For pure cocaine-fueled bars, you need Pusha T. The 44-year-old rapper tested his knowledge of coke rap songs when he appeared on Complex Brackets on Wednesday (February 23).
As the host of the game show, Brian "B. Dot" Miller had Pusha choose between several classic booger sugar-fueled Hip Hop tracks, including N.W.A's "Dope Man," The Notorious B.I.G.'s "Ten Crack Commandments," Gucci Mane's "Bricks," OT Genasis' "CoCo," and more.
With 16 tracks, Pusha T landed on "Grindin'," his 2002 lunchroom classic with brother No Malice as The Clipse, and Jeezy's 2003 dope boy anthem "Trap or Die." Picking the winner wouldn't be a hard choice for Push, as he selected "Grindin" as the best coke rap song of all time.
"Grindin'" was produced by The Neptunes and reached No. 30 on the Hot 100 when it debuted in Billboard's Top 40. Kids were imitating the iconic beat while adding their own lines to the song in lunchrooms across America as the song became a staple. Lil Wayne and N.O.R.E. jumped on the official remix, but the song almost never existed if Push hadn't rushed to the studio to get the beat in his hands.
"I didn't know that it would blow up, but I knew it was something special," Pusha told B. Dot. "When Pharrell made this beat, he called me and said, 'Hey, if you don't get to the studio right now, I'll give this beat to Jay-Z.'"
"And he was like, 'I'm talking right now, please get here in 20 minutes.' I was like 'Don't trip, I'm on my way', so I went to the studio, heard it, and I was like, 'It's dope, though. There's something dope about it, and I wrote it maybe three or four times, but it just wasn't right until I finally found it.'"
Pusha continued to say that his brother Malice had no trouble writing his verse and believed he had the best bars in the song. In a bizarre admission given how iconic the song became, he said that it took nine months for the song to take off.
For nine months, my brother and I did $2,000, $3,000, $1,500 shows for every drug dealer in the country until it finally hit," Pusha T said. Only those people knew what 'Grindin' was all about.