By Tochi Onyebuchi
It’s not the bathroom she died in.
She would find that bathroom six years later in the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills. She would find it after rehearsals with Brandy and Monica for Clive Davis’s pre-Grammy Awards party in 2012. Her last public performance—where she sang “Jesus Loves Me” with Kelly Price—would be in the rearview. That bathroom, in Suite 434, is where paramedics would have found her unresponsive. Benadryl, Xanax, and cocaine would be found in her body, evidencing their use shortly before her death.
So much finding happens when the person that addiction has colonized overdoses. Addiction is ultimately a choreography of searching.
No, the cover of Pusha-T’s latest album, bearing the name of his favorite Rolex watch, depicts a different bathroom, but one that belonged to Whitney Houston nonetheless. Taken in 2006 by Houston’s former sister-in-law Tina Brown, and published in the National Enquirer on April 10th of that year, the photo reveals the postapocalypse of a binge. Leftover food, empty beer cans, cocaine-encrusted spoons, and a crack pipe turn the sink into a graveyard.
One supposes that Daytona, this latest from the Poet Laureate of Cocaine Rap, is grasping at an obvious but still sublime juxtaposition. In an album littered with metaphors and similes for drug dealing (“Still do the Fred Astaire on a brick”), perhaps the idea is that we’re always selling to somebody. Whipping work is never a victimless crime.
If the album’s interior offers consequence-free exploits, a narcotic in and of itself, the cover is perhaps meant to show the consequence. But that would be giving Kanye West, owner and creative director of G.O.O.D. Music and Pusha-T’s boss, far too much credit.
Ultimately, the decision was Kanye’s. In a number of interviews before and subsequent to Daytona’s release, Push tells the story of how the album—after having been scrapped at the 11th hour and re-instrumentalized by Kanye, had been turned in. How the artwork, a simple picture of the rapper, was previously set. Then, at 1am the Wednesday before his Friday release, he gets a call from Kanye telling him it’s not working. He needs new artwork, and he—Kanye—knows just what the $85,000 cure is.
In an interview with DJ Booth, Pusha details the exchange: “I said, ‘Hey, I don’t want to pay for that and I wasn’t even going to ask you to pay for that.’ We picked what we picked, it’s here, it’s ready. ‘No, this is what people need to see to go along with this music,’ [Kanye responded]. ‘I’ma pay for dat.’ I say, ‘You my man! [laughs] You my man!”
On May 24, Pusha T posts the cover art on his Instagram. The very first comment: “Shame on you!” The next comment is six trash emojis, the one after that “You a bitch ass nigga for this.”
On May 25, Daytona debuts at #3 on the Billboard Hot 200.
***
The original cover of George Cain’s semi-autobiographical novel Blueschild Baby depicts a Black man tying off his arm with a portion of the American flag, veins rising under the skin, ready for the next hit of heroin. Cain’s protagonist ultimately overcomes his addiction. Cain himself never overcame his. Already, I’ve indulged in terminological deceit. To speak in the language of “overcome” and “vanquish” and “lose” and “battle” is to suggest a finitude to addiction that perhaps does not exist. This mirage fits the narrative arc. There’s the story that drugs and/or alcohol disrupts, then comes the plummet, so that the end of Act Two finds our hero at their lowest depths, their bottom. Then there’s Act III where the addiction is kicked, the monkey shrugged off the hero’s back, the dragon no longer chased but slain.
Reality, however, often offers an alternate ending. One less talked-about, because it does not make us feel as good. The ending where the addiction “wins,” where its colonization of the body and mind results in the hero’s death.
Missing from drug rap is the banality of the whole enterprise. Taking its place are the industry of dealers in the kitchen, the lavishness of their celebration, and perhaps the occasional thought given to their victims. But so much of the addiction that fuels the drug economy is built on “hurry up and wait.” A flurry of violence, lies, robbing then quiet, very much like modern warfare. Dealers work and wait for sales. Their customers work and wait for the hit. Time collapses, existing only as the interstitial space between episodes of (self-inflicted) violence. For whom in the ecosystem that Daytona describes is time a luxury?
Daytona’s cover, that photograph of Whitney Houston’s bathroom—a corner of that Atlanta home festooned with drug paraphernalia— can appear to the charitable listener as an attempt to say that the banality of drug addiction is itself the violence. That, ultimately, this is what Pusha is rapping about. And the charitable listener hears a note of contrition in his voice with that admission, as though to say, “I wish it weren’t like this.”
But given that Pusha T had nothing to do with the album cover choice, that he admits all he could concern himself with was the music, you realize the drug dealer’s business is ultimately one of exploitation. The note of remorse the charitable listener hears in the trapper-turned-rapper’s voice is false. It sounds like Kanye.
***
Push is a minimalist. Kanye is a maximalist, and one who seems to want conversation and who seems to think the only way to bring that conversation about is through rhetorical violence. Bloodletting as portraiture.
Acknowledging this isn’t to absolve Pusha-T, but to highlight context. The Kanye West who doggedly pursued the licensing rights to that photo is the same Kanye West who emerged from his Twitter hiatus to proclaim support for one Donald J. Trump, to claim the two of them shared “dragon energy.” The same as the gleefully hedonistic misogynist on Yeezus. The easily-meme’d, the forever-misunderstood. The armchair psychologist watches a man who endured the loss of his mother and the end of an engagement over the course of approximately six months and sees a man surrounded by people perhaps unwilling or unable to care for him.
It’s selfish as a spectator and listener to speculate like this on the health of someone who has so publicly been unwell. Just as it is selfish for Kanye to juggernaut his way into controversy by choosing such an album cover, the opprobrium to which threatens to drown out any consideration of the music therein.
But it seems increasingly that there is little regarding Kanye that is simply banal. He claims to want conversation, large and electric. But this choice of album cover, this exhibitionism, is not interested in conversation. It’s merely shouting.
In the end, it’s all violence.
Suggested Reading
Abdurraqib, Hanif. At The House Party Where We Found Out Whitney Houston Was Dead. Freezeray.
Bernstein, Jacob. “Production of a Lifetime: Whitney Houston and Clive Davis” The New York Times Magazine. (September 30, 2017)
Cain, George. Blueschild Baby. Ecco Press, 1994.
Smith, Danyel. “When Whitney Hit the High Note” ESPN the Magazine. (February 01, 2016)
Tochi’s writing has appeared in Nowhere Magazine, the Oxford University Press blog, Tor, and the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, among other places. When not writing or trying to read his way into his best postcolonial self, he can be found indulging in his love for narrative-heavy open-world video games or adding to his already near-encyclopedic knowledge of rap beef. His debut young adult novel, Beasts Made of Night, was published by Razorbill in Oct. 2017. Its sequel, Crown of Thunder, will hit shelves in Oct. 2018. He has fiction forthcoming with Tor and with HarperCollins.
