Pusha T's solo mixtape, Fear of God, dropped like yesterday afternoon. To be honest, I learned about the whole damn thing in one post on 2dopeboyz--I didn't even know the brothers Thornton were doing different stuff. It's one of those splits you're kind of thankful for but wouldn't admit it; listening to Clipse, I'm always like "No, Pusha goes harder," only to change my mind as soon as Malice's verse comes in. So now here's this Pusha T solo album.It's probably the only album--or mixtape, I really should correct myself here--the only mixtape anymore that could open with a Scarface clip and it be like exactly how it should open. It's thirty seconds of Tony and Manny dialogue and it's enough to incite a kind of hermeneutics whereby you consider the notion of its being totally played out, but then arrive at the conclusion that it actually reaffirms everything you like about Pusha T. So then you're ready for the rest of the tape and after this intro it's a little disappointing. It's not grimey; it doesn't have much of that sparse-bombastic, straight-crushin'-you sound. A lot of the beats instead have that predictable epical grandiosity, like it was Cecil B. DeMille, coke dealer turned producer. It reminds me of Jay-Z's Kingdom Come in that it seems like why not do something different, have a bunch of guest spots that totally suck and have only one Neptunes song? And then lyrically, too, you can kind of tell Pusha doesn't really know what to do anymore, since he's even richer than he was when he was rapping about his niece was four when she felt chinchilla, and even more removed from drug-dealing than he was when he was rapping about yellow and blue making green (which is one of my favorite lines of all time, btw).
That said, there are a couple tracks where he kind of unveils a newer, smarter greatness--verses where he comes off more as a clever, intelligent guy who has a hard history than as somebody who's still on the grind, so to speak. His "Can I Live" freestyle would be better than Jay-Z's original, if it were the original. And then the surprising outro, "Alone in Vegas," pairs such smooth, pensive, self-aware rhymes with such a confident, nonchalant, jazz lounge-y beat (via this guy--who is this guy?)--the song can definitely hold its own as a Clipse classic. So when the album fades out, it's got enough to make you wish it wasn't ending. Yeah it's got a disproportionate amount of shitty overblown tracks--disproportionate for a Clipse album, you know--but it's a pretty dramatic King of Kings-type title anyway, and it's a mixtape, and really it's still got like 5 or 6 cool songs. So yeah I'll listen to it until the LP comes out and I mean I'll be pretty busy with other stuff/music anyway--it's not going to be exactly like listening to nothing but Hell Hath No Fury for like a month and a half--so it's kind of whatever, right?
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