My Brother’s Keeper

Matthew K. Ritchie considers Clipse’s new album “Let God Sort Em Out,” the Virginia rap duo’s reunion, and the rarity of a principled artistic existence.

By Matthew K. RitchieJuly 25, 2025

• Music

WATCHING A BLAXPLOITATION film sometimes feels a bit like an exercise in discernment, where you are constantly wary of what a director is trying to convince you about the “true” Black experience in the 1970s. They’re next-door neighbors to morality plays, rooted in a desire to put community empowerment on-screen. Sermons are channeled through slick-talking pimps, crooked cops and ornery detectives, and ravishing women hustling to succeed, or just survive. The figures aren’t all that complicated—stock characters rearranged like deck chairs, heroic or villainous as called for that day. It’s that fluidity that carries Cotton Comes to Harlem, the 1970 adaptation of Chester Himes’s 1964 novel, with its two protagonists, Black NYPD detectives “Grave Digger” Jones (Godfrey Cambridge) and “Coffin Ed” Johnson (Raymond St. Jacques). On its face, the macabre nicknames given to the instruments of the law in a Black community could only spell trouble for common Black folk. Yet, they save their “extralegal” vitriol for the likes of violent criminals, drug dealers, and con men—anyone who tries to undermine the stasis of Harlem and pull one over on the meek and the innocent.

In Cotton Comes to Harlem, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed are on the tail of Deke “Reverend” O’Malley (Calvin Lockhart) after an attempted robbery on his sham Back-to-Africa movement has left $87,000 hidden in a bale of cotton missing in Harlem. In the early stages of their investigation, the detectives are warned by their white captain and lieutenant to lay off O’Malley and disregard him as a suspect, citing him as a credit to the Afro-American people. The comment sets an indignant Coffin Ed off, as he wonders aloud who is going to look out for the Black folk across the country whose money O’Malley stole.

The exchange fizzles out. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed recognize that they’re the only ones with eyes clear enough to see O’Malley’s true character as a con man; they depart, quietly, and pursue the reverend as the key to the caper. After they leave, the captain questions why the lieutenant lets the detectives “run wild” up in Harlem. “You’ve got to understand Ed and Digger, sir,” the lieutenant responds. “They have their own special way of dealing with things up here. And if they find something kinky in Reverend O’Malley, I’ve got to respect it.”

Coffin Ed and Grave Digger coolly back each other up against their white commanding officers, letting outward racism bounce off them before returning their own biting comments in an instant. In the final act, Coffin Ed corners O’Malley for the last time; the slippery con man attempts to bargain with the detective, offering him a fifty-fifty split of the found $87,000. Ed rebuffs him, refusing to leave Grave Digger out to dry, or to swindle Black folks in Harlem: “You steal money from white folks, that’s your business. But when you steal from Blacks, that’s my business.” O’Malley can’t fathom the stance, laughing it off as the folly of a religious, righteous fool. The detective duo, for all their enhanced interrogation techniques and penchant for property damage, are guided by shared code in a landscape ruled by unprincipled men. Keeping this ethos within the constraints of lawful “right” and “wrong” feels a tad narrow, especially when it can be applied generally to almost all endeavors. There has to be some sort of honor when dealing with the work you’re doing, or with the people you’re around, whether you love them or they’re your enemies. It’s a compass that gives you the best chance of stumbling toward the right direction when all other tools are lost.

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It’s as though Clipse, the rap duo comprising Virginia-raised brothers Malice and Pusha T, wrote the word “loyalty” on a whiteboard in Chad Hugo’s bedroom studio in 1994 and decided to figure out the rest later. They’ve practically said as much throughout the lengthy press run for their latest album, Let God Sort Em Out (2025). After their last LP, 2009’s Til the Casket Drops, when Malice—feeling that the group’s subject matter was incongruous with the religious life he wanted to lead—planned to take a hiatus from secular rap music, his younger brother didn’t blink. Even after more than two decades spent honing a strain of particularly intricate drug-dealer raps, meted out in a cold-blooded snarl that feels almost hereditary, Pusha recognized that his older brother’s spiritual needs were most pertinent.

