ON THE SURFACE, they seem natural adversaries. You have Kendrick Lamar, straight out of the hip-hop holy land of Compton, the rapper of his era most likely to attract grandiose descriptors like “the voice of a generation”.
And you have Drake, a sappy song and dance man from the previously unfashionable rap outpost Toronto, who cornered the market for sad-boy summer music by writing songs about drunk-dialling his ex-girlfriends.
It’s been the rap feud of its era – two genuine genre stars locked in a gladiatorial battle, delighting a crowd of onlookers thirsty for blood.
You can picture both combatants, plotting in their respective bunkers, fists clenched as they quote the words of the kung-fu snow leopard Tai Lung: “Finally, a worthy opponent. Our battle will be legendary!”
Who is responsible for all this?
The tension between Kendrick and Drake actually goes back a decade, but for the most obvious starting point to their current feud, we must look to last year, when North Carolina star J. Cole declared that he, Kendrick and Drake were rap music’s “big three”.
It’s a statement that has become the genre’s own assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, setting off a chain reaction that has dragged many factions from the hip-hop landscape into an all-out war.
The claim angered the goliath within Kendrick, who bristled at the idea he was but a single prong in a trident of equals. A response came in late March.
As an esteemed guest on the Future and Metro Boomin song “Like That”, Kendrick dismissed any idea that he shared the throne. A big three? No, Kendrick assures us, “It’s just me”.
Cole responded with his own diss track, “7 Minute Drill”, before quickly discovering he wasn’t built for confrontation.
Two days after its release, the rapper used one of his gigs to apologise on-stage to Kendrick and the song vanished from streaming services soon after. It was an unprecedented climbdown from a rapper, but may rank up there with the best decisions Cole has ever made – Kendrick has thus far spared him from retaliation.
Chart behemoth
That left Drake. A chart behemoth of his age, the Canadian emerged a decade and a half ago as a figurehead of a more sensitive branch of pop-rap, using a half-spit, half-sung vocal style to engage with conditions of the heart.
On my favourite Drake songs (which were almost all released before 2012), his lameness is often his strength as he shamelessly drops corny one-liners into his lovesick lyrics.
But that kind of success has never been enough for Drake. He’s always craved respect, which frequently manifests in raps about his own greatness, and has seen him engage in feuds with more hard-edged street rappers in Meek Mill and Pusha T.
To takedown Kendrick, a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize who wrote some of the most cutting anthems of the Black Lives Matter era, would represent the ultimate vindication.
On 19 April, Drake released “Push Ups”, on which he mocked Kendrick for, among other things, appearing on a Maroon 5 song, and “Taylor Made Freestyle,” which he was forced to delete over its mortifying use of the AI-generated voices of Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg, when the estate of the former threatened legal action.
“Push Ups” included stray shots at, among others, Future, Metro Boomin, and Miami drug rapper Rick Ross, who responded with a diss song of his own. The backdowns, cease and desist notices, and crowded roster created a messy situation. But the core battle would soon be whittled down to the two main characters, as it was always meant to.
Animosity
Last week, Kendrick and Drake gave us an exercise in heaping dirt on each other’s names and reputations, with both men seemingly entombed in their own studio, plotting their next move, next song, next lyric, dragging the tone of the feud to rarely seen levels of personal animosity and overall tawdriness.
For Kendrick, it was clobberin’ time. Across four songs – “Euphoria”, “6:16 in LA”, “Meet the Grahams” and “Not Like Us” – he lets the hate flow through him: “I hate the way that you walk, the way that you talk, I hate the way that you dress,” rages Kendrick, unleashing a Hadouken of venom so callous it’s surely been charging within for years.
In the middle of Kendrick’s rush of creativity, Drake released “Family Matters”. In an escalation of the personal, Drake questioned the paternity of one of Kendrick’s children and claimed his people “hired a crisis management team to clean up the fact that you beat up your queen,” a drive-by on Kendrick’s reputation as the most virtuous and wise of all modern rap stars.
Rap beefs can be vulgar, grimy, gossip rag affairs but the level of private lives-probing in Kendrick versus Drake is a reminder that in rap feuds, women are often collateral damage.
“Family Matters” barely had time to percolate – just 20 minutes after its release, Kendrick’s response was online.
As though he’d already predicted how low Drake was going to pull their feud, Kendrick uses the doleful piano sounds of “Meet the Grahams” to dig into his opponent’s family life.
Framed as Kendrick speaking directly to various members of Drake’s clan, he makes the (dubious) claim that several years ago his enemy secretly fathered a daughter, recalling the (accurate) report made by Pusha T in their 2018 beef that Drake was hiding a son – a revelation that ended Drake’s hopes to triumph in that particular feud.
