Cocaine rap: how Pusha T feels about being grouped into the hip hop subgenre
Think of the term ‘cocaine rap‘, and who, of all the rappers out there, comes to mind first?
Raekwon arguably created the first coke rap masterpiece, with Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… in 1995. Jeezy, meanwhile, is certainly widely regarded as a master of the subgenre, with Rick Ross, Freddie Gibbs and many others all in with a shout. But, for many people, there’s no one better at it than Pusha T, who’s almost synonymous with the term.
Growing up in Virginia Beach alongside his brother and Clipse partner Malice, Pusha started dealing drugs from a really young age, getting into the game as a teenager. Cocaine has played a key part in his life since he was a kid, so, as he sees it, it has as worthy a place in his music as any other subject.
Asked once during an interview with The Talks about how it felt to be classified as a coke rapper, Push was a bit resistant to the label. His reasoning was that, from his perspective, characterising the content of his songs as “coke rap” misses the point. He’s just rapping about the life he knows.
He argued that, when he started out rapping about coke, he wasn’t doing so under the impression that he was working within a specific subgenre. It was people outside of the scene who started thinking of it as a unique branch of hip hop.
“This isn’t just rap to us!” Push insisted, “This is reality, telling the perspective of what’s going on outside in your world, whether it be suburbia or inner city. This is what the basis of rap has always been about: storytelling.”
While coke obviously does come up a lot in his raps, it’s far from the only thing. He has always insisted there’s more to his work than the cocaine rap label might suggest on its face, arguing to The Guardian in 2014, for instance, that his debut album My Name Is My Name wasn’t simply “gratuitous”.
“I talk about my parents’ divorce,” he pointed out, “about my friends who went to jail. These are the stories that other artists don’t want to go into because it ruins their herodom”.
The way Push understands himself is as a “conscious street mind”, someone who understands street life but is not blinded by it. He understands that there is more to life than coke and drug-dealing, but, at the same time, he does not deny the role that these things have played within his life. The blunt term cocaine rap, meanwhile, doesn’t capture the nuance.