The Clipse project was paused, but its legacy was preserved in amber. As Pusha struck out on his own and Malice retreated from the public eye to write books and make starkly different, mostly underheard music under the stage name “No Malice,” the stature of what they accomplished together only seemed to grow. Clipse emerged, in the early 2000s, from Virginia Beach, where their close-friends-turned-superproducers Pharrell Williams and Hugo (known together as the Neptunes) helped them unlock their potential at their biggest moments. With the Neptunes throwing the kitchen sink at them—anything from accordions to harps to synths and record scratches could fill the background—Clipse became more and more comfortable pushing the envelope with the bars they brandished, their conviction growing with each passing test.

Their allure was apparent from the group’s first official single, “The Funeral,” and solidified with an instant classic debut album, 2002’s Lord Willin’—a debut by technicality alone, as their first record was shelved by their label due to a question of the brothers’ perceived marketability, a sign of things to come. Both Pusha’s and Malice’s verses could be studied through a jeweler’s loupe, pored over and held up against any of the work of the best emcees or poets or essayists worth a damn. Pusha’s writing is steeped in the tradition of directness. He adorns his truncated lines and simple rhyming patterns with details that are obsessed with the minutiae, rooting his metaphors in the concrete to give them an extrasensory depth that you can almost feel, like on this section from the track “Comedy Central”:

Still up in the same way
As I left ya, all in three gestures, down, up and aim
I can define death better than Webster, wet ya
Now bless ya, and off to my next venture
Blocks so white, June look like December

Malice, in comparison, is meandering, letting his emotional internal monologue flow out of him with intensity and clarity. While just as evocative with his details as his younger brother, he’s always been unafraid of letting introspection and existential musings bleed into his bars, as if he’s moving between the physical and spiritual realm with each syllable. There’s a blistering stretch on the posse cut “I’m Not You” that causes an ache in your heart and a stank face expression in the same sequence:

To feed poison to those who could very well be my kin (Uh-huh)
But where there’s demand, someone will supply
So I feed them their needs, at the same time, cry
Yes, it pains me to see them need this
All of them lost souls and I’m their Jesus
Deepest regret and sympathy to the streets
I seen ’em pay for they fix when they kids couldn’t eat (So sorry)
And with this in mind, I still didn’t quit
And that’s how I know that I ain’t shit (I ain’t shit)

As special as they register as individual rappers and writers, their brotherly foil results in a creative connection that only a handful of duos (your OutKasts, your Mobb Deeps, your EPMDs) can hold a candle to. I found, and still find today, myself drawn to “Virginia” as the “come to Jesus” moment for becoming a Clipse fan. It’s balanced perfectly: Pusha muses about buying the block and laughing off the hoopla of the O. J. Simpson trial; Malice wanders, eternally wary of outsiders trying to get a slice of his and his brother’s pie. I like to imagine them as a pair of warriors fighting off a horde of enemies, with Pusha situated just a little in front of Malice, the younger sibling cutting a path with abandon and the elder ensuring that no foes are left standing in their wake.

The formula remained even as Clipse was thrown off their path by corporate label acquisitions and reshufflings, placed under a Jive/Zomba imprint that could only be described as artistic purgatory. Clipse began their run under the Neptunes’ Star Trak imprint distributed by Arista Records, until 2004 when the label restructured, splitting up the coalition: Star Trak went to Interscope, and Clipse were placed under Jive’s care. Their brilliant sophomore effort, Hell Hath No Fury (2006), was trapped under a mountain of red tape by a label that didn’t care if the duo dissolved or never rapped again. Clipse asked to be freed from the label, and when that request was rejected, they sued. While litigation broiled in the background, the brothers linked with Philadelphia rappers Ab-Liva and Sandman to form the Re-Up Gang. Together they produced, in quick order, the We Got It 4 Cheap mixtape series, repurposing classic and popular beats for sprawling track lists filled with hard-nosed posse cuts, and presumably hoping to pressure the executives into granting them a release date. It was an unfamiliar (and admittedly uncomfortable) format for the Virginia pairing: “I never did a mixtape before, nor was I welcomed in the mixtape world at that time,” Pusha told Pitchfork’s Jayson Greene in 2016.

Despite the duo being unaccustomed to the art form’s intricacies—with Vol. 1 (2004) being considerably less impressive than Vol. 2 (2005), the latter of which is a torchbearer for what the street-rap mixtape can be in its purest form—the underlying motivation fueling the projects ensured that you’d want to show up as a listener. Vol. 2’s brilliance, displaying a master class in sewing punch lines together with a menacing chemistry likened to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, wasn’t just about wanting to hear new Clipse bars over classic beats from songs by Snoop Dogg (“Drop It Like It’s Hot”) and the Game (“Hate It or Love It” and “Put You on the Game”). You could feel the desperation emanating from within the four walls of the studio. “We were fighting for our lives,” Pusha said in the same Pitchfork interview. And there’s not a second on those tapes where you don’t believe him.

