Songfacts®:

• This is based on the 1972 Curtis Mayfield song "Pusherman," which is sampled in the hook. Mayfield's song, from the movie Super Fly, is about a drug dealer, but Ice-T's pusher is selling music. The dope he's offering is dope beats and lyrics.
  
  This theme is true to life: Ice-T stayed away from drugs.
• A track from Ice-T's second album, Power, "I'm Your Pusher" helped establish him as a streetwise hustler with a new look and sound. "That was setting the tone for what Ice-T was," he said in a Songfacts interview. "'Pusherman' was as much about a song as an image. You know, here comes a rapper with a perm and tailor-made clothes, and he doesn't look like Run-DMC. This is something different."
• Like most of his early work, Ice-T collaborated on this track with producer Afrika Islam. Curtis Mayfield is also credited on the track for the "Pusherman" sample.
• Ice-T made a video for this song that was released around the same time Yo! MTV Raps debuted. The video starts with a newscast reporting the story of Ice-T stealing master tapes as opposed to drugs.