#125, "Nosetalgia," Pusha T (feat. Kendrick Lamar) (2013)

150 Favorite Songs: #125, “Nostalgia,” Pusha T (feat. Kendrick Lamar) (2013)

Let’s start with the beat, a handful of high-pitched chords ringing out over a fuzzy bassline and stuttering drums. Pusha T’s voice sounds perfect over this kind of beat. He’s so strident as a rapper that I always think that his voice is like three octaves lower than it is when I’m not actively listening to it.

This isn’t a song you can dance to. It’s not something you’d put on a playlist for a party. Pusha T has those songs, but “Nosetalgia” isn’t one of them. This one’s meant to scare you a little, which is true of a lot of his songs. He works hard to hit that here, quoting Rocky IV and Ivan Drago’s stone-cold “if he dies, he dies” line, which he then spins forward into references to Boyz N The Hood, connecting his own experiences (or at least the experiences of the Pusha T character he plays on record) to movies for a listener who never sold drugs for a living to hold on to. There’s a lot of nimbleness to the way Push raps. His songs feel loose and improvisational and fresh, which is impressive for someone who has recorded well over a hundred songs all about cocaine.

“Nosetalgia” means something to me, though, for another reason. My job has given me the unusual opportunity to meet a lot of people who are famous, or whose work is meaningful to me, or both. Here’s my story about Pusha T and “Nosetalgia.”

It was SXSW 2013. If you’ve never been to SXSW and you try to imagine it, you are probably not picturing what it’s really like, especially during its early-2010’s height. It’s not really a music festival. There are no gates, no tickets, no clear boundaries to the event. It’s more like if you superimposed a second city on top of the city that normally exists in Austin, this one funded by mega-brands and populated by a lot of famous people, people who aspire to be famous, and people who will be famous in a year or two. The regular city’s parking lots and unrented storefronts become something else entirely in the city that pops up during SXSW. The two exist in a weird tension; sometimes a restaurant or bar or coffee shop that you would normally just be able to walk into to order food is, for that week, called The Bud Light Hootenanny or something and only certain people are allowed in, but everything on the menu is free for them. Austin businesses tend to love this, since they get paid very well to rent out their entire place for days at a time (up to ten, which is how long SXSW lasts).

It’s also very hierarchical in terms of who matters in that world and who doesn’t. If you matter, you get invited to once-in-a-lifetime events that sound made-up to talk about. If you don’t, you can maybe catch a glimpse of things, and pick up a free Red Bull or bag of Doritos, because the entire enterprise only works if there are have-nots who wish they were on the inside, so the ecosystem of the overlaid city is built to ensure that there’s just enough free stuff—snacks, beer, entertainment featuring medium-sized headliners or up-and-coming artists—to maintain a population that makes the people who matter want to stick around.

These days, I only matter a little bit during SXSW, which is fine with me. I’m tired, and the best stuff tends to start very late. For a few years when SXSW was at its height, though, I worked mostly for MTV, and that gave me incredible access to that layered city that appeared over the one I lived in the rest of the year. (In 2013, I stood next to Questlove watching Prince play a club show until 4 in the morning!) It was, in a word, weird. I am a simple boy who lives in Texas and grew up in Indiana; I am not comfortable with spectacle. But that year, my job was to attend fancy things and talk with famous people.

One afternoon, that list included Pusha T. I had been doing interviews with people who were all less famous than him that morning, mostly at a Starbucks, because Starbucks is an easy place to sit for several hours talking with people in a hectic environment. I met Push downtown and as we looked for a place to sit, suggested yet another Starbucks. He gave me a look that was both kind and firm, which I understood to mean “you seem like a nice guy, but I am a famous rapper, and I’m not going to be seen hanging out with you in a Starbucks.” We walked down the block to the Four Seasons and sat on a couch in the lobby to talk for half an hour about what he was working on.