In preparation for Clipse’s first album in more than 15 years, I let their raps fill the idle pockets of my days, relieving the pieces of their discography that soundtracked my hazy childhood memories and discovering corners of it that I hadn’t always cared to explore. Rarely would I turn off the constant stream of coke raps, letting them rub up against other activities and media. So it was hard not to see slivers of the brothers in the bristling bravado of Coffin Ed and Grave Digger in Cotton Comes to Harlem as the detective duo rattled through their neighborhood in search of justice. Coffin Ed’s tendency to fly off the handle (often with a villain’s face bloodied, staring down the barrel of his gun) is akin to Pusha’s standing as the aggressor when necessary, while Grave Digger and Malice settle into the role of the cooler one, by necessity. Their slick-talking barbs at petty criminals and foxy women alike roll with such a natural musicality that you wish they were set to the Neptunes’ beats. You see it in the way that Pusha and Malice move through interviews in this press run, almost mirroring their rapping formation: Pusha is more apt to launch into hilarious anecdotes, Malice settling into a meditative tenor that piques with delight when he’s prodded by his brother’s boisterous nature.

It felt as though the substandard, fourth-wall-breaking Til the Casket Drops (their first LP not fully produced by the Neptunes) was a logical place for the hiatus to begin. Pusha’s profile as a solo rapper grew in the 2010s, meshing with Kanye West’s GOOD Music collective, so much so that Pusha would eventually be named the president of the label. In 2019, West asked Pusha for Malice’s phone number to get him to feature on his gospel-rap record Jesus Is King. Already wary of West’s volatile shtick—the “foolishness,” as Pusha put it in a recent GQ cover story by Frazier Tharpe—Pusha’s brother obliged, even inviting Malice to come to Wyoming to record a verse for “Use This Gospel.” However,  it was revealed on The Joe Budden Podcast that, upon arrival, West tried to send Pusha home once Malice was in his artistic clutches, hoping to trade one brother for the other. When the switch was proposed, Malice didn’t hesitate for a moment. “That’s where it comes back to that loyalty,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Listen. I’m going to go tell [Pusha T] what you said, and you can talk to him how you want.’ And I don’t know if [West] knew how to take that or what, but that’s how we are.”

The capitalistic, all-for-one nature of the music industry is almost undefeated against the structure and foundation of any group. Ego causes once-unbreakable bonds to deteriorate, families cannibalize one another in the hunger for stardom, and money tempts people to cut loved ones out of deals. Pusha and Malice’s loyalty to one another seems to act like a shield sealing the Clipse project against the surrounding environment’s pollutants. Pusha’s devotion to his brother’s spiritual peace meant never rushing his return to the mic, and it meant letting Malice heal his relationship to the art form at his own pace. In turn, Malice (who, in the group’s initial run, was often lauded as the more talented emcee) held such respect for Pusha’s standing in rap that it likely motivated him to maintain the level of quality for which he had previously been recognized. I’d pause before referring to it as accountability—which almost feels like an empty platitude in comparison with Clipse’s devotion to each other. Nobody had to tell Pusha or Malice that the other deserved the purest effort on the mic and in the writing room. When it’s all said and done, their dutiful honor to each other ensured that their joint name was never cheapened, that love and brotherhood was the reason for wanting to elevate the game every time they stepped into the studio, that seeing the other be at their best was more than enough reward.

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It wouldn’t be a Clipse album without a lengthy delay at the hands of label disturbances. (It’s interesting that this particular barrier seems to be Clipse’s curse to continually pass, feeding back into their mythos as moral rap warriors—a mantle they’re more than happy to play into.) Meant to be released in 2024, the record was held up by Def Jam, allegedly because of the label’s fear that Kendrick Lamar’s verse on “Chains & Whips” would exacerbate its feud with Drake, whose ongoing lawsuit against his own label, Def Jam’s parent company Universal Music Group, alleges that UMG conspired with Lamar’s team to destroy his reputation. Def Jam wanted to censor Lamar’s verse out of fear of legal retribution for a “controversial” line. Pusha and Malice say they—on behalf of themselves as a duo and Pusha as a solo act—responded by paying an exorbitant amount of money to be released from their contracts. They later found a distribution deal with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation. On the doorstep of a long-awaited return, Clipse was asked to break their covenant with rap music to ease the anxieties of executives. A simple choice for them, all things considered: What’s another six months in exchange for your soul?

