When musicians say, “It’s really a full-circle moment for me,” they don’t usually mean a diss track with fish sandwiches.
But here we are – two decades after a then-burgeoning Pusha T carved his way to jingle immortality with McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It” campaign – and this is how the battle-hardened Virginia rapper describes his latest venture .
In Arby’s new Spicy Fish Diss commercial, which premieres today, Pusha T takes aim at McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwich to ping for a competitor. On the surface, it’s one of hip-hop’s dumbest, most corporate beefs — a famous rapper gets paid a ton to promote one mass product by dissing another. In fact, the occasional Clipse MC says that this track and its backstory hold significant financial and personal lessons for him, and serve as a cautionary tale on less frivolous subjects like song ownership and sync rights.
But dessert is always the best course, so let’s eat that first. The insane ad mixes lines you might hear on a proper Pusha-T record (“I could sell water to a wal/How could you ever think I’d fail”) with ruthless targeted attacks against Mickey D’s (“Fillet- o-Fish is shit/And you should be disgusted”). The ad overlays surreal images of a clown carrying bags of money, a sailboat sinking in the ocean, and a slow-motion close-up of a bear eating a fish. The tone is decidedly tongue-in-cheek, in keeping with the quasi-Shakespearean cool Twitter wars many fast-food companies have been waging in recent years.
Since the beginning of his career, the former Clipse star has positioned himself as one of rap’s most reclusive biggest businessmen, allying himself with artists and brands for small fortunes. In 2016, industry veteran Steve Stoute shocked the industry when he claimed that alongside Pharrell, Pusha T and his brother Malice (who now raps under the moniker No Malice) were the writers behind McDonald’s ubiquitous “I’m Lovin’ It” jingle of the year 2003 was Williams and Justin Timberlake. The company had already paid Timberlake $6 million to record his song “I’m Lovin’ It,” which the jingle is based on. (Pusha’s role in writing the jingle has since been disputed by others.)
At the time, Clipse had just released their debut album, Lord Willin’, and were still trying to break into the industry. Pusha now says he was paid a one-time fee but no royalties for the longest-running marketing campaign in the company’s 82-year history. “I’m solely responsible for this company’s ‘I’m Lovin’ It’ swag and jingle,” he told Rolling Stone. “It’s just real. i am the reason Now I must destroy it.”
He laughs, adding, “I did it at a very young age, at a very young point in my career, when I didn’t demand as much money and possessions. It’s something that always bugs me later in life like, ‘Damn, I was a part of this and I should be a part of it.’ It was like half a million or a million dollars for me and my brother – but that’s peanuts while this is going on. I had to get this energy out of me, and this [ad] was the perfect way to get that energy like, “You know what? I’m over it.'”
The partnership is not without precedent for the rapper, who was somehow linked to Arby’s in 2018 when their “We Have the Meats” campaign licensed Yogi and Skrillex’s 2014 EDM hit “Burial” with the rapper. Although his actual voice does not appear in the ad, Pusha confirmed that he owns 40 percent of the track and, to this day, gets paid every time it airs.
“I’ve had a lot of obscure collaborations in EDM,” he says. “For some reason, a lot of EDM acts felt like my voice pierced the chaos and intensity of the music…I’ve always been known for hardcore rap, but a big part of my business has always been in the sync business.”
Deals like that make tax sense to him, he continues: “When I do these kinds of songs, I usually need a high percentage of ownership. I do this because this style of music is very suitable for commercials. And regardless of what role they play in the song – whether it’s my voice or not – I own what I own.”
The ownership component is just as crucial, if not more important, to Pusha than any cultural impact of a corporate ad placement. His last actual diss track — the personal, crushing “Story of Adidon,” which accused Drake of being a “dead” father “hiding a kid” — caused a nuclear impact in hip-hop.
“We had a good time [with ‘Adidon’], but I’m over it,” he says when the subject comes up. “I’m the very first fish sandwich diss ever, and I should go down in history for that.”
Pusha laughs again. “I hope [‘Spicy Fish Diss’] has more cultural impact [than ‘Adidon’]because that goes straight into my pocket.”