Drake and Kendrick’s Beef Is the Most Miserable Spectacle in Rap History
Kendrick Lamar and Drake (Image by Chris Panicker, photos via Getty Images)
Pitchfork writer Alphonse Pierre’s rap column covers songs, mixtapes, albums, Instagram freestyles, memes, weird tweets, fashion trends—and anything else that catches his attention.
The truth about rap is that all rappers are liars. Even if they are telling the truth, the lines between fact and fiction are always blurred. How many Jay-Z drug-dealing sagas or Cam’ron flexes are all imagination and embellishment? We’ll never know for sure. But rap beef is another thing entirely. It’s all about digging up dirt, airing dirty laundry, and saying whatever you can to expose a deeper truth whether both parties actually believe it or just want you to believe it. How much you trust either side depends on your fandom and biases. It’s supposed to be part of the twisted, demented fun.
Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s beef started out like that, too, until it became something else entirely. What might be true—or half-true, or a lie—has become a kind of weekend-long disinformation campaign that has turned rap’s all-time biggest beef into a messy, confusing conflict that, at its core, is nothing but ugly. But you can’t look away, can you? All eyes are on Drake and Kendrick as they crash and burn, and, for what? Entertainment? Competition? Ego? Boredom? What it’s turned into doesn’t even sound like rap beef anymore, but the death knell of an entire era.
On March 26, when Drake vs. Kendrick (and Future and Metro Boomin and Rick Ross and every other rapper that had a hit song in 2013) kicked off with Kenny’s verse on “Like That,” it was just a little skirmish between two titans of the last 15 years of hip-hop. The battle felt a decade too late—two insanely accomplished rich guys chasing a thrill and desperately holding onto the past. As Drake dropped his mildly funny “Push Ups” and the extremely corny A.I. troll job “Taylor Made Freestyle,” and Rick Ross ranted about Drake’s plastic surgery abs—or, as he called him, “BBL Drizzy”—it all felt real but fake, the kayfabe of professional wrestling. Surely this was just a spectacle to preserve and prolong the last era of rap that may ever truly make superstars, right?
I thought so, at least until last week, when Kendrick released “Euphoria,” his slow-building evisceration of Drake’s identity, marked by the hilariously dramatic, “We don’t wanna hear you say ‘nigga’ no more.” Since then, the beef has picked up an unprecedented, live-wire pace and reached dark, dark places that I never imagined the beef between the former star of a Canadian teen soap opera and a Pulitzer Prize–winning advocate for therapy would ever get to.
In the last few days, we got nearly 30 minutes of music dedicated to this beef: Friday night gave us Drake’s “Family Matters” and “Buried Alive Interlude” parody, a one-two-punch complete with impersonation work and mafioso-style posturing as a response to Kendrick’s “6:16 in LA,” which he dropped earlier that morning. Immediately after “Family Matters,” on Friday evening, Kendrick responded with the tectonic-plate-shifting “Meet the Grahams” and shot back again on Saturday night over club-ready Mustard beat with “Not Like Us.”
The internet lit up like a pinball machine. The speed with which it was happening just spiked the adrenaline even more. These are a few of the most bizarre, uncomfortable, overwhelming, and evil diss tracks ever. Full of contradictions and hypocrisies. Full of legitimately funny, or maybe, just shocking moments when Drake calls Kendrick’s pro-Blackness a sham and Kendrick calls Drake a degenerate deadbeat. Full of gotcha accusations with no party bearing the burden of proof, allegations that are so serious they will hang over their legacies forever.
On “Family Matters,” after seven well-rapped minutes of poking holes in Kendrick’s manicured image, Drake drops a bomb—“They hired a crisis management team to clean up the fact that you beat up your queen”—trying to destroy the perception of Kendrick as our most thoughtful, socially conscious rap star. On Kendrick’s proportional response “Meet the Grahams”—a psychological, Eminem-like takedown of Drake, where he raps like he’s scribbling on the walls in the Barbarian basement—he offers twisted advice to Drake’s son (Adonis), Drake’s daughter (who may or may not exist), and Drake’s parents (Sandi and Dennis). At one point, he even raps toward Drake’s dad, “You raised a horrible fuckin’ person, the nerve of you, Dennis,” one of the most hateful bars to come from a beef that is all hate.
But the direction Kendrick takes the song is way more unsettling, alleging that OVO is a ring of sex predators led by Drake: “Him and Weinstein should get fucked up in a cell for the rest of they life.” Less than 24 hours later, Kendrick doubles down and comes even more directly on “Not Like Us,” where he chants “Certified lover boy? Certified pedophile,” and, “Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A minor” on a funky L.A. party song. You can imagine people all summer rapping along to bars accusing Drake of pedophilia, with big smiles on their faces and drinks in their hands, while they hit the little two-step that Kendrick calls for at the end of the song while he shouts “OV-hoe.” (It’s actually already happened.)