What he was working on was the album that became My Name Is My Name, the Kanye-produced album that, despite Push being thirty-six years old at that point, was somehow his solo debut (he’d been in a group with his brother for the previous decade, but they disbanded when his brother left rap to become a preacher).

I don’t really get intimidated or nervous about interviewing famous people. My secret to that is I dissociate a little through these interviews. I am not there to establish a connection or to make the person I am talking with like me or think that I’m interesting; I become an information-gathering robot who is there to get them to say the things I need them to say so that I can write the story my editor is expecting. This is a useful boundary, especially when the person I’m talking with is someone who, say, I have spent many hundreds of hours listening to sing or who have written words that I’ve tattooed on my arm. I’m not there as a fan, I’m there to work.

But when I was talking with Pusha T about My Name Is My Name, he mentioned that he was working on a song that he had written specifically to collaborate on with Kendrick Lamar, and for maybe the only time I can remember, my careful boundary slipped. Kendrick was the hottest shit in the world at that moment; he’d just released Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City as a shot across the bow to basically everyone else in music, announcing himself as a fully-formed young artist at twenty-five years old. I asked Push what he could tell me about the song, and he said he couldn’t say anything because it wasn’t finished and Kendrick hadn’t even agreed to record it yet; I told him I understood, but could he just, like, tell me anyway? Off the record, I wouldn’t use it for anything, I just really wanted to know. And because Pusha T, while aware of his image and the importance of maintaining it, is a thoughtful person and maybe because he was proud of and excited about this song he’d been working on, rapped me a few bars of not just his part of the song, but the part he wanted Kendrick to do, all in the lobby of this hotel.

Because we were off the record, I won’t describe what he rapped. I will say that it wasn’t what his eventual collaboration with Kendrick turned out to be. But I remember seeing the track listing for My Name Is My Name a few months later, and the collaboration with Kendrick and being very excited that he’d managed to make this thing happen. Then I listened to it, realized it wasn’t the song he’d told me about, and had a quick rush of disappointment followed by one of excitement: “Nosetalgia,” I think, is even better than what he’d planned.

I love that about “Nosetalgia,” because I love when creativity becomes magical. I don’t know exactly what happened between Pusha T and Kendrick Lamar, but I can guess that it went something like this: Push probably pitched Kendrick the song he described to me at the Four Seasons, and at some point while they were working out what the appearance would be, Kendrick suggested an alternative. That process changed Push’s plan into something else, something special, something that existed as a proper collaboration between the two of them.

So back to “Nosetalgia.” It’s a cocaine song, which isn’t surprising because every song Pusha T records references cocaine in some way (that’s even true of the McDonald’s diss song he recorded for Arby’s; it’s clearly a point of pride). His stage name is literally “Pusha!” But “Nosetalgia” is special within his body of work anyway. You’ve probably figured out the pun in the title by now, but the alchemy of their collaboration is that, where Push raps about the emotionally-deadening highs of selling cocaine, knowing it’s going to ruin the lives of a lot of his customers, Kendrick provides the other perspective: about growing up as the kid of one of Push’s customers, about having your video games stolen by people who are going to sell them to buy drugs, about wanting to help your family thrive while also being furious at them for their addiction. Those two perspectives are never in conflict here, which is wildly empathetic from both of them; they both understand. Kendrick starts his verse connecting back to Push’s, referencing Boys N the Hood again as he raps “You wanna see a dead body?” in what’s probably my favorite vocal delivery in his entire catalog, following that throughline into his own family story. Push, for his part, lets Kendrick get the last word, never attempting to refute what he has to say or justify the thrilling coke rap of his earlier verse. These things just exist alongside each other, in tension but not outright conflict. There’s an understanding.

I think the song that Pusha T originally envisioned for the two of them would have been a good one, but when I listen to “Nosetalgia,” I get to hear what happens when two artists at the height of their talent, both hungry in different ways, create something unique, playing off each other in ways that neither of them could have expected alone.