Day 50: Pusha T – Daytona

Photo by James Willamor from Raleigh, NC, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A very short one today. Since today is my 50th day of album-a-daying, I thought I’d go through all my old posts to retroactively add a rating in the tags and compile a little list of everything I’ve ranked thus far. Hopefully, I’ll be able to add a thing to the review page where you can sort by rating, if I can make the tag thing work.

Those activities have taken me hours today, so I thought I’d do a short review for a short record. I chose Pusha T’s Daytona. Released in 2018, it’s Pusha T’s third album, and with a run time of only 21 minutes, it seemed like the right choice for today.

I think as responsible consumers it’s up to all of us to choose who we are ready to support financially. There’s a limit you shouldn’t cross when it comes to buying some people’s records, streaming their songs and buying their tickets, and that’s for each individual to decide. For me, being a Nazi sympathiser crosses that line, so I won’t listen to Kanye. However, if an album happens to have been produced by Kanye in the past, I feel like that I can somewhat enjoy it without guilt, kind of. Daytona was produced by him, so I can appreciate the artistry of Kanye on this album without the baggage of Kanye’s ideology. Kind of. Just let me have this one.

I can’t say I know much about Pusha T, which is a bit unfortunate. Daytona is very, very good. The production is obviously top-tier and it sounds immaculate. I love “Come Back Baby” and “Santeria”, and I do shamelessly enjoy that he was whacking Drake on “Infrared”. I like how concise the album is, there’s nothing you could take out. Apparently they chose seven songs because Kanye liked that it’s a holy number.

My only issues are that there are a few bars there that have aged like milk, with several mentions praising Diddy (and even an addendum by Pusha T on Genius saying “we all in the streets, all looked at Puff like, man, he’s the man. He’s really that guy.”) And the cover is disgusting. They paid 85k to licence a photo of Whitney Houston’s countertop full of drug paraphernalia in the bathroom where she died, taken on the same day. As if you couldn’t have done literally anything else. I’d normally put the album cover as the photo but I’m not doing that with this one, what a nasty thing to do.

If I separate the art from the artist’s poor decisions, it’s an 8/10. I’ll get properly into one of his albums when I have more time.