Update from Ghostface: cocaine, like rap, is not what it used to be. Old cokeheads fiend for yesterday’s dust, while original hip-hop heads fiend for the good ole boom-bap. At least this is what he told me after I had endured the skateboard spitting of Swollen Members and Planet Asia to see Tony Starks grace the stage in New Haven. My guess is that most of the crowd had to take his word—the club’s aroma indicated a different choice of vice. But before the blunt-boys could lament vicariously, Ghostface announced he would be dealing us rap’s equivalent of the good cocaine of yesteryear, the Fishscale of hip-hop, come November.

Cue up “Be Easy,” the first single off Fishscale, which mentions little about cocaine but still has the punch to give you a nosebleed. Cohesiveness be damned, after disappointing Pretty Toney sales Ghostface has something to prove. Ghost fires off a buckshot of braggadocio: he bangs your sister, pisses in your drink, and drops a few gems like ”I stick it up like an iced cake robbery / And when I’m done, y’all can finger nail file me.” Granted, this isn’t a “Beat the Clock” stream of conscience—with typewriter line switches he’s too content to trap his rhymes between Pete Rock’s punctuating horns. But this deference doesn’t seem as bad come the chorus, where Ghost leads an addictive crew chant that brings the Staten Island goober-bounce, redeeming “Be Easy” as something like hip-hop narcotic.

The same evening that Ghostface professed to bring back the “good cocaine rap,” I heard, for the first time, Pusha T. come out of the gate on Clipse’s “Play Your Part” with some scary-potent drug boasts:

Quite frankly, I don’t understand these claims,
You ain’t know I was Pusha a.k.a. Brick James,
You can’t touch this, in on the feds’ list of names,
I hibernated immediate when Pusha hit fame,
I’m cold blooded …

Look how them boys, Pusha and Malice, have grown, going from mere vocal accompaniment for Neptunes’ beats to cockily dropping icy, near-immaculate verses over one of the year’s most menacing beats, Mobb Deep’s “Cobra Clutch.” Managing addition through subtraction, the absence of an exclusive Neptunes production favorably shifts the focus to what Clipse deliver—malevolent trap reports delivered with creepy sangfroid.

Some dealers cum rappers, like Young Jeezy, soften their dope-slinging street anthems by invoking community: “Everytime I do it, I do it for my hood.” Not Pusha: “I flew ‘em in, it ruined men, I’m through with them / Blame me for misguiding their life / So go and sue me then.” There’s no regionalism here, there’s only Pusha and his product. His brother Malice seems bent on destroying neighborhoods wherever they get in the way of moving his coke. “Natives gettin’ restless?” Malice already snuffed them, “such a waste of life.” Malice goes on Ice Cube’s “Summer Vacation,” but he’ll live to take over the next town.

Clipse take the typical hip-hop dope pusher narrative and cut off the front-end. Not a fight for survival, not a come up, Clipse’s game is a will-to-power. And our übermenschen here aren’t going to trade in their spot on the corner for a spot on Billboard—like Juelz they’re taking “Everyone’s Spot.” As they do so, Clipse push the cocaine-rap fusion far beyond Ghostface’s analogy, and their product is unsettlingly good.

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