A major Grammy haul and a juggernaut Super Bowl performance have left Lamar standing over his rap rival like a triumphant heavyweight. In the history of music feuds, there’s never been anything quite like this, writes Louis Chilton. Is there any modern musician that can weaponise an image quite like Kendrick Lamar? The picture that sprang from Sunday’s Super Bowl halftime show – proliferated around the internet as meme and mission statement – may have been one of the American rapper’s less elaborate ones. Midway through “Not Like Us”, Lamar’s Grammy-winning, multi-platinum-charting 2024 single, the artist turns to the camera to directly address the song’s target, Canadian hip-hop star Drake. “Say Drake,” he raps, wearing what can only reasonably be described as a s***-eating grin. “I hear you like ‘em young.” By this point, the effect is obvious: this is what winning looks like.
The Super Bowl may be Lamar’s vituperative final shot in a mud-slinging diss track back-and-forth that began in 2013 – when Drake was slighted alongside several other rappers in Kendrick’s seismic guest verse on “Control” by Big Sean. Throughout the next decade, the pair would sporadically call each other out on record, before a flurry of targeted releases last year turned the cold war hot. Since “Not Like Us” first dropped last May, consensus has ruled Lamar the feud’s victor, not by points but by knockout. His five-award haul at the Grammys earlier this month would have been all the more stinging for the fact that wins for Drake have been increasingly scarce in recent years. Salting the wound further, Lamar’s outfit for the night – denim on denim, otherwise known as a “Canadian tuxedo” – was read by many as a veiled dig by Drake’s personal troll-in-chief.
“Not Like Us”, in which Lamar accuses Drake (real name Aubrey Graham) of being a paedophile, was bad enough, but the procession of industry awards, and now the triumphant Super Bowl appearance, has taken it to new and unprecedented waters. Drake, who has denied the accusations of paedophilia, is currently suing his (and Lamar’s) record company Universal Music Group (UMG) for allegedly inflating streams of the single in an effort to artificially goose Lamar’s popularity, and for defamation. But the damage has been dealt, and whatever the outcome of the court battle, there’s no denying what our eyes and ears can report: an entire stadium of people all chanting along to the words, “Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A minor.” Think of the most humiliating anxiety dream you’ve ever had and treble it – somehow, this has become Drake’s waking life.
It’s almost disorienting to comprehend the success of “Not Like Us”, and the way that it has been embraced as a mainstream product. Throughout Lamar’s career, he has proved peerless in his smuggling of both lyrical sophistication and complex subject matter into hugely popular music. But the gravity of his allegations against Drake is simply antithetical to the norms of the popular music industry. This is true too of the allegations made against Lamar in Drake’s own diss tracks, including unsubstantiated accusations of domestic violence, which Lamar has denied. In the throes of the hip-hop tete-a-tete, some people speculated that the whole beef was a contrivance of record labels, a manufactured animosity intended to drum up publicity. This may well be a factor in just why the industry has not recoiled from giving Lamar’s song its most illustrious awards, but it’s specious to suggest that they would seek to purposely engineer something as thorny and, particularly for Drake, reputation-eroding as this.
To some extent, it’s a testament to Lamar’s standing within the industry and the culture at large: these weren’t the libellous rantings of a mouthy crank, but the deft and dense words of a Pulitzer Prize-winning artist. Lost, often, in discussion of the song – buried beneath the noisy and prurient shouts of “paedo” – are subtler and more insidious condemnations of Drake, of his role as cultural coloniser, of his relationship with the Black community. Even the notorious “A-minor” pun contains within it another critique – A minor being, significantly, the tonal scale on a piano that involves only the white notes.
On another level, the whole affair is informed by the idiosyncratic history of rap beefs – a form of public dispute in which more or less anything goes. It’s not so much that the allegations within “Not Like Us” are unserious, but rather that they fit into a wider culture of musical warfare, one in which frivolous considerations such as “libel laws” are voluntarily sheathed. There are those who have claimed that Drake’s suit against UMG is itself a capitulation, an abandonment of diss-track etiquette that equates to a declaration of defeat.
But even within the history of diss tracks, this is a unique case. From Tupac Shakur’s “Hit ‘Em Up”, which escalated the Nineties’ coastal hip-hop rivalry and led, many have claimed, to the rapper’s murder, to “No Vaseline”, in which Ice Cube savagely dissected his former NWA collaborators, the rap genre is littered with songs of spite and retribution. But it’s telling that most of the highest-profile feuds emerged decades ago – when rap still operated outside of the traditional musical-critical establishment. Lamar, spitting venom from atop the industry’s uppermost pedestal, is another story.
