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Watch Drake Discuss the Origins of His Beef with Pusha T and Kanye West

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Drake stopped by Maverick Carter’s HBO show The Shop, where he sat down with Carter and LeBron James to discuss his beef with Pusha T and Kanye West. Touching on Pusha’s diss track “The Story of Adidon,” Drake said that he recorded his own response to the diss, which mentioned “terrible things,” but specifically chose not to release it because it wasn’t something he wanted to be remembered for.

“I got home, listened back [to the diss], and I was like, ‘Man this is not something I ever want to be remembered for,” he told Carter. “This is not even a place I necessarily want to go…[Pusha’s] song, I thought was trash, but it was a hell of a chess move.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Drake mentioned how the beef has effected both his and Pusha’s careers, and that he knew the Clipse member was investigating the existence of his son, Adonis. “Rap purists and people who love confrontation, they love to say, ‘There’s no rules to this shit!” There are fucking rules to this shit,” he said. “I knew something was gonna come up about my kid. They had to add the deadbeat dad thing to make it more appealing, which is fine…But wishing death upon my friend who has MS…When you mention defenseless people who are sick in the hospital, who have passed away, I just believe that there’s a price you have to pay for that. It’s over! Someone’s gonna fucking punch you in the fucking face. That shit’s done, the event’s over. I wanted to do other things. I didn’t want to further your career by rapping back to you and having this exchange.”

Drake also mentioned how his beef with Kanye originated. In the interview, Drake said that Kanye invited him to work on the famously scatalogical track “Lift Yourself,” which he recorded in Wyoming as part of a number of recording sessions that would become his latest album ye. At that point, Drake says that Kanye hadn’t yet revealed he was working on releasing a new album. During the sessions, Kanye asked his collaborators to be “completely transparent,” imploring Drake to reveal the release date of his then-upcoming album Scorpion.

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“I’m in Wyoming. I play him [Scorpion‘s] “March 14.” I tell him I’m having trouble with my son’s mother,” Drake said, suggesting that Kanye fed details about his son to Pusha for the diss. “I wake up, and all these [G.O.O.D. Music release] dates are out. One by one by one. All of them around June 15,” he said, implying that the series of Kanye-produced G.O.O.D. Music releases from Pusha, Nas, Kid Cudi, Teyana Taylor, and Kanye himself had release dates chosen to specifically sabotage Drake’s Scorpion rollout.

Pusha first took aim at Drake on the track “Infared” from his latest album Daytona, where he poked fun at the rapper for allegedly using ghostwriters. Drake was quick to respond less than 24 hours later with “Duppy Freestyle,”  where he questioned Pusha’s authenticity and status on the G.O.O.D. Music roster. In the wake of Pusha’s next diss “The Story of Adidon,” Drake released a statement addressing the track’s cover art, which depicts the rapper in blackface makeup.

In August, Drake referenced Kanye and Pusha in his “Behind Barz” freestyle, and later changed the lyrics to his hit “Know Yourself” live into a diss about Kanye. Kanye has since apologized for the beef, noting that he “did not have any conversations about your child with Pusha.”

Watch clips of the interview below and revisit our timeline of Drake’s beef with Pusha T.

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