Why Clipse Not Reuniting Is Probably For The Best

Confession: Justin Timberlake’s “Like I Love You” was the first time I ever heard Clipse. I was 10 years old and didn’t really care about much beyond Tekken 4 and getting that kid from across the street to trade me his Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon Yu-Gi-Oh! card (my offer of three slightly-bent Dark Magicians still stands, Robert). At the time, rap meant Eminem’s “Stan” and that 50 Cent album kids at school used to talk about. But when I heard Malice and Pusha T over that Neptunes beat, everything stopped.

It wasn’t long before I was begging my mom to get me Lord Willin’, and I’m pretty sure that was all I listened to for like two years straight. “When the Last Time” is what I imagined the soundtrack to getting drunk in high school would be like; “Virginia” opened my eyes to the perils of hustling; and “Grindin’” cemented my unshakable belief that Clipse was the coldest group in music at the time. Pusha T and No Malice set a standard of coolness that was unattainable to most people—especially a 10-year-old kid in the UK—but we all tried anyway. Like when you saved up your pocket money for three weeks and rapped, “Excuse me if my wealth got me full of myself” in the bathroom mirror.

As I stumbled my way through puberty, Hell Hath No Fury, Til the Casket Drops and all the Re-Up Gang tapes joined Lord Willin’ as staples in my dusty ass SONY stereo. My appreciation for Clipse became more than just about living vicariously through lyrics; for the last decade, Clipse has shown us very good, very consistent lyrical rap.

It’s 2014; it’s been five years since 2009’s Til the Casket Drops. That record was hardly a swan song for the Virginia duo; the album debuted at a meager No. 41 on the Billboard 200 and failed to make much of a splash in hip-hop, even with impressive collaborations with Kanye West, Cam’ron and Pharrell. I actually fucked with Til the Casket Drops, but it was hard to ignore the disappointment. Just three years prior, Pusha T and Malice dropped what many consider to be a coke rap classic with Hell Hath No Fury. And then people were left questioning where the fury had gone.

Pusha T and Malice’s careers have taken completely different trajectories since the release of Til the Casket Drops: Pusha reinvented himself as a solo artist under G.O.O.D. Music and finally dropped his impressive debut album, My Name Is My Name, last October, while Malice battled with the guilt of glorifying the drug dealer lifestyle in the face of his manager’s incarceration. Malice went on to renew his faith in God, appropriately changed his name to No Malice and subsequently turned his back on his old ways—Clipse’s brand of lyrical street rap included. “This is just a new time in my life, and like I said, I’ve grown,” he told us in an interview last February. “So I don’t want to be attached to anything negative like that.” But a Clipse reunion is a question that’s always on the table.

In 2011, Pusha T and No Malice announced that their focus would be on their solo careers while a Clipse reunion remained a possibility down the line. But just last week, No Malice lowered the proverbial casket on the prospect of Clipse releasing a new album anytime soon. “There is no Clipse album in the works,” he told The FADER. “It’s not going down. I don’t know where the rumor stems from. And I don’t know how this keeps coming back up—this isn’t the first time. But I would never play with the fans like that and act like something’s about to happen and it’s not.”

Years of hope had just been killed off, even if it was admittedly false hope. Even if we all preferred living under the pretence that Pusha T and No Malice were linking back up to make another coke rap classic, this was the crashing-down-to-Earth clarity we needed. Contrary to No Malice’s claim that “a Clipse album could be done,” it’s become extremely difficult to see how, under current circumstances, that’s possible. Since choosing the righteous path, No Malice has inadvertently put his brother’s lyrical themes at odds with his own. Sure, No Malice has always sort of played the yin to Pusha T’s yang, and he served up extra slices of consciousness on Til the Casket Drops. “If I misled any kid that was fatherless, that burden’s on my soul as long as I exist,” he rapped on “Popular Demand” (a few bars prior he declared himself “the pioneer of coke rap,” so it was obvious he was still trying to cling onto that old narrative). But if the brothers’ most recent effort—the awkward and disjointed ”Shame the Devil,” off No Malice’s independently released 2013 solo album, Hear Ye Him—is anything to go by, we shouldn’t hold our breath for a Hell Hath No Fury 2.

A Clipse album that doesn’t sound like a Clipse album is a recipe to underwhelm, and an insipid comeback album is a recipe to tarnish a legacy. That threat becomes more of a reality when you consider how much the hip-hop landscape has changed since Clipse’s prime. This isn’t 2006; braggadocious drug-dealing rap is no longer the trend du jour.

Which is not to say that a good ol’ fashioned Clipse album won’t be refreshing in 2014. The commercial success (a No. 4 debut on the Billboard 200) and overwhelming critical acclaim of Pusha T’s My Name Is My Name proved there’s still a healthy demand for that brand of quote unquote lyrical street rap; music that “makes me roll down the windows and ride past the club line three times before I get out the car,” in Pusha’s own words. But will the duo be able to make the same impact as they did when Hell Hath No Fury wowed critics and cracked the top 20 eight years ago? The most exciting acts today are those “cracking the pavement,” to quote Yeezus, not retreading old ground.

As an audience, we, too, have changed. We’re a generation who hears a song, takes to Twitter, and critiques it for about 20 minutes, and then it’s on to the next one. We’re less about listening to music, and more about immediately critiquing it. We’ll tweet anything for retweets and favorites. And determine something as #classic or #trash after one listen (if that). If Clipse did decide to force this long-awaited comeback album and, given the dilemma they currently face, it failed to live up to its billing, we’ll sure as hell let Pusha T and No Malice—and the world—know about it.

From Cypress Hill and Three 6 Mafia to Onyx and Public Enemy, we’ve seen too many rap groups fall from grace, content with churning out mediocrity in the hope of recapturing past glory. We don’t need Clipse to be another one. OutKast, on the other hand, is a group that seems to have got it right. After a seven-year hiatus, Andre 3000 and Big Boi are making a grand return to the stage this year with over 40 festival dates, including headlining appearances at Coachella and Governors Ball Festival. These days, people consume concerts over records; it’s a tangible product. Live shows leave you with adrenaline running through your veins, poorly-filtered Instagram photos and, if you can fight past those elbow-throwing douchebags that always seem to occupy the front rows, you can actually touch 3 Stacks as he performs “Ms. Jackson.”

But the chance of Clipse hitting the road is as likely as them releasing an album next week. The duo planned a 30-date tour in 2012 to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Lord Willin’ before No Malice backed out at the last minute. “Two weeks before it was time to go, my brother was like, ‘Nah, I don’t want to do it. I’m off that, I’m on my mission right now,’” Pusha T told BBC Radio 1.

No Malice is ideologically opposed to the coke raps and street tales of old, but is that what we really want? What if it’s just a period in our life, that nostalgia we’re yearning to relive? Like when “Mr. Me Too” was the shit and Lil Wayne started dissing the Clipse and all you wanted for Christmas was that BAPE hoodie Malice wore on the Hell Hath No Fury cover. Clipse has never been a defining voice like Nas, Jay Z or Kanye, but it’s that cult-like community that made being a Clipse fan so special. Sometimes, it’s okay to let the past live in the past. Maybe there’s no more nostalgia, there’s only “Nosetalgia.” On that note, bring on King Push.

Andy Bustard is one of the best bloggers out, you can find him on MissInfo.tv and TheBoomBox. He’s on Twitter – @aboynamedandy