Was Never My Dream, The Immaculate Win
Terrence Thornton, better known by his rap alias Pusha T, is a label executive and hip-hop artist from Virginia Beach, Virginia. His close collaborators are some of the most impactful people in the industry, including people like Kanye West and Pharrell, Kid Cudi and Travis $cott, among others. Push got his start as one half of the duo Clipse. Terrence was five years the minor to his brother, Gene, who went by Malice when performing, at the time. I can’t overstate how much Clipse meant to hip-hop overall, but especially hip-hop in Virginia.
Clipse was the latest wave of a rising tide of Hip-Hop and R&B being created on the east coast of Virginia. They were essentially brought onto a record deal through their connection to Pharrell Williams, a close friend who lived nearby. Pharrell had gotten his start performing with a friend from band camp, Chad Hugo, a friend named Magoo, and then his cousin, some guy named Timbaland. That group disbanded before releasing any music, but Pharrell would be a part of many hit-making groups throughout his career. The Neptunes, N.E.R.D., and his own production have accounted for some of the biggest hits in rap history.
And that talent was right down the street for Pusha T and Malice. Push has said himself, in an explanation of his lyrics on genius.com, that rapping was never his dream. It was his brother’s, but as the younger brother, he tagged along with Gene everywhere. So, he went to the studio, Terrence went to the studio. I’ll let him tell it:
There was no amazing battle that I did to get a record deal, it just happened to be my best friends lived up the street and they ended up being super producers and my brother was a really good writer and has been a really good writer since a child. I simply just was hanging around the studio and you sort of – when you are around it you sort of know the criteria and the standard for raps, and that was how I learned. I learned by being around my brother and being around Pharrell and knowing what was whack by their standards.
Pusha T, on Genius.com
I think it also helps to understand that at this same time, athletes from Virginia Beach were taking over the country. There is an old rumor (I’ve never seen or heard proof) that Clipse was selling mixtapes at Michael Vick’s high school games. Mike went to high school just a five-minute drive away from where Allen Iverson graduated just half a decade prior. Those two schools are only a thirty-minute drive away from Princess Anne, where Pharrell attended.
Virginia Beach in the 1990s was a rough place, especially for young black men. To hear any of those mentioned above tell it, they were all lucky to escape with their bodies and brains intact. In the opening chapters of Not a Game by Kent Babb, we learn about AI’s upbringing, and how his parents would send him to buy drugs from as young as eight. I don’t mention that to cast shame on anyone, addiction can be hell itself, but just to emphasize how unlikely it was for anyone to make it out. Mike Vick would talk about how when he was ten or eleven years old, he started going fishing all the time, “even if the fish weren’t biting,” just to get away from the violence and stress that permeated the streets he could’ve been in.
Push: My Name is My Name
My Name is My Name is Pusha T’s, debut, solo, major-label album. It spans twelve tracks and just over forty-five minutes long, and it is packed with a variety of musical styles and influences. It was released in 2013, under Kanye and Pusha T’s g.O.O.d Music label. It features Kanye and Pharrell on production and includes verses from other titans of the genre like Rick Ross and Jeezy, with standout performances from rising stars Kendrick Lamar and Future. The album was received well by critics and fans alike, debuting at number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, and receiving positive reviews from both fans and outlets.
The album is one of my favorites of all time. I was learning about Hip-Hop throughout high school, and by the time October 2013 came around, I was already considering myself a real rap fan. I’d been scouring the trenches on Datpiff.com, finding new releases from Chance the Rapper and Logic, listening to Lil Wayne and Kanye’s catalogs, and I’d just started to get to know Kendrick Lamar and Childish Gambino. When I pushed play on My Name is My Name, I had no frame of reference for what I was about to hear. To this day, no song has wormed its way into my brain the way that Numbers on the Boards did. That may be the most important song I ever heard. The airy, drum-heavy beat that provides just enough substance for Push to slide through. The spaced-out feel allows for every line to hit you in the face, an appropriate vibe for an album in which Kendrick tells us “every verse is a brick.” Every line on NotB is brimming with braggadocio, and I’ve quoted it often in the ten years since.
