some rap shit. I just don’t rate you. Damn, it’s like it just kind of cheapens the art of it once we gotta have real questions about suing and litigation. Like, what? For this?”
Whichever factor—fear of Trump or of Drake—motivated the label to quash the track, Pusha T said in the same interview that Def Jam’s attempts to censor the Clipse collaboration with Kendrick reminded him of the label’s response to the fallout from “The Story of Adidon,” the scathing 2018 Drake diss track in which Pusha T exposed both that Drake had a previously unknown child and that he had been photographed in blackface—which the artist later said was part of an art project designed to bring awareness to the limited roles available to Black actors and the way “African Americans were once wrongfully portrayed in entertainment.”
Thereafter, Pusha T claimed in his Popcast interview, Def Jam put up roadblocks when he tried to release new music, allegedly nixing multiple guest verses on other artists’ songs that it interpreted as subtle disses aimed at Drake.
When the Clipse said they hit an impasse with the label, refusing to remove or censor Lamar’s verse, the duo bought themselves out of their contracts for a seven-figure sum, according to Pusha T’s longtime manager in an interview with Billboard; their latest album is being released on Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, a subsidiary of the music giant Live Nation.
Censorship in rap is “egregious,” said Malice during the Popcast interview. “Rap, the arts, entertainment, it’s like the last frontier for Black expression. This is what we have.”
Drake’s legal representation and UMG did not respond to requests for comment.
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.