The ongoing feud between rappers Pusha T and Drake escalated from “playground scuffle” to “global thermonuclear war” on Tuesday, as Pusha T released a vicious diss track called “The Story of Adidon.” How vicious is it? Let’s just say that Pusha T’s selection of album art—a portrait of Drake in blackface by photographer David Leyes that, as Pusha has pointed out on Twitter, is apparently not doctored—is the kindest thing about it. On the other end of the spectrum are lyrics accusing Drake of having a secret child with ex–adult actress Sophie Brussaux. TMZ reported a year ago that Brussaux was claiming Drake was the father of her child, allegations she repeated on Twitter:
Pusha T weighed in on the situation with verses that are so vitriolic and personal they seem more like a South Carolina Republican primary mailer than a diss track. Pusha splits the difference between painting Brussaux as a helpless innocent wronged by Drake and a debauched woman he should be ashamed to be involved with, a heady mix of two separate kinds of misogyny, but no matter how bad a look this is for Pusha T, it’s a worse one for Drake:
Sophie knows better, ask your baby mother,
Cleaned her up for IG, but the stench is on her,
A baby’s involved, it’s deeper than rap.
We talkin’ character, let me keep with the facts,
You are hiding a child, let that boy come home,
Deadbeat motherfucker playing border patrol.
Adonis is your son,
And he deserves more than an Adidas press run.
Love that baby, respect that girl,
Forget she’s a porn star, let her be your world.
A lot going on there, and that’s only the part about Drake’s alleged kid. As you’d expect from a song with a picture of Drake in blackface on the cover, the rapper’s relationship to his race comes up too. For starters, it’s not a mistake that Pusha chose to rap over the beat from Jay-Z’s “The Story of O.J.,” a song that is explicitly about a black man trying to escape his race, and features a music video that trades on the same blackface imagery Drake is fumbling around with in the photograph Pusha dug up for the cover. Like Pusha’s lines about Brussaux, this part of the song is pure acid—and more than a little obscure when it comes to Drake trivia. In 2010, Drake appeared on MTV’s When I Was 17 and had the following to say about his teenage hairstyle:
When I was 17, I used to have, like, this terrible afro. You know how an afro’s supposed to be big, it’s just supposed to be like a nice sphere, and then it’s supposed to end. My joint, like, never really ended. It was like a neck afro. It made me look like I had the biggest head in the world.
Pusha T renders this as “always thought you weren’t black enough/ Afraid to grow it, ’cause your fro wouldn’t nap enough.” Does Pusha attribute Drake’s supposed racial confusion to his troubled relationship with his father? Did you think he wouldn’t go there, at this point? And those still aren’t the song’s most personal or offensive lines: Pusha reserves those for Drake’s producer Noah Shebib—aka “40”—who co-founded record label OVO Sound with Drake and Oliver El-Khatib. Shebib was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2005, and no matter how much you’re cringing already, this Trumpian couplet will make you cringe more:
OVO 40 hunched over like he 80, tick tick tick,
How much time he got? That man is sick, sick, sick.
It will take some time to hash out exactly how many lines Pusha T crossed tonight, but an internet consensus seems to be forming on the broader question of the feud between the two rappers. And that consensus is: “Stop the fight, he’s already dead!”:
Best wishes to everyone involved in this trainwreck! Listen to “The Story of Adidon” below:
