Kendrick Lamar made a surprise appearance during Clipse‘s concert in Los Angeles.
The Virginia rap duo brought out the Compton superstar to perform their collaboration “Chains & Whips” together for the first time.
The performance kicked off the concert with the highly acclaimed track first in the setlist before the rap duo performed tracks such as “Ace Trumpets”, “P.O.V.” and their classic hit “Grindin'”.
Kendrick’s verse on Let God Sort Em Out led to issues between Clipse and Def Jam with the duo ultimately forced to buy themselves out of their record contract.
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Sitting down with Billboard, Pusha confessed Def Jam caught him off guard when they asked him to remove the verse: âI was shocked by it actually. I was shocked at first. We havenât been doing anything particularly. For the past two years, it was just creating the album and back and forth to Paris. It was no ill intent in creating that song. We werenât on that type of time, so it was totally a shock from what I feel like the optics were enough to put a halt to something like that.â
Speaking to GQ, Pusha T described how their relationship with the storied label crumbled over Lamarâs feature on âChains & Whipsâ.
He said: âThey wanted me to ask Kendrick to censor his verse, which of course I was never doing. And then they wanted me to take the record off. And so, after a month of not doing it, Steve Gawley, the lawyer over there was like, âWeâll just drop the Clipse.â But that canât work because Iâm still there [solo]. But [if] you let us all go⌠â
Pusha also explained how Kendrick’s verse came to be: âClipse and Kendrick together, that speaks lyricism. I donât think anyone wants anything other than that. There was a traffic of people coming in and out of the studio and one of the people just happened to be a person from Kendrickâs camp.
âWe let his folks hear the album. He called them and was like âlisten, you need to get on thisâ. At this particular time, he was super busy. He sent them songs over. He called back laughing like âokay, I gotta do it, donât worry about it, I wanna do two.â The idea of right place, right time makes everything happen.â
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