Pusha T and No Malice had to pay an insane seven figures to get out of their Def Jam deal because they didn’t want to censor Kendrick Lamar‘s verse on a song.
Push, No Malice Had to Pay a Ton of Money to Exit Def Jam Deal
In a new interview with Billboard published on Tuesday (June 3), Pusha T’s manager, Steven Victor, revealed that Pusha T and No Malice had to pay a “s**t-ton of money” to exit their deal with Def Jam all because they didn’t want to censor Kendrick Lamar’s verse on “Whips & Chains,” which will appear on their upcoming album, Let God Sort Em Out.
Victor confirmed Pusha’s previous remarks in a GQ interview that Def Jam was concerned about K-Dot’s verse on the song and that they weren’t going to remove it.
“Yeah, I don’t know what their concern is. But they were like, ‘There’s a line here; we think it’s controversial; [Kendrick] needs to change it, or we’re not putting it out,'” he explained to Billboard. “We’re not going to ask him [Kendrick] to change the verse. You guys are wrong. Stop looking at this this way. None of this makes any sense.”
“It got to the point where the conversation became, ‘You can’t keep stopping this guy from being able to put out his art.’ He’s a rapper. Every time he puts out an album or a song, you can’t listen to it to make sure that he’s not dissing somebody before you put it out,” he continued. “He has to think about what he’s saying before he’s saying it in the hopes that you might not think that he’s saying the wrong thing? Who could live their life like that?”
Victor did offer a solution of possibly releasing the song somewhere else so Def Jam and Universal Music Group won’t receive any complications from it and they’ll license the song back to them. But Def Jam rejected Victor’s idea.
“Their response was, ‘How about you just find somewhere else to put out Clipse? Just pay something to us and put it out somewhere else,” he stated.
Subsequently, Push and No Malice had to pay a seven-figure sum to get out of their Def Jam contract and find a new home for their album.
So they said, ‘Find another deal, and let’s figure out a business,'” Victor explained. “They didn’t drop us. They were like, ‘Pay us this money’—which was an exorbitant amount of money, a sh*t-ton of money—’and we’ll let you out the deal.’ That’s what happened. We paid them the money, an insane amount of money. It wasn’t, like, $200,000. It was a lot of money for an artist to come up with. They bought themselves out of the deal.”
Pusha T confirmed the news in posts on X. “No lies told,” he tweeted below. “Insane…but doable…So it got done.”
Read More: Pusha T Raps About Laughing at Ye’s Interviews on New Clipse Song
Pusha T and No Malice Secure Roc Nation Deal for Album
Once Steven Victor worked out an exit deal with Def Jam—on principle, he was then able to finalize a distribution agreement with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation within 24 hours.
“Once I knew that we had, in principle, a deal in place with Def Jam [to leave], I got on the phone with Jay-Z,” he said. “I was like, ‘Look, this is what’s happening. We’ve been talking about doing X, Y, Z, together. There’s an opportunity here to do this album. What do you think?”
“He hit me back right away, like, ‘You just made my day. Let’s figure it out. What do we need to get it done?” he continued. “I went back to Pusha, and said, ‘Listen, Jay’s gonna give us a very artist-friendly deal, we get to own the masters, and they’ll put the marketing power of Roc Nation behind it. You guys are friends. It’s a great outcome.’ We worked out the deal in less than 24 hours.”
Now with the deal in place, Pusha T has total creative control of his career.
“Pusha is having way more success creatively, financially and professionally, than he did at the peak of his career, which was when [Clipse’s] ‘Grindin” came out. Smart and steady wins the race,” Victor affirmed.
Clipse’s fourth album, Let God Sort Em Out, produced solely by Pharrell, will arrive on July 11.
Read More: The Most Anticipated Hip-Hop Albums of 2025
Check out Steven Victor’s comments and Pusha T’s reaction to Steven revealing Clipse paid seven figures to get out of their label deal below.
