Let God Sort Em Out: A Track-by-Track Grief Sermon Disguised as a Clipse Album (Part Two)

Tracks 3 & 4: P.O.V. & So Be It

P.O.V.

By track three, it’s clear Clipse didn’t come back just to reminisce. They came back to put grief in a sand-colored Rolls Royce and drive it through the American psyche with tinted windows and three passports in the glovebox. P.O.V. isn’t a break from grief—it’s the performance of life after it. It’s the post-trauma hustle. It’s what happens when you survive and now everyone wants to know what you’re going to do with that survival.

“P.O.V., kilos in my Maybach” — That’s how Pusha opens, and right away you know: this isn’t about cocaine anymore, not really. This is about legacy. About what you carried, how heavy it was, and the way people romanticize the load now that you’re not breaking your back carrying it anymore.

Grief doesn’t always show up in tears. Sometimes it looks like overachievement. Sometimes it sounds like flexing. Sometimes, grief dresses itself up in a Tom Ford suit and dares you to say you see the sadness underneath. This track is full of that kind of grief—masked, dressed, marching forward, refusing to be still.

In the first verse, Pusha’s rattling off industry critiques and street-level reflections like someone who’s seen too much to be impressed by smoke and mirrors. He says:

“You stream kings but you never fit a crowd in there.”

Translation: you might have the numbers, but you don’t have the presence. You haven’t walked through fire. You haven’t buried anyone. You haven’t lost enough. And maybe that’s what grief really gives you—depth. Longevity. Gravitas.

Then Tyler, The Creator steps in like the younger cousin who went for walks with the older boys on Thanksgiving and came back paranoid and smelling sticky. Like the one who grew up idolizing the family dope boy but learned to build his own empire. Tyler’s verse is wild, witty, and intentionally erratic—his grief shows up differently. His is more existential:

“The curse of the zeros / When you become the Devil or the tap dancing negro.”

That line is dangerous and brilliant. It’s about what success does to Black men who make it out. About the grief that comes after you reach the top and realize how lonely it is. You either become a caricature or you lose your soul. Either way, you grieve the version of yourself you can’t be anymore. Tyler says it out loud:

“I came to terms that I'ma probably outgrow my heroes.”

That hurts. Because who are you after that? If your idols were the only blueprint you had for survival, and now you’ve outpaced them… where do you go from here?

Then No Malice steps in and gives us what we’ve been waiting for—a spiritual check-in. His verse is where the song reveals its depth. He doesn’t just mourn what’s lost. He mourns what was never right in the first place. He raps:

“If I didn’t give you both sides, I wouldn’t be me.
I was the only one to walk away and really be free.”

That line isn’t just about stepping away from the rap game—it’s about choosing redemption, choosing clarity, and acknowledging how easy it would be to lie to yourself and call it purpose.

“I can open up my closet with a skeleton key.”

That’s grief poetry. That’s a man saying he lives with the ghosts, but he doesn’t pretend they aren’t there. And then the line that made me pound the steering wheel:

“Niggas chains look just like oppression to me.”

In the words of Alonzo in that restaurant booth, talking to Jake: Boom.

In one bar, Malice decimates the illusion. That all this—this flaunting, this flexing, this accumulation of ice and cars and homes—is still captivity. That the grief we carry from the past, from the blocks we grew up on, from the systems that tried to erase us, never really leaves. We just learn how to make it rhyme.

“P.O.V.” is a mirror. And it hurts to look at. Because it shows us what success looks like when you never had time to heal. What survival looks like when it’s dressed in designer. What grief sounds like when it’s too dangerous to cry, so you put it in a verse and dare someone to ask if you’re okay.

This track isn’t about dealing with grief.

It’s about living in it. Selling from it. Building with it.

And praying you don’t pass it down.

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So Be It:

If Chains & Whips is reckoning and P.O.V. is performance, then So Be It is resignation. This is the shrug after the storm, the middle finger raised from behind smoked-out windows. It’s grief transmuted into fatalism. A hymn for the hardened. And Push & Mal never sounded more comfortable in chaos.

The track opens with a quiet flex:

“Sixteen thousand square / Eight million up there, two million down here.”

That’s not just real estate—it’s scale. It's what the world looks like after you’ve scaled its walls and realized nothing up there really saves you. The grief in So Be It isn’t loud. It doesn’t cry. It smokes. It waits. It says, "What did you expect from me?" And if you’ve lived long enough with loss, disappointment, betrayal, or violence, you might know that kind of grief too well.

Pusha’s verses here are clinical, diamond-cut, almost cold.

“Your soul don't like your body, we helped you free it.”
That bar is wild because it’s murder dressed up as mercy. It's death framed as liberation. It also hints at the ultimate dissociation—when your grief becomes so embedded, you start helping others leave their bodies too. Whether literally or metaphorically, you spread what you’ve been carrying.

The repetition of “Smoke. So be it.” in the chorus is its own mantra. It’s a shrug at God. A nod to the violence. It’s what you say when you’ve run out of excuses and hope in equal measure. You stop trying to be understood. You just exist in the consequence.

No Malice’s verse slices sharper than ever. It feels like a funeral eulogy written by someone who already knew how it would end—someone who told you to get out but you stayed.

“You ain't solid, ain't valid, you ain't Malice.”
He’s talking to the industry, to clout-chasers, to fake believers. But mostly, it feels like he’s talking to anyone who tried to co-opt the pain without paying the cost. This is what it sounds like when a man who once glorified the life has nothing left to prove, and even less to lose.

“Ain’t no more Neptunes, so P’s Saturn.”
Translation: the stars that once aligned are gone. The production gods have left the studio. Whatever cosmic magic fueled the early Clipse era—my early white T and backpack era—has scattered, and they’re okay with that. There’s still one. So be it.

“Ain’t no more Neptunes, so P’s Saturn.” is a quiet funeral for an entire empire (we get to this later)—that line mourning not just a sound, but a brotherhood, a time when everything was still orbiting joy. Now, Pharrell is Saturn: distant, ringed with restraint, colder maybe, heavier for what he’s lived through. It’s what happens when time stretches out long enough to make gods out of the friends you once joked with in the studio—when creativity stops feeling like play and starts sounding like prophecy. So be it.

Malice raps:

“If I had her, then you had her, she never mattered.”
It’s dismissive, yeah. Misogynistic, sure. But it’s also a line about how nothing lasts in this world. Not love. Not loyalty. Everything is transactional. And if you grieve long enough, deeply enough, you might find yourself saying things like this—not because you believe them, but because it hurts less than admitting you once did.

The track ends like it began—in smoke.
No neat conclusion. No healing offered. No redemption arc handed out in a tidy bow.

So Be It is a portrait of men who’ve lived in grief so long, they wear it like cologne. Like armor. Like chains. And maybe that’s what Clipse is showing us here—not how to grieve, but what happens when you don’t.

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