One Song for You from My Album of the Motherf**** Year (Easy)

I don’t need to wait for Spotify to wrap and tell me my album of 2025, because it will surely be the one I’ve been listening to on a daily basis since July.

To me, Clipse’s Let God Sort Em Out is perfect, and I agree with Pusha T’s assertion from their recent show at Denver’s Mission Ballroom that what he created with his brother and Pharrell and others is “the album of the motherfucking year, easy.”

Even if that sentence above is utterly meaningless to you, I’d just like to invite you to listen to one song from the album that I think you’d like, after a brief intro designed to give you just a little context. (And if you have a different album you love this year, you’re required to tell me so I can listen.)

For me, like many, my first introduction to Clipse was hearing their song “Grindin’” on the radio. I was mowing lawns at a summer camp and driving my work truck to the next field when the song came on and Pharrell, of the Neptunes, told me that “The world is about to feel something that they’ve never felt before.” The song stunned me to the point that I didn’t get out of the car for ten minutes after I got where I was going.

Here’s some mythology about that song, told via Lego in the excellent movie Piece by Piece:

In that video you see Pusha T, one half of Clipse along with his brother Malice. It’s so cool to see brothers rap together because their similarities blend so well and their individual differences reveal themselves in continually interesting ways. If you watch just a little bit of Clipse’s NPR Tiny Desk performance, you can get a sense of this pretty quickly:

On the song I’d like to share, “The Birds Don’t Sing,” each brother takes a verse to speak to one of their deceased parents and describe the circumstances of their last days, Pusha T first to their mother, Mildred, and Malice next to their father, Gene. Between the verses John Legend, the choir Voices of Fire, and Pharrell create an emotional hook, and combined with the powerfully written verses I watched fans at the Mission Ballroom being moved to tears in public. It’s excellent songwriting, and sets the tone as the first track on the album.

If you want some support listening along because the writing is dense, you can foll0w along with the lyrics at Genius.com.

Then again, you can also just turn it on and feel something that you never felt before:

Do you have a different album you love this year? Tell me about ! jed@kindandfunny.com. (Wanna just talk about how good Clipse is? That’s great too.)