THIS IS CULTURALLY INAPPROPRIATE
In the dark dungeons of rap, it’s tougher than ever with millions of MCs trying to scrape and crawl their way to the top. The dust is still settling after the war between the game’s two biggest titans, and it seems like a downward spiral as the biggest names are dropping lackluster projects left and right. Carti’s highly anticipated “I AM MUSIC” was bloated and had weird AI allegations, Drake is still asking for hugs and love, and Travis Scott’s Jackboys 2 came and went with a “wobbly-wiggly huhhh”. But in the fallen glory, Clipse reopened the casket with chains and whips in hand. But before murdering the competition and taking the throne, “The Birds Don’t Sing” opens the album and reintroduces Clipse after 16 years. The song serves as a dedication and memorial to Malice and Pusha’s parents, who died only four months apart: “Lost in emotion, mama’s youngest / Tryna navigate life without my compass / Some experience death and feel numbness / But not me, I felt it all and couldn’t function.” The song opens with a somber, funeral piano and Pusha returning to the death of his mother. He recounts her last days and how “she was dying without letting [him] know”. Pusha admits in the verse that he wasn’t on great terms with his siblings and that he wasn’t focused on his family: “Seein’ you that day / Tellin’ you my plans but I was leavin’ you that day / It was in God’s hands, Ye was at Elon’s waiting to get with me / On my way to Texas, that’s when Virginia hit me.”
Pusha admits his failure of priorities, that he focused on his own career rather than his family, and we can know in hindsight where both Ye and Elon went from here. But the line “On my way to Texas, that’s when Virginia hit me” is the turning point for Push. On one hand, it was his wife, Virginia, calling him to tell him of his Mother’s passing, but also his home, Virginia, his calling back to Pusha and telling him to come back (and possibly God telling him to get away from the future villains that would be Ye and Elon). The verse ends with Push putting together the pieces of his mom’s plan, where in her last days she laid the strings in a way that would bring her family together again after she had passed. After a piercing, soaring chorus by John Legend, Malice delivers on their Father’s end. “The way you missed Mama, I guess I should’ve known / Chivalry ain’t dead, you ain’t let her go alone”, Malice opens. While Pusha describes the moments before his Mother’s passing, Malice speaks about his reflection in the current moment. “Combin’ through your dresser drawers, where do I begin? / Postin’ noted Bible quotes, were you preparin’ then?” In a similar way to how their Mother was getting ready for her death, their Father was quietly preparing too. From here, Malice pens a love letter to his Father, describing him as a true hustler, but never wanting to share his pain, and a painful admission of when his Father found cocaine in the cupboard. He ends his verse, “Your last few words in my ear still ring / You told me that you loved me, it was all in your tone / ‘I love my two sons’ was the code to your phone, now you’re gone (home)”.
As Malice explained later in a Genius response, after their Father’s passing, he was looking through their Father’s belongings, finding post-it notes with bible quotes and finding his passwords often being a variation of Ilovemytwosons. Parents often aren’t mentioned in rap, and if they are, it can often be a sore subject or some point of growth. Tyler has spent the last decade unraveling his relationship with dad across albums, Kendrick sharing his own struggles on “Father Time” and the Mr. Morale album more broadly, and Drake… has his own issues. But rarely is there a dedication, a love letter written in the genre. On “The Birds Don’t Sing”, Clipse prove that you can pen an open love letter to Mom and Dad, and still be the most ruthless killers in the genre. And if anything defines Clipse, it’s that they always wear their hearts on their sleeves. On September 13 of this year, Clipse were the first rappers ever to play at the Vatican, and this was “The Birds Don’t Sing” was their opening song.
- Bentley Bradford