Let God Sort Em Out is a balancing act between fulfilling the idea of a “Clipse project” and existing in the reality of artistic evolution and aging. The duo went back to their most plentiful well with production responsibilities from Pharrell. Yet, they were without Hugo, as he and Pharrell are embroiled in a lawsuit over the Neptunes’ naming rights. While both Pusha and Malice contend that there’s full love for Hugo as a person, the artistic choosing of sides runs almost antithetical to the entrenched “loyalty” that powers Clipse. Pharrell, whose beats have been sanded down over the years since crushing Hell Hath No Fury behind the boards, has been lacking in imagination and joy as his existence becomes more and more luxuriously sterile. Gone are the instrumentals draped in accordions and harps, which teetered on the edge of madness behind Clipse’s gristly bars, like “Mr. Me Too” and its mutated G-funk lowrider groove, or the clapping hi-hats and sun-kissed synths of “Gangsta Lean.” Here, one can only hope that Pharrell unearths an old production vein that is reminiscent of the Neptunes’ heyday for a brief moment (“E.B.I.T.D.A.” and “Let God Sort Em Out/Chandeliers” rattle with those atmospheric synths that would have felt right at home on 2003’s The Neptunes Present … Clones), or that he crafts a sparse, brittle landscape that allows Malice and Pusha to spread out and explore (“Ace Trumpets” and “F.I.C.O.”).

Yet for the tepid nature of Pharrell’s contributions, Let God Sort Em Out is a suitable arena for Clipse to showcase that rapping well and spitting with feeling are the main draws. Pusha and Malice are 48 and 52, respectively, but the signs of wear only serve to underline their already resolute utterances. Malice’s world-weariness is his armor as he raps with a philosopher’s wisdom: “But God only knows my intention / But selling dope is a religion / The hammer’s in position / I can show niggas the difference,” he drones on “M.T.B.T.T.F.” There’s something rakishly funny about the way Pusha refers to lesser emcees as “stream kings” and “Zeus-network niggas” after telling them that their pockets aren’t full enough to match up with him. Passion for the craft itself fuels the lyrical tricks that turn the majority of Clipse bars into gems, but it also allows them to delve into unguarded soliloquies. Pusha and Malice begin Let God Sort Em Out with an ode to their parents, who died in succession a couple years earlier. The brothers lost their North Stars in the midst of making their way back to each other. Pusha finds the strength to dig deep while standing abreast of his brother, the former not often regarded for his sentimental spitting (a critique that Pusha would hear in his brother’s absence). He meets Malice at the same introspective level on the intro track, “The Birds Don’t Sing”:

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

It’s not the first time Pusha got personally honest on a Clipse record. On “Freedom,” the opening track of Til The Casket Drops, he monologues about needing to apologize to his brother and the first love of his life, and about how his “pen’s been the poison to family and friendships.” Yet, that was couched by an irate fourth-wall break, where he spewed vitriol about the critical and fan response to their passion and honesty, almost as a defense mechanism. Here on “The Birds Don’t Sing,” there’s no urge to explicate further from either Pusha or Malice. Their vulnerability arrives without fear of pushback (from themselves or others), a true exhibition of the freedom that they’ve always coveted.

The whole lead-up to Let God Sort Em Out wasn’t without headline-grabbing palace intrigue. Interviews and cover stories touched on Pusha’s cold war with Drake and his punching down at Travis Scott on “So Be It” for the Houston native’s “shameless” and “corny” behavior, which can all get a little boring. This behavior could even be perceived as cynical, with tepid controversies surrounding a press run coming off as a bit convenient. But I contend that it’s an inevitable symptom of Clipse living and breathing once again in the rap ecosystem, one whose stars are now increasingly disappointing the purists with AI-aided art and clickbaiting bars to fill the otherwise empty space. Expecting Pusha and Malice to sit idly by while they believe the culture they love is wasting away is akin to asking our two hard-nosed detectives if they’d let a con man swindle thousands of Black people out of their well-earned hopes and dreams. While armed with all the faith in letting God handle it, they’d be damned if they didn’t speak their piece as well. It’s all they’ve got.