Hey, hello. Hi, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, Internet's busiest music nerd. I hope you're doing well.

I've got to talk about one of the craziest stories that I've seen in the past week coming out of the music industry. It involves one of my most anticipated albums of this year. That's going to be the upcoming Clipse album, Let God Sort Em Out.

Now, Clipse, if you're unfamiliar, is a legendary Virginia hip hop duo consisting of Malice, now No Malice, and his brother, Pusha T, both great rappers with fantastic creative chemistry. They have created multiple classics with each other, in my opinion. Hell Hath No Fury is a no-skips album. I will die by that. And it's also one of the best rap albums of the 2000s with some of the best production of any rap album from the 2000s from none other than the Neptune.

That is partially what makes this upcoming Clipse album such an exciting venture because not only does it see Pusha T and No Malice back together as Clipse making an entire album for the first time in years and years and years. But also we're supposed to have a full slate of Pharrell Williams' production on this record as well, which given how great the beats were on Pusha T's last album, the ones that were from Pharrell, it's almost dry, I have no doubt the production on this new record, now involving Malice, is also going to be stupendous and that there's just going to be fireworks flying in every direction.

However, this celebrated and highly anticipated comeback between these two has not been without its weird and unexpected drama, because apparently there's going to be a track on the upcoming album titled "Chains & Whips", which features none other than Kendrick Lamar. If I remember correctly, Kendrick had a very impressive verse on that nostalgia track on one of Pusha T's solo records. That was amazing. Obviously, these two have a lot of for each other mutually as lyricists and as artists.

But there's another thing that connects them as well. And that would also be their dislike for one Aubrey "Drake" Graham, and both of them, respectively, having taken Ws against Drake in track for track beefs they had with him. There are a few meetings of the minds in rap music that I wish I could be a fly on the wall for. This is definitely one of them.

And that's not to say any song that Pusha T and Kendrick Lamar come out with together as a collaboration has to necessarily center itself around Drake. I mean, frankly, I feel like that would be beating a dead horse at this point. But still, it's a very entertaining and interesting link that they both share.

Apparently, it's also something that caught the attention of Def Jam and got them looking at this new song quite skeptically, because as it has been reported in multiple outlets at this point, there is some content in Kendrick's verse in this yet to be released song that Def Jam was not vibing with, was connected to Drake, supposedly somehow, and they wanted Pusha T to undergo the process of censoring the verse.

Look, when it comes to censoring verses and labels putting pressure on artists to maybe say something else on a song of some sort, I mean, that's a tale as old as time and one that doesn't necessarily always pan out as negative. I mean, there are those homophobic bars that were struck from A Tribe Called Quest's Low-End Theory that, I mean, thankfully, they're not there.

And look, even recently with Kendrick Lamar, either by virtue of the label making this suggestion, or was it a creative choice? There are some very clearly blacked-out bars that were struck out of the opening track, "Wacced Out Murals". So it's not like censorship in hip hop has never been a thing, that there's not a history of it and a precedent for it in some cases, be it, again, something the label is pushing for or a personal creative choice.

But miraculously, Pusha T has responded to Def Jam on this ask with essentially an F U, which, again, is a pretty interesting choice for him to make, not only because Kendrick, again, has censored his own work in the past when maybe it needed to happen. But I find it doubly interesting that Pusha T has opted for this choice, given that it's not even his verse, it's not even his words. He feels so strongly about the content of somebody else's verse and the fact that it is his song, and it is a Clipse song, that he wants it to remain unchanged. And apparently now Clipse and Def Jam have severed ties over this Kendrick verse and Pusha T's insistence that it's staying there as is, uncensored.

This is not something that happens often. Labels don't typically just let artists go because they refuse to change a lyric on an album. A lot of the time, what does end up happening is the lyric gets fucking changed because the artist is signed to a contract with that label, and they're not coming out with a record with any other record label outside of the one they have a contract with.

So it's not like the label is like, 'You're trying to say something we don't like. We're just going to let you go.' Clipse bought themselves out to the tune of seven figures to basically leave this Def Jam deal and maintain their creative freedom here, which honestly, I feel like is even more commendable.

And honestly, I feel like it's only going to benefit Clipse at the end of the day because it is going to be a Kendrick feature. It is going to be something a lot of people are curious about, want to stream and want to hear, especially after all of these headlines like, 'Oh, man, it has something to do with Drake. It's something Drake-related.' Obviously, now there's naturally a lot of curiosity around this verse and what it says.

What I find to be so funny about this is that currently we have no real confirmation about whether or not that's actually what the verse is about, or even if whatever bars are trying to be censored here are like a bombshell in any way. I mean, for all we know, this could be like a handful of subliminals that could be read in multiple different ways. And Def Jam is here just pushing for censorship on these bars just out of fear that it could potentially inflame further the ongoing lawsuit that Drake has going on with UMG.

But yes, now that Clipse is officially off of Def Jam with this album, I guess they've moved over to Jay-Z's Roc Nation, which further thickens the plot due to the connections there. But what an insane falling out in position for Pusha T and Clipse to be in at this juncture. And I feel like it definitely demystifies these constant claims that we're hearing from the Drake fandom camp that the industry is conspiring against thier boy, and it's a David and Goliath thing, and the industry is trying to silence him and blackball him and write him off and so on and so forth. When if that's the case, even if it is just for the sake of their own bottom line and saving themselves maybe further legal headaches.

If Def Jam and UMG were really truly against the idea of giving Drake an even more difficult obstacle in front of him to deal with, why would they be doing everything they can to censor this one little couple of lines in a verse on a Clipse album? Again, even if UMG is acting out of self-interest in a way in this scenario, that also does benefit Drake. If they were purely operating under the guise of making Drake's public perception worse and worse and worse and inflaming this beef and making it a bigger PR nightmare for him, why would they be running interference and be willing to give up this album and Clipse for a seven-figure sum just over a handful of lines?

And again, all of this without even any confirmation that what Kendrick has said on this now, uncensored, because it's going to be uncensored, uncensored verse, is even that crazy. For all we know, it could just be like, 'Yeah, I make a lot of bucks. Drake sucks.' But whatever it is, Pusha T clearly felt strongly enough that I had to stay as is on the song for a record that, frankly, I already thought was going to come out great, and I was highly anticipating. Now I'm even more enthused to get there with this information that Pusha T has just held so strong to him and Malice's artistic vision on this process to the point where they were willing to pay out the ass to make this project happen how they wanted it to happen.

We don't get a lot of stories like this coming out of the music industry, and frankly, you'd love to see it. Let me know what you guys think about all of this madness down in the comments. I'm sure you will.

Anthony Fantano. Clipse. Forever.