Clipse
Xavier Scott Marshall for Rolling Stone
In its first week, Clipse’s Let God Sort Em Out album accrued 118K first-week sales, earning a spot at number 4 on the Billboard Hot 200—their highest chart debut. Along with its sharp rhymes, the album was praised for its extensive and holistic media rollout, which appeased blog-era rap fans accustomed to the rollouts of the aughts, which often included a great deal of press. They created multiple editorial profiles and conducted a Hot 97 radio premiere for “So Be It,” which led to a scavenger hunt for its MP3 file — it felt like a return to 2008 in a way that diverged from our current recession and housing crisis. Their press run has been a salvo for rap purists who miss artists talking to actual journalists, not athletes, fellow artists, or streamers who claim to be such while flouting journalistic ethics.
Clipse did speak with some content creators and podcasters, but they also connected with trained journalists, exemplifying the ideal balance of casual conversation and thorough interviews. We know Clipse for giving people their fix, and that’s what they did for those who miss traditional rap media. It was the most intentional, impeccable rollout that may never happen again: Will we have a story as engrossing as Clipse’s, from artists who realize the importance of telling it to journalists? Additionally, it’s worth wondering how that kind of access affects people’s willingness to be critical.
The leadup started last year, with a conversation with Vulture and a profile in the September 2024 issue of Rolling Stone. They offered two days of access in their hometown of Norfolk, where I got to talk to them for almost five hours over three interviews. Unpublished interview nuggets still periodically pop in my head: talking with them for 20 minutes about Virginia’s rich music history, and Pusha telling me that Malice sending him the video for the 2012 Loaded Lux vs. Calicoe rap battle made him realize he was still tapped into the culture. The duo was candid and insightful, understanding the assignment. Malice has dropped two albums since pausing Clipse in 2009, but there’s a perception that he’s been absent from the rap game since then. People wanted to know what he’s been up to, as well as the what and why of his comeback.
Years ago, editorial would have been the no-brainer format to explore such a winding saga, but a decline in the popularity (and existence) of traditional media outlets dovetailed with the rise of new media options. Now, an artist can tell their story on a podcast, talk to a streamer, another entertainer, or, in the case of Cam’ron in 2017, simply do an Instagram Live session telling all themselves. Stan culture helps artists on the status of the so-called Big 3 avoid all media, knowing their fans will tap in from their social media pages. Kendrick Lamar does sparse interviews, J. Cole’s last print cover was about basketball, and Drake lampooned traditional media with his Her Loss promotion. But those options pale in comparison to talking to a (good) journalist who knows how to ask the right follow-up questions, refrain from previously asked questions, and, when necessary, ask the tough questions. The written feature also contextualizes artists and their legacies in a way that a conversation can’t always do. Clipse’s story is history. Despite what conservatives think, history is still worth reading.
Their story was told in print via Rolling Stone, GQ, and the New York Times, as well as a range of video interviews in the past month. From Complex and Spotify to Jadakiss and Fat Joe, Clipse covered the gamut of popular media, prioritizing fellow hip-hop heads. And the people they didn’t talk to got plenty of aggregation material: they delved into their perception of whatever happened with UMG and Def Jam behind Kendrick’s verse. Pusha revealed why he dissed Travis Scott, and both talked about their devotion to high-quality hip-hop. But no matter how many Instagram slides we make about the effectiveness of their rollout, it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach. This wasn’t just about intention, but timing.
The gap between finishing the album and releasing it allowed them months to plan promotion. The duo’s manager, Steven Victor, was a publicist at Interscope Records before pivoting careers; it’s worth wondering how much he helped craft the press run. It helps him that there aren’t many acts like them, who can keep the fans’ attention over a dozen-plus interviews. Clipse are grown men with a lot to talk about: Pusha T has long been one of the most engaging interview subjects in music, and Malice is reminding us that he’s one of the most thoughtful. Not many acts can keep fans’ interest over a dozen interviews, or carry the respect to have outlets wanting to interview them after they’ve previously covered so much ground with prior interviews.
Clipse is a canonical rap group with two amazing, if not classic, albums in their catalog. They’ve also been away since the first Obama administration, while Pusha T became an established solo star. Their comeback single, “Birds Don’t Sing,” was one of the most poignant songs they’ve ever done, and before the album dropped, their other singles showed that they hadn’t lost a step. There just aren’t many hip-hop stories with the impact and circumstances to capture the rap world’s attention in the same way, or artists willing and able to communicate like Clipse can. That’s not to say publicists shouldn’t look to Clipse’s rollout for pointers, but they can’t expect their results.
What happened this summer, with talented lyricists and talented journalists coming together to strangle hip-hop discourse, feels like a hat tip to a bygone day, when Jay-Z was name-checking “hottest interviews” as part of the criteria for best rapper, and the road to platinum went through promotion in a print magazine. Since then, the lyricist, like the journalist, is fighting for their life against the lowest common denominator spectacle. The modern rap icon doesn’t need to be a lyricist to be a star, nor do they need traditional media. The codes of rhyming that Clipse speak of are as precious as the ethics of journalism, clasped tightly by their advocates, and unappreciated by the unaccustomed. Clipse, intentionally or not, reached an olive branch to a fellow medium besieged by layoffs, streamers, and virtue signalers who don’t consume the work they claim they want; it felt like solidarity. We learned, with this rollout, that people don’t realize how much they’ve missed lyricism or journalism until they’re reacquainted with them on the highest level.
The Clipse rollout has felt like a homecoming party; therefore, anyone who’s not festive is perceived as a party-pooper. A Pitchfork review ranked the album a 6.5 out of 10, surmising that the album was sharp lyrically but faltered because of Pharrell’s presence. Perhaps it was the review’s cutting tone that had it roundly condemned online, even though it expressed that the reviewer generally enjoyed the album. It’s impossible to know, but it felt like part of the backlash was that a critic had the gall to offer a dissenting opinion on an album that had enjoyed a purely celebratory album cycle; it’s worth wondering whether the Clipse’s meticulous rollout anticipated engineering the kind of goodwill that would deter people from calling out what they may have disliked on the project. Even during an album credited for reviving traditional media, there was a moment that expressed how much people fundamentally misunderstand the function of music criticism.
Despite that hiccup, Clipse’s album cycle has shown that traditional hip-hop media can still aid in helping an act properly promote their work, provided the story and timing are right.
From Rolling Stone US.
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