Got beef? Pusha T certainly does with McDonald’s, and thanks to some help from Arby’s, the rapper gets a little bit of revenge on the fast food titan with a diss track that’ll leave McDonaldland in flames.
“I’m the reason the whole world love it / Now I gotta crush it,” begins Pusha T in the anti-McDonalds diss track he dropped on Monday (Mar. 21). Pusha, 44, teamed with Arby’s for “Spicy Fish Diss,” the commercial promoting the chain’s new Spicy Fish sandwich. From there, Pusha goes in for the kill. “Filet-O-Fish is Sh-t / And you should be disgusted.” Pusha doesn’t hold back, saying that “A little cube of fish from a clown is basic,” that “drowned in tartar, that Filet-O-Fish is tasteless,” and that “them other clowns are just too frail.”
This song is not the first time that hip-hop and fast food have combined. There was that We Beefin? mixtape that Wendy’s dropped in 2018, and Epic Rap Battles of History did an episode featuring Ronald McDonald, the Burger King, and Wendy. Not to mention, Pusha’s friend, Kanye West, made a surprise appearance in a McDonald’s commercial during the 2022 Super Bowl. However, while all those instances have been for fun, there is some legit animosity between Pusha and McDonalds. Rolling Stone noted that in 2016, music industry vet Steve Stoute claimed that Pusha T and his brother Malice (who now raps under the No Malice moniker) were the writers behind McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It” jingle, alongside Pharrell Williams and Justin Timberlake.
“I am solely responsible for the’ I’m Lovin’ It’ swag and the jingle of that company,” he told Rolling Stone. “That’s just real. I am the reason. Now I gotta crush it.” Pusha said that he wrote the jingle “a very young age at a very young time in my career where I wasn’t asking for as much money and ownership,” and that he only got “like half a million or a million dollars for me and my brother.” Mcdonald’s reportedly paid Justin Timberlake $6 million to record his “I’m Lovin’ It” song, and Pusha noted that he and his brother got paid “peanuts” for their works – especially, as he puts it, “for as long as that’s been running.”
“I had to get that energy off me, and this [ad] was the perfect way to get that energy like, ‘You know what? I’m over it,’” he adds. Rolling Stone also notes that Pusha worked with Arby’s in a previous ad campaign. The company licensed Yogi and Skrillex’s 2014 song, “Burial,” for a 2018 commercial. Though Pusha’s vocals on the track weren’t featured in the spot, he says he owns 40% of the track and gets paid whenever it plays.
Pusha T’s last major diss track was the “Story of Adidon,” which revealed that Drake had a secret child he was hiding from the world. Pusha said he’s moved on from that beef and would rather be known as the rapper who wrote “the first-ever fish sandwich dish ever,” and that’s more important because all the money from this ad is “gonna go direct to [his] pocket.”