Posted by Pusha T is the rapper to go to when you need pure cocaine-driven bars. On Wednesday (February 23), the 44-year-old put his knowledge of coke rap songs to the test when he was the latest participant on Complex Brackets.
The game show’s host, Brian “B. Dot” Miller, had Pusha pick and choose between several classic booger sugar-fueled Hip Hop songs such as N.W.A’s “Dope Man,” The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Ten Crack Commandments,” Gucci Mane’s “Bricks,” OT Genasis’s “CoCo” and more.
After going through 16 different tracks, Pusha T ended up with “Grindin’,” his 2002 lunchroom classic with his brother No Malice as The Clipse, and Jeezy’s 2003 dope boy anthem “Trap or Die.” Picking the winner wouldn’t be a hard choice for Push as he went with “Grindin” as the best coke rap song of all time.
“Grindin’” was produced by The Neptunes and cracked Billboard’s Top 40 when it peaked at No. 30 on the Hot 100. The song would become a staple across lunchrooms in America as kids were imitating the iconic beat on tables while adding their own bars to the song. N.O.R.E. and Lil Wayne jumped on the official remix and people may not know the song almost never happened if Push didn’t rush to the studio to get the beat in his hands.
“I didn’t know that it was going to blow up, but I knew it was something special,” Pusha told B. Dot. “When Pharrell made the beat, he called me and said, ‘Hey if you don’t get to the studio right now, I’m going to give this beat to JAY-Z.’”
He added, “‘And he was like ‘I’m talking about right now, you better get here in 20 minutes.’ I’m like ‘Listen, don’t trip I’m on my way.’ I go to the studio I heard it and I was like ‘It’s dope though, there’s something dope about it and I wrote it three times maybe four times but it just wasn’t right and I just finally found it.”
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Pusha continued to say his brother Malice had no trouble writing his verse and believed he had the best bars on the whole song. He also revealed that the song took nine months to blow up, which was a crazy admission given how iconic the track became.
“Me and my brother did $2,000, $3,000, $1,500 shows for every drug dealer in the country for nine months until it finally hit,” Pusha T said. “Those are the only people that knew what ‘Grindin’ was about.”
Listen to “Grindin’” by the Clipse below.