Who is older in the clipse

I'd walk into the club and it would be full; just the neighbourhood drug dealer and all his friends celebrating his birthday. This unconventional marketing campaign paid off for Clipse. By the summer of , Grindin' had cracked the Billboard top Alongside it came an album, Lord Willin' Clipse were fond of dropping their gs , also produced entirely by the Neptunes.

Sharing the same home town of Virginia Beach, Pusha was 14 when he first met Pharrell, following his elder brother Gene into the circle of the then up-and-coming producer. This article includes content provided by Spotify. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'.

Romantic issues resolved, the brothers became "really tight" with the duo and the next year Clipse were formed. Pharrell and Chad were the maestros of being different. Our styles clashed but meshed, their beats give us the free range to say all the reckless things that we wanted to say. At the same time, I feel like our lyrics opened up the mind of the streets to the beats. It's fair to say that the phrase "street element" is a synonym for raps about drug dealing.

Crack rap was the name given to Clipse's style. They weren't the only ones to describe the process of cooking, selling and spending the profits of the drug that blighted black America, but Pusha T and Malice did so with a forensic eye for detail and a lyricism that painted a richer picture.

I talk about my parents' divorce, about my friends who went to jail. These are the stories that other artists don't want to go into because it ruins their herodom. Pusha describes his persona as that of a "conscious street mind". Of someone steeped in the life but not enamoured of it. He refuses to answer directly questions about his drug-dealing past, but after much deliberation, he will put it another way.

By the time hit, nine of my best friends and my manager were in jail on a drug conspiracy, for 10 to 34 years. Then, this past September, my road manager went to jail for another six and a half years. Whatever form that love took, it didn't just keep him out of prison, it kept his career on the up. Clipse's second album, Hell Hath No Fury , was released in Another epic combination of Neptunes beats and gimlet-eyed drug raps, it only reached No 14 in the Billboard chart but became a cause celebre amongst critics and devoted fans.

Pusha accurately describes Clipse as "one of the first internet-darling rap groups", their music much more blogged about than it was bought. Some of those fans were bigger than others, though, and soon Kanye West was inviting Pusha to his birthday party in New York. He called for me and my brother to perform Hell Hath No Fury. The whole album. For him. I was like: 'Wait a minute, wow, no problem.

Actually he didn't call me, Rick Ross called me. In fact, you can see its appeal as a topic to rappers. Shock and outrage have long been part of hip-hop's currency, but recently, it seems to have exhausted its power to provoke, relying not on the music, but the characters who make it for shock value.

What's outrageous about 50 Cent and The Game is not the predictable gangster cliches of their records, but their bullet-strewn life stories. By lauding cocaine, you can upset not merely the prissy guardians of white bourgeois morality, but anyone who has ever wasted an evening trapped in the hellish company of someone with one suspiciously runny nostril, delivering an uninterruptable monologue about themselves. The last thing the world needs is a numb-nosed rapper bragging about his relationship with the old imbecile-dust.

That's precisely what cocaine rap's leading light, Young Jeezy, offers, but the genre's other main practitioners are a more intriguing proposition: Virginia-based brothers Gene and Terrence Thornton, who call themselves Malice and Pusha-T and make up Clipse. Their career has been an uphill struggle, despite the patronage of superstar production duo the Neptunes.

Their debut album went unreleased. Bolstered by the brilliant single Grindin', but hamstrung by a cover painting of the Thorntons chauffering Jesus around the ghetto that seemed to have been snatched during a daring heist on Tony Hart's gallery, their second, Lord Willin', went gold in America: hardly earth- shattering news in the multi-platinum world of hip-hop. Its follow-up has been delayed for four years by record-label politics and litigation. Perhaps understandably, a sense of frustration and despair permeates every track on Hell Hath No Fury.

You can hear it in the sparse, bleak, challenging music the Neptunes conjure up: one-finger synthesizer riffs, disjointed vocals, harsh, trebly beats. Wamp Wamp dispenses with drums in favour of the clatter of metal hitting metal.

On Ride Around Shining, Clipse boast about their Porsche, while someone drags a coin over piano strings. The overall effect is utterly forlorn: car-as-penis-extension, but flaccid and impotent.

The female vocals on Mr Me Too are blank-eyed and heavy-lidded; the singer sounds like someone forced to sing while on a horrible cocktail of drugs.

The Thorntons, meanwhile, sound like the men who sold it to her.