Credit: Delarge

Clipse couldn’t have started their commercial career much better than with ‘Grindin’. Their debut single reached number 30 on the Billboard Hot 100, starting a trend across school lunch tables across the US with The Neptunes’ trademark beat. However, the production almost went to Jay-Z instead.

One time, Pharrell (one half of The Neptunes) was making beats in the studio and summoned Pusha T. He told him that if he didn’t go to the booth immediately, he would give a potential hit record to Hov. That song ended up being ‘Grindin’.

“I remember being at home and Pharrell saying, ‘Listen, I got this record and if you don’t come to the studio right now I’m gonna give this record to Jay-Z,’” he recalled to Complex. “And he just knows that it would burn me up inside if he did something like that. I’m very territorial about Neptunes’ production. I’ll leave text messages, voice messages, and emails of pure disgust and disrespect when they give away records that I feel like I should have had.”

When he first heard ‘Grindin’, Pusha couldn’t quite work out what to do with it. It wasn’t until his third time rapping over the production that he understood where Pharrell was coming from.

“When I heard ‘Grindin’ I was like, ‘How do you rhyme to this?’ I think I wrote that record at least three times. It’s the only record I’ve written three times. It was was so unorthodox that I couldn’t really catch it. The other verses [I wrote] were good, but they weren’t in pocket. And I was like, ‘Man, this isn’t really like a mixtape verse, you can’t mixtape verse this.’”

Despite being a hit, a ton of work went into making it a success. “It took nine months to break the record,” he said. “People don’t understand that I did every $5,000 show with every drug dealer in the United States of America behind that record. Things start in the streets, and the hustlers of the world resonated with that record so well that they were just booking us.

“It was an underground cult kinda thing. It was like, ‘Come to Detroit, five racks, wear a bulletproof vest’ and ‘Come to Milwaukee, where you need armed security.’ And this isn’t a radio-driven thing. This is something that’s basically brewing in the streets.”

Before ‘Grindin’ was given to Clipse, Pusha would wind up Pharrell, making digs about the lack of quality in his beats. “I’d be like, You got some aight joints. But you have not made no muthafuckin’ crucial shit. Look, I think you’ve been going to the movies too much. You get Hollywood? You rich?’” he told XXL.

“Pharrell started yelling, screaming. Called Chad, asked him, ‘Do you hear this shit?! Do you hear this shit?!’ He said that a thousand times, and then kicked everybody out of the room.” ‘Grindin’ now holds an important place in hip-hop history. It’s a snapshot of the early 2000s and paved the way for one of the greatest rap duos.