If Drake was clinging on at this point, the killer blow came with “Not Like Us”, on which Kendrick further pushes the boundaries by referencing the public chatter surrounding Drake’s alleged inappropriate correspondences with teenage girls.
“Say, Drake, I hear you like ’em young,” he says artlessly, later referencing the title of Drake’s album Certified Lover Boy by declaring him a “certified pedophile.”
Record breaking
These are jaw-dropping assertions, made more impactful by being placed over a bouncy instrumental. Diss songs that play well in nightclubs can seep more quickly into the pop culture consciousness.
Indeed, “Not Like Us” broke the all-time record for biggest single day streams of a hip-hop song in US Spotify history, eclipsing, as it happens, Drake’s 2021 hit “Girls Want Girls”. It will probably continue to pop off all summer, keeping Drake the butt of the joke.
Kendrick also accuses Drake of stealing from Atlanta rappers, a long-standing criticism of the star, and part of a broader discussions of whether he, as a mixed-race Canadian man of Black and Jewish heritage, has shown enough respect in his assimilation into Black American culture (or, indeed, whether he should even be held to a different standard than his contemporaries).
In recent weeks, Rick Ross has repeatedly called Drake “white boy” to marginalise his position in rap culture. In this backdrop, accusations of Drake being, as Kendrick puts it, a “colonizer” land to the solar plexus.
Drake’s retort was “The Heart Part 6”, potentially the final public communique between the two (for now). Over a gloomy beat that perhaps reflects his mood, Drake attempts to sound nonplussed by the attacks, but his drained vocal cords signal a man desperate for this whole thing to end.
He claims that, aha, it was actually him who tricked Kendrick by masterfully feeding him the fiction of a secret. Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t, but rap battles are won and lost by your own pen, and Drake spends more of “The Heart Part 6” defending himself from Kendrick’s assault than finding fresh angles.
“I’m too respected/ If I was fucking young girls, I promise I’d have been arrested/ I’m way too famous for this shit you just suggested,” he raps, ignoring that powerful men get away with doing terrible things all the time.
More convincing is the reference to Kendrick’s threats to pull his music from Spotify in protest of the streaming service removing the work of XXXTentacion (murdered while awaiting trial for a domestic abuse case involving a former girlfriend) and R. Kelly (convicted on multiple charges involving child sexual abuse) from its playlists, submitting that Kendrick is in no position to voice disgust at alleged predatory behaviour.
Drake also seizes on Kendrick’s song “Mother I Sober”, from 2022, where Kendrick confronts the trauma that comes from generations of sexual abuse and the scars left on him in childhood when he was forced to repeatedly deny that a cousin had abused him.
Drake suggests that Kendrick is projecting because he may have been molested as a child. It’s a particularly cursed thing to do in a series of jibes that won’t rank up there with the moments of their careers that either man is most proud of.
Winner
With the escalation of hostilities seemingly at an end, both rivals’ pens returned to their sheaths, it’s right and proper a winner is declared and that winner is Kendrick Lamar.
It’s no surprise – as a rap artist he is better than Drake. He just is.
Over the weeks his raps have been sharper, his concepts have been stronger, and his voice has been more mailable, able to turn goofy when levity is required and grave when the moment demands it.
At the heart of Drake’s strategy was to point out that Kendrick is not as wise and righteous as everyone says – that his reputation for walking on water is a fabrication. But that’s what Kendrick himself was trying to achieve with his thorny, emotionally complicated last album Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers and, now, a series of diss tracks that see him cross the Rubicon of good taste.
Kendrick is done being idealized, and Drake played into his hands.
Things felt a lot less fun when, on Tuesday, three days after Kendrick released “Not Like Us” with cover art featuring an image of Drake’s home (with red pins to indicate sex offenders), an unidentified man appeared outside the mansion and shot a security guard.
He was rushed to the hospital with serious injuries. As of yet there is no evidence to suggest a connection to the feud, but still, it feels like the time has come for everyone to go home.
To be fair to Drake, he’s had to stand up to heavy shelling from a lot of different directions in recent weeks and has refused to bend the knee.
He will escape the kind of apocalyptic damage to his reputation suffered by Ja Rule in his 2000s battle with 50 Cent and Eminem. Kendrick, meanwhile, has added another string to his bow – not just the most thoughtful rapper of his era, but among the most uncompromising.
Crucially, the mammoth interest in the saga displays the public’s appetite for rivalries in hip-hop is still ravenous. Rap is a blood sport, and Kendrick Lamar is your mortal combat champion.
Dean Van Nguyen is the author of the forthcoming Words for My Comrades: A Political History of Tupac Shakur, due out next year on White Rabbit (Ireland/UK) and Doubleday (US).
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