Over the course of these twelve songs, Push has many suggestions for how one should live a life. His experiences in life are surely different than yours or mine, but whether you’re pushing cocaine or hustling two gig jobs to make ends meet, there’s something you can learn from Pusha T.
Lesson 1: Know Yourself
Before you are able to go out into the world and make a name for yourself, you have to decide who you’re going to be. Who you’re going to be is a mixture of what you believe, what you do, and who you interact with. Knowing yourself is key to identifying how you create your own mixture. In knowing yourself, you also set your own goals, track your own progress.
On King Push, the intro track to MNIMN, Push raps:
I’m King Push, still King Push,
I rap, n****, ’bout trap n****s, I don’t sing hooks
And that’s true. Try to find a song where Pusha T is singing the chorus, you won’t be able to. He may harmonize from time to time, but he won’t be singing. If a chorus calls for sung vocals, he is more than happy to outsource that work. Throughout this album, he brings on Chris Brown, The-Dream, Kevin Cossom, and Kelly Rowland to handle chorus duties.
My first grammy was my first brick,
Red carpet every bad bitch
More BMF than Billboard
I got a label deal under my mattress
Pusha T on King Push
If you’re reading this, I assume you’re familiar with the Grammys. Pusha T understands that they don’t give Grammys to cocaine rap, and he doesn’t care to aim for one. When you combine this lyric with the idea we discussed above, that Push never saw himself as a rapper, you get the full picture of someone who couldn’t care less about what the recording academy thinks of his work, he’d rather sell them some work. He says he’s more BMF than billboard, a reference to the Black Mafia Family, a 1980s crime syndicate from Detroit. Again hammering home that, if anything, this is extra credit. He finishes that verse by adding that he’s got a label deal under his mattress, a sly way of saying once again, he does not need rap money. He has as much as he’d make from a label deal tucked away already. Throughout the album, he is reminding us that first and foremost, he believes his superpower is moving weight. On Who I Am, the Big Sean and 2 Chainz assisted track, Push raps:
Always knew I could rule the world, let’s define what my world is
Knee deep in this dope money, damn near where my world ends
On Pain, he provides the title line, a reference to Marlo from The Wire, an acclaimed television show about selling drugs. He elaborates, “there’s no us without Caine, Push: My name is my name.” On 40 Acres, he explains himself: “unpolished, unapologetic, this cocaine cowboy pushed it to the limit.”
Have you gotten the point yet? Pusha T has absolutely no false ideas about who he is, what he does, or how he does it. He has no qualms with his methods. He understands that you might, but you’re not him, and he’s fine with that. If you lived the life he lived, you’d probably run the score up too.
Lesson 2: Run it Up
In America, we value only a handful of things, but there is nothing we value more than the ability to get money. Our society is engineered to make it easy for some and hard for others, specifically, easy for those who are already rich and hard for those who are not. If you’re growing up in the projects of Chesapeake, VA, you’re not already rich. I did not grow up in the projects of anywhere. My parents were able to afford a nice house in a nice neighborhood. But since I’ve been on my own, I’ve seen the struggle that exists just beyond the walls I grew up behind. Point of all this being, I have seen how hard it is to get money. And when I say get money, I don’t mean enough to pay the rent. I mean money like what Warren Buffett plays with. I’ve seen how wealth is gatekept. I’ve seen how difficult it can be to get access to those circles and those people. If you can traverse that gap, and get from being poor to rich, you owe it to yourself, and to the legacy of those who struggled before you, to run it up as much as you can. Everything you get might be something that the people who were rich before you had, and now do not. Becoming rich can be a revolutionary act in itself, capitalist though it may still be, the radical redistribution of wealth would cause economic ripples we couldn’t anticipate.
