Clipse, "Grindin'"
Never stop hustlin', never stop grindin'
Century Songs is a deep dive into the songs that have meant the most to me in the 21st Century so far, 2000-present. The songs are not ranked, and I’ll be writing about whichever ones seem right that week. For an overview of the project, click here.
I don’t remember definitively the first rap song I ever loved, but if I had to take a guess, it was probably “Gin N Juice.” I had Snoop Dogg’s 1993 debut, Doggystyle, on cassette and I used to listen to it constantly on a Walkman until I memorized pretty much all of it. Every track, every skit was essential, and my friends and I used to rap “Lodi Dodi” and “Tha Shizit”* while walking home from school (careful to change or mumble the expletives, lest someone who knew our parents heard us). Suffice to say Doggystyle was ground zero for my hip-hop appreciation.
*It was decades before I knew that the outro to the “W-Ballz” skit at the beginning of “Tha Shiznit” was a direct interpolation of the Parliament song “Flash Light,” and I forget this frequently until I’m listening to that song and it catches me off guard again. It explains a lot!
But the truth is, I’m not actually as big a hip-hop head as I could be. Not long after my Doggystyle days (and The Chronic, and Enter the Wu-Tang) I discovered I lean much more toward rock and punk, pivoting from Chicago’s Top 40 station B96 (still going strong!) to the alternative rock station Q101 (R.I.P., mostly) around 7th grade. I kept up with hip-hop off and on, but I know I missed a lot in the back half the 90s I’m still catching up with.
That late 90s aesthetic is what first gave us Clipse, although it wasn’t until the early 2000s that the duo really came into their own with their proper debut, Lord Willin’, in 2002 — especially their lead single “Grindin’.” The pounding beat, the hand claps, the slow, deliberate flow from Pusha and Malice: it was clear that this era of rap was going to have a vastly different sound than I was used to, and it signaled that new voices could come from anywhere, not just the coasts.
Clipse are two brothers, Gene “No Malice” and Terrence “Pusha T” Thornton, who were originally born in the Bronx but came up in Virginia Beach. Originally this seemed like an idyllic escape from the pressures and trappings of a big city, but it was there that they discovered cocaine was the family trade. Talking to XXL in 2002, Gene said, “I got two cousins where we used to get the money at. They ran it, so it was easy.” Younger Terrence pushed back, trying to set his brother on a different path, nearly leading him to join the army before friends introduced the brothers to producer and Virginia Beach native Pharrell Williams of the Neptunes.
The brothers both shared a love of hip-hop, and Gene had tried to make it as an MC before life intervened. But meeting Pharrell was a game changer; suddenly, a career in music was a possibility, and Gene began working to record a demo with Pharrell and Terrence, by then about 16, tagging along. Although Gene originally assumed he would be a solo artist, Pharrell convinced him to let Terrence, then going by the name “Terror” to match Gene’s “Malice,” to form a duo so they could flow with each other and used that shared experience.
In 1999, the brothers, now going by the name Clipse, were signed to Elektra and set to release their Neptunes-produced debut, Exclusive Audio Footage. The album has some interesting moments and features guest spots from Kelis, N.O.R.E., and Kurupt, but the brothers have a rushed, strained delivery and the late 90s production is too big and messy to make the best use of Clipse’s dynamic. Their debut single, “The Funeral,” did not chart, despite a video and a label push, and the album was shelved.
Not every rap debut catches fire, and while Clipse clearly had talent there wasn’t much on Exclusive Audio Footage to suggest what they would be capable of. After the album went nowhere, the brothers went back to the block and Pharrell had some misses of his own*. Heading into the new millennium, hip-hop was beginning to change, with much of the late 90s coastal excess giving way to regional nuances, pop and crossover influences, and a refreshing minimalism. Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, as the Neptunes, seized on this combination and in 2000 finally started scoring some hits of their own.
*Despite following up “The Funeral” with “Got Your Money” by Ol’ Dirty Bastard ft. Kelis, which is absolutely not a miss.
One of those hits was from New Orleans rapper Mystikal, the immortal “Shake Ya Ass,” which made it to #3 on the R&B charts and #13 on Billboard and became the gravelly southern rapper’s signature song. Built around a slowed-down James Brown sample, the song is a gritty, sweaty pop-rap anthem, one that makes brilliant use of Mystikal’s voice if not exactly showcasing his rapping. (Although he originally resisted the idea of the song as a single, once it was a hit, he was happy to be wrong.)
