Pusha T photographed on Aug. 15, 2017 at The VNYL in New York.
The theme song for HBO's corporate family drama Succession won an Emmy last month for outstanding main title music and has likely been caught in viewers' heads since the series debuted last year.
Ahead of the second-season finale on Sunday, viewers have another version of the track to tide them over until the show returns for season three.
Rapper Pusha T and theme-song composer Nicholas Britell have remixed the song for Pusha T's more hip-hop heavy version, "Puppets."
The rapper told Vulture that he found out about Succession from his manager, who told him that the rapper reminded him of patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox).
“I mean, I’m a little bit [like him]," Pusha T told Vulture, later adding that he thinks Logan's son Roman (Kieran Culkin) will be the one to take over the company.
After meeting Britell, Pusha T caught up on Succession's first season and Britell pitched him the remix, Vulture reports.
“We talked about the connection to power and its dynamic, issues writ large: struggle, pain, all of the things we could deal with,” Britell told Vulture.
The rapper redid the lyrics, though, after someone at HBO felt that his first pass inadvertently predicted too many Season 2 plot details.
“I was like, ‘How, I didn’t even see it?!’” he told Vulture, laughing. “So I tweaked some things because the lines were a bit too detailed. I think [Nick] didn’t want to ask me to redo anything. Ordinarily, I probably wouldn’t have. But, I mean, the show is dope.”
While the lyrics in the final version don't specifically discuss the Roy family specifically, Pusha T explores the themes of family, money, greed and betrayal.
"If you love me, please don't judge me," he raps over the theme song's familiar beats, this time with more bass.
“The greed, the resentment, the idea anybody is basically disposable — that’s a gangsta movie type of quality. On Succession, it’s involving family, it’s like, Whoa! It’s a bit more shocking,” Pusha told Vulture. “And so that’s what made the writing process fun, because I could use all of the street, gangster rap nuances and qualities and energy and incorporate it into the theme of the music. It was really just a dope exercise, honestly.”
Listen to the track below.