How are we even supposed to take all of this? Does it even matter who is “winning?” Technically, it would be Kendrick because “Not Like Us” is a smash and also features a pretty thorough dismantling of Drake’s musical and culture vulturism. In the final verse, he methodically goes through each Atlanta rapper that Drake used and discarded (forgetting Makonnen!) all leading up to the mic drop, “No, you not a colleague, you a fuckin’ colonizer.” That line might cut harder to Drake than any of the shit accusing him of being a sex offender.
But that’s the problem. As a listener, you’re in an impossible position: Whether it’s true or not, you have to consider that the allegations of Kendrick’s physical abuse of his wife and Drake’s relationships with underage girls might be true. You can’t just write that off as typical rap beef shenanigans, right? You have to consider the women who are the ones who have really suffered, who don’t have the agency to speak for themselves. Drake and Kendrick are not thinking about that at all. To them, this is all just material for jokes and trolling.
I know rap beef isn’t usually the place for moral handwringing, but this feels beyond that. Especially coming at a moment when hip-hop already feels long overdue for a reckoning, as Russell Simmons hides out in Bali and Diddy’s cases pile up; as alleged abuser Dr. Dre, Kendrick’s one-time mentor, approaches billionaire status; as convicted abuser Kodak Black, who was featured prominently on Kendrick’s last album, is still a megastar; as support for Tory Lanez, who sits behind bars for firing gunshots at Megan Thee Stallion, is still deafeningly loud, including from Drake. They think we don’t give that much of a shit about anything other than jokes and trolling either.
They might be right. Go on Twitter or Instagram or TikTok or YouTube where the beef is being followed like it’s Game 7 of the NBA Finals meets a gladiator duel. More, more, more. Go harder. End him. It’s obvious that social media has fanned the flames. That was the case when J. Cole made a guest appearance in the beef with “7 Minute Drill,” a Kendrick diss he undoubtedly felt he had to make, but didn’t actually want to. He was clowned for apologizing and bowing out two days later, though, in hindsight, it’s clear that was the right call. Drake and Kendrick aren’t just fighting each other; they are at war for command of a faceless social media army that begs for escalation and will shrug and say, I didn’t expect it to go like that, if something really stupid happened. “Drake you gotta shoot him now, I’m sorry,” said Akademiks while listening to “Not Like Us” from the basement he streams out of.
I get it. Nobody wants to be the buzzkill around one of the biggest moments rap’s seen in the last decade. This is jokes. Don’t be so gullible. It’s something to pass the time until the next playoff game or the 20th Metro-Future album drops from the sky. But is it? Doesn’t it feel much deeper and more cynical than that? This is Drake and Kendrick Lamar. Drake and Kendrick! Going back and forth about how one is a pedophile and the other is an abuser. Is that really what rap beef is all about? Maybe you would argue that rap should make you uncomfortable because it’s real. I would tend to agree. But this isn’t that. And, if these are the lengths you have to go to get a rise out of the people, then the real problem might be us.
How do they even move forward from all of this? Say it was all theater and just go back to making their next Honestly, Nevermind or Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers? Maybe it never will end and Kendrick and Drake will be going back and forth until the ice caps melt. That’s the last thing I want because, worst of all, about half of the songs to come out of this are forgettable. There are exceptions: “Not Like Us” will light up the clubs all summer long; the “Like That” beat is memorable; “Meet the Grahams” is striking and wickedly unique; “Drake’s third verse on “Family Matters” might be the smoothest rap flow he’s caught since the IYRTITL days. But they both sound mostly like bitter, lonely rappers having a misery-off.
None more than Drake on last night’s follow-up to Kendrick’s weekend barrage “The Heart Part 6”—swiping the title of Kendrick’s long-running series. He sounds beaten-down and cold, spending nearly six minutes calling Kendrick a bad investigative journalist, attempting to mock the molestation story in Kendrick’s “Mother I Sober,” and disputing claims that he’s had relationships with underage girls in the worst way possible: “If I was fucking young girls, I promise I’da been arrested/I’m way too famous for the shit you just suggested.”
It’s a miserable song. He sounds washed and exiled. To think this is the same guy who was once just a goofy Canadian who wore his feelings on his sleeve. But those days are so gone and the fun has been missing from his music since “Toosie Slide” anyway. This is the fall from grace of the rap star of the last 15 years, taking his entire era down with him. Even if he gets back up, and goes back to churning out pop hits, his words— whether truth, lies, or somewhere in between—feel so meaningless. And, in rap, once you lose that, you have nothing. Congrats, Kendrick, on your crown. But that feels worthless at this point.
Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
