Yesterday, Pusha T dropped the clip-on bomb from Def Jam because they wanted to review Kendrick Lamar’s poems or remove them altogether.
“They asked me to ask Kendrick to review his verses, which of course has never been done,” Pusha t told GQ. “Then they asked me to delete the record [the album]. ”
Today, his manager Steven Victor has provided more details for the content behind the scenes and has provided billboards. “If you’re an artist, your whole life is creating artwork and pushing it out,” Victor said. “If someone tells you that you can’t do that, or you have to do it within the scope of any box they put you in, like a creative prison.”
He discussed that UMG has this department and they are reviewing the lyrics here “So that’s the department. The real reason [that department] Whether to protect artists and labels from copyright infringement. They do it for all labels. Some tags are closer to it than others. Suppose you inserted someone else’s song. [That department] Is it possible to ensure that the song is cleared correctly? It’s not to say “You say to XYZ artist XYZ says so we won’t release this kind of music.”
“I don’t know what they care about. But what they mean is, “There is a line here; we think it’s controversial. [Kendrick] It needs to be changed or we didn’t push it out. “We won’t ask him to change that way.
“Every time he releases an album or a song, you can’t listen to it to make sure he didn’t fire him before you published it.
“I went to them and said, “Let’s put this song somewhere else because you have a problem with that. You don’t have to stand behind any complications. We will put this song elsewhere and when the album is released, we will license it to everyone. “Their answer was: “You can just take out the clippings elsewhere?” Just pay us some money and put it somewhere else. ” Steven revealed.
“My thing is, we can’t do it – Praka is the same thing as clip art. [At this point]He obviously doesn’t trust you. You are not good stewards in his career. So they said, “Find another deal, let’s find a business.” They didn’t let us go. They’re like “pay us this money” – it’s a lot of money, for example, a lot of money – “We’ll let you cancel the deal.” That’s what happened. We paid them a lot of crazy money. It’s not $200,000. The money that artists come up with is a lot of money. They bought it out of the deal. ”
Steven further revealed that Pusha left three solo albums in the deal, and they quickly exited the deal and simultaneously launched a conversation with Jay-Z released via ROC Nation. Pusha/Clipse also agreed to profits from the new transaction.
“Can we pay you that money and a portion of the profit? We can find a deal that we can pay you when the guy makes money from the new version instead of bringing up this big money. [right now]? ” They said no.
“Look, that’s what’s going on. We’ve been talking about the opportunity to do X, Y, Z, together to do this album. What do you think?”
He immediately called me back and it was like, “You just did my day. Let’s figure it out. What do we need to do?” I went back to Pusha and said, “Listen, Jay will give us a deal that is very suitable for artists, we can have masters, and they will put the marketing abilities of Roc Nation behind it. You’re friends. It’s a great result.” We made the deal in less than 24 hours. ”
“Pusha has achieved creatively, financially and professionally more than he had achieved at the peak of his career, and it is [Clipse’s] “Grindin'” comes out. The smart and steady game won the game,” he signed.
