Drake Responds to Blackface Criticism From Pusha T Diss Track Photo
By Jem Aswad
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – More than 48 hours after Pusha T went after him with an aggressively personal diss track “ The Story of Adidon, ” Drake responded Wednesday night in a lengthy Instagram stories post.
While did not directly address any of the multiple attacks in the song, he instead explained the startling blackface photo that Pusha used as a cover image (and also by extension a hard lyrical jab in the song about the biracial rapper being “always afraid he wasn’t black enough”).
“I know everyone is enjoying the circus but I want to clarify this image in question,” Drake wrote on his iPhone’s Notes app on Wednesday night. “This was not from a clothing brand shoot or my music career. This picture is from 2007, a time in my life where I was an actor and I was working on a project that was about young black actors struggling to get roles, being stereotyped and type cast. The photos represented how African Americans were once wrongfully portrayed in entertainment.”
He continued, “Me and my best friend at the time Mazin Elsadig who is also an actor from Sudan were attempting to use our voice to bring awareness to the issue we dealt with all the time as black actors at auditions. This was to highlight and raise our frustrations with not always getting a fair chance in the industry and to make a point that the struggle for black actors had not changed much.”
In the song, Pusha also goes after Drake for a child he allegedly fathered as well as his producer Noah “40” Shebib’s multiple sclerosis. While West has been relatively silent on social media for the past few days as he finishes the album he’s scheduled to drop this Friday , his prominent role in “Daytona” and Pusha’s career makes him a participant in the battle as well.
Sources tell Variety that West has been revising the album all week — he continued revising his 2016, The Life of Pablo, even after its release — so it seems safe to assume that the controversy will get another chapter when his album drops at midnight.
