One song from Pusha T‘s new album Daytona is hoping to stir something up. It’s called “Infrared,” and on it Pusha takes aim at Cash Money Records, dissing Birdman and Lil Wayne while also dropping a line about “Quentin Miller” and ghostwriting—a shot at Drake that references the roots of his beef with Meek Mill.
The lines in question go:
“The game’s fucked up, niggas’ beats is banging Nigga, ya hooks did it
The lyric pennin’ equal to Trump’s winnin’
The bigger question is how the Russians did it
It was written like Nas
But it came from Quentin”
Pusha T’s beef with Drake started through his longstanding issues with Lil Wayne. Back in 2006, Clipse felt that Wayne was copying their style with his Vibe cover from that year, as well as in the video for “Hustler Musik,” in which Wayne is decked out in the BAPE. Clipse, along with Pharrell, made the Japanese streetwear brand fashionable in the mid-2000s. It didn’t help things when Wayne, asked about this by Complex in 2006, responded to the claims saying, “I don’t see niggas like that. You talking to the best. Talk to me like you’re talking to the best. I don’t see no fuckin’ Clipse. Come on man. Weezy, man. They had to do a song with us to get hot, B. ‘What Happened To That Boy?’ C’mon B. Don’t do that, dog.”
Clipse went back at Wayne in interviews and songs, but things eventually cooled when Wayne went to prison in 2010. The beef ignited back up, though, when Pusha went at Birdman, Wayne, and Drake in the 2012 song “Exodus 23:1.” He famously raps in the song, “Contract all fucked up I guess that means you all fucked up / You signed to one nigga that signed to another nigga / That’s signed to three niggas, now that’s bad luck.”
That brings us to Pusha’s current beef with Drake. After “Exodus 23:1,” Drake responded on his song “Tuscan Leather,” the intro to his 2013 album Nothing Was The Same, with subliminal messages about “bench players acting like starters” and getting “hype on tracks,” lines many read to be allusions to Pusha. Pusha himself seemed to think so, too, responding to Drake on multiple songs, including with a reference to Drake benefiting from ghostwriting.
On his song “HGTV Freestyle,” Pusha rapped about someone “with a questionable pen so the feeling ain’t real.” Before “Infrared,” Drake responded on the song “Two Birds, One Stone,” saying about Pusha: “But really it’s you with all the drug dealer stories / That’s gotta stop, though / You made a couple chops and now you think you Chapo.”
The war of words doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. Listen to the new song below. (UPDATE: Drake has responded).