Pusha T may not agree with 100% of what I’ve said there, but I know one thing. He’s going to run it up. Numbers on the Boards remains one of the best displays of lyrical ability that I’ve seen or heard. Shakespeare AND one thousand monkeys with one thousand years couldn’t write:
Motherfuckers can’t rhyme no more, bout crime no more (Jay-Z sample)
Mix drug and show money, Biggs Burke on tour
25 bricks move work like chore
Hit Delaware twice, needed 25 more
I see flaw, cracks in your diamond
CB4 when you rhyme simple simon
Come and meet the pieman
A must that I fluant it
The legend grows legs when it comes back to haunt us
I advise you to listen to this song and especially key into this part. Pusha T originally rapped the line from the Jay-Z sample, but Kanye threw in the actual sample for good measure. It connects the two in a way, furthering a comparison levied in King Push, when T says “best D-Boy all I’m missing is a dash, difference ‘tween me and Hova.” Hova, short for Jehovah, is a nickname for Jay-Z. You’ll notice that Pusha T abstains from using a “-” in his rap alias. The sample juxtaposes Jay’s smooth, NY sound against Push’s grimacing, menacing tone. In that tone, he describes moving 25 bricks like its just another daily chore. A brick is a common way to reference a kilogram of cocaine, which has a street value in 2023 of around $35,000. Just another day moving $875,000 worth of coke.
While doing this, he references a nursery rhyme, where Simple Simon goes to meet the Pieman. To me, this emphasizes the role that cocaine had in his home growing up. When he and Malice tell the story on Intro, from their Lord Willin’ album, it started with their grandma selling cocaine, and they learned from her.
Our last thing to pull out of this verse, is actually explained by Push himself. I always appreciate when artists take the time to explain their work on genius.com.
I was basically saying doing all this shit is it’s a must that you show it off because when it comes back to get you, it’s going to grow legs. People are going to say you were the kingpin of all kingpins, they are going to lie on you. That is what happens a lot, people lie and people tell on you and put more work on you than you actually had, and so on and so forth. So the legend grows legs when it comes back to haunt us.
Pusha T, about “A must that I flaunt it…”
There’s also a level of vengeance to this accumulation of wealth and power. The song 40 Acres takes its name from an unfulfilled promise. Under reconstruction, black families were going to be granted 40 acres of land and a mule. However, after Lincoln was assassinated, that promise was revoked and never delivered on. It represents a legacy in this country of broken promises, misleading agreements, and bad faith between peoples. Push enlists the angelic voice of The-Dream for this track, and he is tasked with bringing beauty to the words, “I ain’t leaving without my 40 acres.”
It’s on this song that Push calls himself unpolished and unapologetic, he repeats it couple of times throughout his verses. It’s clear that those two words underpin everything in this song, the etherial harmonies behind the chorus all the way through the driving beat under the verses. Unpolished, unapologetic. You could reasonably conclude he’s unapologetic because he recognizes that the world would do the same to him in a heartbeat. One of my favorite sections of the entire album is from this song:
School of Hard Knock, I attended
Selling hard rock, fuck who I offended
I was a goner, punished by karma
Called me tar baby now I’m transcending genres
I was a goner, punished by karma.
Shit, man. I wouldn’t care who I offend either.
But don’t get it twisted, this is not a feel-sorry-for-me song.
Unpolished, unapologetic
This cocaine cowboy pushed it to the limit
You thought Tony in that cell would’ve made us timid
We found his old cell, bitch, we searchin’ through the digits
Anything Spanish, got me speaking Spanglish
Money’s universal, that’s the only language
The dream ain’t die, only some real n****s
We was born to mothers who couldn’t deal with us
Left by fathers who wouldn’t build with us
I had both mine home, let’s keep it real, n****s
My better half chose the better path, applaud him
Younger brother me a spoiled child, I fought him
I heard that the Devil’s new playground is boredom
The California top just falls back like autumn
And they say I’m on the verge of winning
I claim victory with Malice on the verge of sinning
Old habits die hard, that rainy day bag buried in the backyard
It’s heaven for a hustler, no graveyards
‘Cause stand-up n****s don’t lie on no floors
Pusha T, Verse 1, 40 Acres
Anti-Standom 