Megan Thee Stallion Paid Future $250,000 In a Backpack Full of Cash For His Verse on ‘Pressurelicious’
Grammy-winning rapper Megan Thee Stallion has spent most of 2022 preparing for the release of her sophomore album Traumazine. On one of the album’s singles, “Pressurelicious,” Megan teams up with Future for a one-of-a-kind collab. But to make it happen, Megan had to fork over a hefty lump sum of cash.
Megan Thee Stallion released ‘Pressurelicious’ with Future as a single
Megan released the lead single from Traumazine, the Dua Lipa collab “Sweetest Pie,” in March 2022. The following month, she released the braggadocious “Plan B.”
In July, she released the Future collab “Pressurelicious” as the third single from her highly-anticipated album.
After two years filled with plenty of ups and downs and public drama, Megan used the album as a way to express herself in her own voice. “I feel like it’s been so easy for people to tell my story for me and speak on my behalf,” she told Apple Music 1, according to Rolling Stone. “I’m like a nonchalant person, and people be talking about me, and I’d be like, ‘Okay, go with it. Fine. Sure.’ But I see now that it can get out of control. So I feel like I wanted to just take control of my own narrative, take control of my own storytelling and tell it from me.”
Megan paid Future $250,000 for his verse
“Pressurelicious” showed fans that even though Traumazine is a personal album, she would still be the same confident Megan on the project. In an appearance on Power 106 Los Angeles, the Houston-bred rapper reflected on how she got Future on the track.
“I had the beat for ‘Pressurelicious,’ right? I recorded the song, and I recorded it one way. And I’m like, ‘You know what? This would really sound hard if Future was on it,’” she remembered.
“So I feel like being a woman in the industry, reaching out to a man trying to get a feature is always going to be a task. You never know what to expect,” she continued. “So how I went about it was: ‘OK, somebody figure out what’s Future feature price. Let’s just ask him what’s his feature price. And they was like, ‘OK, 250. He wants 250K.’ I was like, ‘OK, bet. Somebody go pull 250,000 out of the bank and go drop it off to Future and tell him I need the verse before he leaves.’”
Both she and Future were in Miami at the time, but he was preparing to leave. To lock down a verse from him before he jetted off, Megan ordered her team to withdraw a quarter of a million dollars from the bank and deliver the cash to Future. Her manager pulled out the money and dropped off the cash in a backpack.
She had to edit down his verse
Future, who himself released an album in early 2022, ended up rapping over the entire beat that she sent him. As a result, she had to go into the studio and select which lines of his she wanted to use on the track.
“He gave me the whole Future experience,” she said. “When I got his verses, I was like, ‘I’ve got to write some new verses because I’ve got to make this make sense.’”
