travis taking kanye's song and using the "god's country, this is war" line like that combination of words has any meaning to him beyond sounding cool, that's his entire ethos as an artist lol

When Clipse dropped “Ace Trumpets,” their first official single in over 15 years, to rapturous applause across the internet, Pusha T was hardly all smiles as the acclaim rolled in. Instead on Instagram he wrote an ominous comment: “I hate every last one of you b****es.” The Thornton brothers have set their intentions from the jump with an album title that promises to Let God Sort Em Out; ostensibly they’ll be killing all the competition by putting their bid in for Rap Album of the Year. But across the project, due out July 11, Pusha is also out to settle all outstanding business like Michael Corleone in the Godfather climax—an attitude he upheld during our conversation for his and Malice’s GQ Hype feature when I hinted at Push taking some unexpected shots in the new music.

Yes, on the thunderous “Chains & Whips,” Jim Jones gets a whole verse for that run of interviews where he repeatedly disparaged Pusha’s legacy. But while Pusha said he has no interest in taking Drake’s attempts to bait him back into the ring seriously—“I can't pay attention to none of that. I did the dance for real, not to come back and tip-toe around anything”—another rapper in the orbit of Drake’s recent subliminals does get a heat check from Push on the new album: Travis Scott.

On “So Be It,” Push and Malice kick their usual upper-echelon stunting over a sinister Pharrell beat, but things get smokey when Pusha closes the song out with a final verse that made me do a double take on first listen. While Push never calls out Travis by name directly, pointed references to “utopia” and an ex whose “lipgloss is poppin’” pretty much erase any doubt about who he’s talking to; the verse is short, but no less scathing than any of Pusha’s similar instances of letting a fellow rapper know what he really thinks of them, alluding to witnessing Travis “losing his pride” and conspicuously mentioning Alexander “A.E.” Edwards, best friend and right-hand man to Kylie’s ex Tyga.

Now that the song is out for the masses to hear, I can share the portion of my conversation with Push in which he shed light on his issue with Travis and gave context as to why he felt compelled to write those bars.

When I asked Push why he went in like that, he cited Travis’s 2023 song “Meltdown,” which had come up earlier in our discussion of recent shots and taunts Drake had been throwing. The song’s title comes from Drake declaring, in a guest verse, that he’d “melt down the chains that I bought from your boss, give a f*** about all of that heritage s***,” a reference to the classic, peak-Neptunes-era jewlery Drake bought through Pharrell’s Joopiter auction site.

Travis is Switzerland on that song, but the fact that Utopia features production and vocals from Pharrell elsewhere on the album—and that Travis made a show of teasing the album by filming himself playing it for Pharrell—didn’t sit right with Push, who reveals he was also there that day.

“The true context of that is we were in Paris, literally working, and he was calling to play P his new album. He came to Pharrell’s studio at Louis Vuitton HQ, where Clipse recorded most of Let God Sort Em Out. He interrupted a session,” Pusha recalled. “He sees me and Malice] there. He's like, ‘Oh, man, everybody's here,’ he's smiling, laughing, jumping around, doing his f***ing monkey dance. We weren't into the music, but he wanted to play it, wanted to film us and Pharrell listening to it. And then a week later you hear ‘Meltdown,’ which he didn’t play. He played the song, but not Drake’s verse.”

Push was quick to add that he doesn’t “hold Travis to any standard,” because as he sees it, Travis has a pattern of remaining conveniently neutral when it suits him. “He's done this a lot. He has no picks. He'll do this with anybody. He did it with ‘Sicko Mode’”— on which Drake seems to diss Kanye, despite Travis’s close ties to him. Push then referenced last spring when Travis joined Future and Metro on stage and excitedly asked them to tease “Like That,” the song whose incendiary Kendrick Lamar verse ignited Kendrick’s beef with Drake: “He was on the Rolling Loud stage like, ‘Play that, play that!’ He don't have no picks, no loyalty to nobody. He'll jump around whatever he feels is hot or cling onto whatever he feels is hot. But you can play those games with those people…We're not in your mix. Keep your mix over there.”

It’s the latter part that aggravated Pusha enough to the point of taking his issue to wax. “I personally have been removed from that crew and those people for a minute,” Push said, in reference to the larger Kanye/GOOD Music extended orbit. “So, that's where my issue comes in—like, dawg, don't even come over here with that, because at the end of the day, I don't play how y'all play. To me, that really was just like…he's a w****. He's a w****.” (Print can’t do justice to the disdain in Pusha’s delivery here.)

“I’ve already dealt with the lack of loyalty to his mentor, the guy he looks up to,” Push said, referring to Kanye. “I've been dealing with the corny s*** that goes along with them. So it's like, I'm in a whole ‘nother place. Don't bring that over to bring that over to my house. I just wanted you to have that true context, man...and honestly, Frazier, you got to realize I've really been in Paris. I've really been making my joints. I've really been doing my s***.”

It was in this moment when Pusha got the most fired up, seemingly intent on disproving the perception that he’s a bully or that he’s engaging for attention or shock value. “When these people mention me, they're really going out of their way. What have I done besides wear clothes, bro, in the past couple of years? It's like these people are going out of their way. Somebody brought “Meltdown” to my house. To P's house, actually… I mean, I don't give a f***. P don't give a damn. But it's like…”

It’s the principle.

“It's the principle of it,” Pusha said, impassioned. “It's the principle of what I'm saying. That filthy quality that they have about themselves, that lack of loyalty. Travis really has that. He's proven. I just named three people that he does that type of behavior with. I'm just not one of them. Dog, I ain't with that. This s*** ain't coming out of nowhere. Bro, I be cool with all these guys. Everybody you mentioned today, bro, I promise you they did the underhanded, weird s***.”

And then they get the heat check?

“Always. It always comes.”

I started listening in the 90s when loyalty was still a thing man idk. its sad that the bar in through the floor now.

I had Owl Pharaoh when it came out but didnt know he was a born snake.

We need more ogs calling out weird behavior

just for the bants

Its the same interview

this s*** is so funny honestly like that man isn't religious in the slightest

like it’s been dead for like 5 years now

ay side note, this song is hard af bruh.

I’ve always thought the same thing, I love Travis and Meltdown and even Sicko Mode were hard but have some loyalty/respect for your friends and collaborators

should i eat some granola and berries

video get played at almost every party ive had since 2012

Didn’t travis leave his first manager having a heart attack on the sidewalk?

This is who he is

some yogurt ?

The Meltdown story is so similar to Like that

F*** what you talkin bout. Its not enough hate, let it flow

Killing me that niggas jumped to this being about ye

i wonder if that old story about travis’ old friend/producer or whatever having a seizure in the studio and travis robbing him or whatever is true …

It wasn’t robbing him it was him allegedly just standing

no i’m not a big yogurt fan i eat granola like cereal

i love trav but he had a song where drake dissed Pharrell and a year later debuted a song where Kendrick dissed Drake. Push can feel however he wants