Steven Victor says it took an "insane amount of money" for Pusha T and No Malice to buy their way out of their deal with Def Jam. He discussed the rappers' dispute with the record label while speaking with Billboard for a new interivew ahead of the release of Let God Sort Em Out.
Victor confirmed Pusha T's recent comments with GQ, in which he claimed a disagreement over censoring Kendrick Lamar's appearance on the album sparked their departure. As they continued to try and find a middle ground, Victor eventually suggested parting ways. "I went to them and I said, 'Let us put the song out somewhere else since you guys have an issue with it. You guys won’t have to stand behind whatever complications come from it. We’ll put the song out somewhere else, and we’ll license it back to you guys when the album comes out.' 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 continued: "My thing was, we can’t do that — Pusha and the Clipse are one thing. [At this point], he clearly doesn’t trust you guys. You guys haven’t been good stewards of his career. So they said, 'Find another deal, and let’s figure out a business.' They didn’t drop us. They were like, 'Pay us this money' — which was an exorbitant amount of money, a s—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."
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"Let God Sort Em Out" Release Date
Pusha T revealed that Let God Sort Em Out was no longer releasing through Def Jam while speaking with GQ, earlier this week. He explained that he hoped to put out the project last summer, but the meeting in which they played the music for Def Jam didn't go well. “They wanted me to ask Kendrick to censor his verse, which of course I was never doing,” Pusha T explained. “And then they wanted me to take the record off [the album].”
Now, Pusha T and Clipse are officially in business with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation. “I think that that synergy, just in a rap sense, is going to speak volumes,” Pusha said of the partnership. Let God Sort Em Out will be Clipse's first album in 15 years and is due out on July 11th.