With this newfound success, the Neptunes launched their own subsidiary label, Star Trak, and made Clipse their first signing. By this point, Terrence had changed his name to “Pusha T” and was slowing down his delivery, leaning into the easy-yet-hard southern rap of the early 2000s. When Pharrell shared with them the minimalist, woodblock percussion beat that would become “Grindin,’” Malice didn’t get it, claiming something must be missing. But they thought it over and put some of the toughest, catchiest coke-rap lyrics over it. A modern rap classic was born.
The beat, which primarily sounds like a remix of car doors slamming, hand snaps and claps, pairs well with a track that doesn’t even bother with a hook and puts Clipse’s criminal stock and trade front and center. Listening to rap in this vein, you can’t help but become complicit, like watching Goodfellas and rooting for Henry Hill to outrun those goddamn helicopters. Pusha T gives us his business card, complete with a mission statement, and some signature wordplay.
“From ghetto to ghetto, to backyard to yard
I sell it whipped or un-whipped, it’s soft or hard
I’m the neighborhood pusha
Call me Subwoofer, ’cause I pump base like that, Jack”
The beats on Lord Willin’ go a long way toward making the explicit criminality on display sound fun as hell. This is something the Neptunes excelled in at this time, so much so that Pharrell personally introduces practically every song on the album, stepping away just before dropping the craziest beat you’ve ever heard. “When the Last Time,” another killer single, goes a bit bigger than “Grindin’” but still swirls around the sounds of vaguely retro-futuristic office equipment before asking the rhetorical question, “When the last time you heard it like this?” Never, man. Not before or since.
Trying to build a music career, working in studios with the Neptunes and going back and forth with labels: all of that is a way to get out of the hustling game. Pusha dismissively refers to this early work as his “dope boy chronicles,” acknowledging that kids today aren’t going back to old music and learning the history. Rap is about always moving forward, always keeping current; the classics are forever, but resting on your laurels is a fast track to irrelevance.
Man, I make a buck, why scram?
I’m tryna show y’all who the fuck I am
The jewels is flirting, be damned if I’m hurting
Legend in two games like I’m Pee Wee Kirkland*
Platinum on the block with consistent hits
While Pharrell keep talking this music shit
*Pee Wee Kirkland is a former basketball player who turned down getting drafted by the Bulls in 1969 because, supposedly, he was making more money as a drug dealer. If you’re making a buck, why scram? (He also appeared in the movie Above the Rim, which is only relevant if, like me, you are a 40-something-year-old guy writing about 22-year-old rap songs.)
Malice gets the second verse, and it’s funny and clever, starting with a “patty cake” rhyme and letting that build into a bunch of bread and baking metaphors. And when Malice rhymes, “And you can tell by how my bread stack up / Then disguise it as rap so the Feds back up,” you have to wonder how true that is anymore, considering Young Thug has since had his own lyrics used against him as evidence in his racketeering trial. The songs tell a story, they paint a picture of a world that’s honest to the Thornton brothers’ experience but nevertheless blurs the lines between reality and fiction. Taken strictly literally, it’s hard to purely enjoy even the most fun parts of “Grindin,’” but literal has nothing to do with it. Pusha’s and Malice’s verses, the Neptunes’ beats, and a whirlwind story of crime on the streets of Virginia Beach: it’s like a movie unto itself, and their honesty shines through in even their most seemingly nonchalant lyrics:
“Filthy, the word that best defines me
I’m just grinding, man, y’all never mind me”
As I constantly discover and rediscover the hip-hop of this century that means the most to me, there’s always going to be strange through lines that connect back to what I used to listen to as a kid. Over time I’ll probably dig into that more, but at this point I think it comes down to killer production, detailed storytelling, and charismatic MCs who respect and continue the tradition while making it their own. If you don’t have something to say, don’t bother trying to say it. And Clipse might still officially be a thing although it’s a while since we’ve heard from them; Pusha is more known as the solo artist, but I don’t think we’ve heard the last from them. And we certainly haven’t heard the last from them in this newsletter.
Next week: A murder ballad and a meditation on the nature of evil