The reason why Clipse broke up: “I was dealing with regrets”
The Clipse are responsible for some of the best hip-hop albums of the 2000s. The duo of Pusha T and Malice are behind certified classics, 2002’s Lord Willin’ and 2006’s Hell Hath No Fury, before closing out the decade with 2009’s Til the Casket Drops. Despite their success in the noughties, the pair went on an indefinite hiatus following the latter album.
Clipse are well-known for their lyrics about drug-dealing, but upon Malice’s conversion to Christianity, he called it quits as the rapper fans once knew and loved. Malice was personally affected by his former lifestyle, ditching the name Malice in favour of No Malice. In the aftermath, he posted a video of himself looking at his former self in a grave.
Sharing quotes from the Bible, he said, “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and slander be put away from you, along with all malice; wherefore laying aside all malice, and all guile, and hypocrisies, and envies, and all evil speakings.”
He continued, “Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers; but now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth.”
Malice continued to release music, except he removed all explicit words from his vocabulary. Hear Ye Him was released in 2013, and Let the Dead Bury the Dead was released in 2017. Speaking to GQ about his awakening post-Clipse, he said, “This isn’t on some holy redemption. This is really affecting me personally where no one else would know. Like, this doesn’t feel right. Something isn’t right. I couldn’t find fulfilment in the comfort that I wanted.”
His 2006 album is a snapshot into who he was at the time, which he’s still coming to terms with years later. “Listening to Hell Hath No Fury, there are things that are still being revealed about the mindset and the place I was at the time,” he admitted. “I can even see how it has led me to where I am today. I’m speaking for me personally, I didn’t set out for it to be regretful, but I was dealing with regrets, I was dealing with remorse.
He added, “As far as the celebrating, I think we always found something to be thankful for and knew that things could be worse. There was a lot of pain in dealing with that album. The funny thing about this struggle is that some people have the impression that the lifestyle wasn’t all that was cracked up to be. I tell them, ‘No, it’s everything you imagined it to be.’”
Thankfully, Clipse didn’t part ways for good. 16 years after Til the Casket Drops, they’ll return with their new album, Let God Sort Em Out, on July 11th. Equipped with big-name features from Kendrick Lamar, Nas and Tyler, The Creator, anticipation is at an all-time high, led by venomous singles ‘So Be It’ and Ace Trumpets’. By the sounds of it, they haven’t missed a step.