Kanye West Plays Peacemaker

A day after his elaborate album-release event in Wyoming, Kanye West fired off a tweet distancing himself from rap beef. And while he didn’t name names, it seems there’s a small chance the tweet wasn’t about the ongoing beef between Drake and Pusha T, in which West is at the very least a proxy player: He’s named in a couple of the contentious lines between the two rappers and he produced Pusha’s latest album, which contains “Infared,” one of the songs in the escalating war of words.

“I’ve never been about beef,” West wrote early Saturday morning. “I’m about love. Lines were crossed and it’s not good for anyone. So this is dead now.”

While neither Pusha nor Drake have commented, Pusha quickly retweeted it.

Despite the storm of controversy around West in recent weeks, the Drake-Pusha was possibly the main topic of conversation among attendees of the Wyoming event. Although no one involved addressed the situation publicly — although Pusha was boisterously present at the event — everyone was talking about it. And when the house DJ played Drake’s recent hit “Nice for What” early in the evening, looks of amused confusion could be seen all across the room.

While tensions between Drake and Pusha stretch all the way back to 2006 — starting off with a general attack on Lil Wayne and his Young Money crew, of which Drake is a member, and getting more specific over 2012-13 via songs like Pusha’s “Exodus 23:1” and Drake’s “Tuscan Leather” — the battle burst into the open over the past few weeks with “Infared,” Drake’s response “Duppy Freestyle,” and especially Pusha’s ferocious response, “The Story of Adidon,” which features a cover photo of Drake in blackface makeup and hard lyrical jabs about the biracial rapper being “always afraid he wasn’t black enough”; he also goes after Drake for a child he allegedly fathered as well as his producer Noah “40” Shebib’s multiple sclerosis.

Although many people were stunned by the deeply personal nature of the attacks on the song, an unscientific consensus at the Wyoming event seemed to think it was true to rap battles’ general eye-for-an-eye rule — and wondered how Drake would respond. West’s tweet may be an attempt at quashing the beef before it escalates further.

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