Credit: Delarge

Clipse really landed on hip-hop head’s radars in 2002 with the track ‘Grindin’’. The song became an immediate hit due to its heavy, skipping beat and flawless lyrics.

Pusha T, one half of Clipse, spoke to Complex about the creation of ‘Grindin’’ – which was produced by the Neptunes.

He explains that at the time, Clipse had already shot a video for ‘Virgina’, they were getting visibility, and starting to make money. But the rappers’ attitude was still quite casual. Pharrell Williams (one member of The Neptunes) kept pushing them to make more records, but Pusha T was only ever like “Aight, whatever”.

He then got a phone call from Pharrell one day 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’”. Pusha explained that “[Pharrell] 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”.

Pusha went to the studio and listened to the beat for ‘Grindin’’. “I was like, ‘How do you rhyme to this?’”, he said. The music was so unorthodox that it took him three times to write the lyrics. “I couldn’t really catch it. The other verses were good, but they weren’t in pocket”.

For Clipse, the novelty of ‘Grindin’’ challenged them to move away from a place of complacency.

“I was like, ‘Man, this isn’t really like a mixtape verse, you can’t mixtape verse this’”, Pusha said.

“It’s the only record I’ve written three times”.

Once the record was ready, Clipse had to really grind (pun intended) with it. The track didn’t immediately blow up, but it did resonate with the streets.

“People don’t understand that I did every $5,000 show with every drug dealer in the United States of America behind that record”, Pusha told Complex. “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”.

As ‘Grindin’’ got bigger, so too did the risks. “It was like, ‘Come to Detroit’”, Pusha said, “wear a bulletproof vest. ‘Come to Milwaukee where you need armed security’”.

For Pusha T, the momentum behind the single was all organic, without radio play. He remembers that “[It was] something that’s basically brewing in the streets”.

‘Grindin’’ represented a shift in how Clipse were working. They seized a track that tested their musical talent but also that leant itself to street culture; not the music industry machine. Rather than opt for more manufactured hiphop that may have been easier to make and sell, the duo made music that resonated with the hustlers and dealers who booked them – the very people they were rapping about.

The story behind ‘Grindin’’ is one of being committed and being real.