The Undeniable Truth of the Kendrick-Drake Beef

They’re bumping “Not Like Us” on commercial breaks for Western Conference semifinal slaughters. It’s ringing out of candy-painted lowriders and souped-up Challengers and every one of those damn wheelie-loving ATVs. Play it by the right patch of palm shade out West and these fools are liable to start C-walking on cumulous concrete, with the bassline lifting their immaculate Chucks like golden wings. A day after it went up on streaming, I heard it reverberating out of a delivery van in New York.

Wasn’t even noon. Wouldn’t be the last time.

Only two men can declare the most public, costly, and rapidly descending rap beef in history truly over—but we’ve got eyes, and what they spy is a Canadian floating, belly-up, in the deep fryer. There are many paths through which the shrewd multi-conglomerate creation known as Drake might sabotage his enemy, and none of them involve finding a way to rhyme another clause with the words “this Epstein angle was the shit I expected.” Fair, unfair, and in between, in the audience’s mind, The Boy appears stuffed like an attic rug: covered in dust and rolled on up.

Kendrick Lamar won. We’ll get back to what that means later, how it ebbs and flows around all of the rotten things that have already come out of this, and may continue to. Given the urgency and force displayed over Lamar’s four-songs-in-five-days outburst, the finality in this declaration isn’t the thing that jumps out most, but it is the kind of mythmaking that whispers in the wind. K-Dot’s battle plans were plain: He circled, warned, pounced, and conquered; head cleaved from collar, mind from spirit, body from soul.

The people have spoken. Even for streaming gods, that’s a Herculean thing to undo. And so, in the words of October’s very own, nothing will ever really be the same. What we’ve seen—the nature of it all, the bottomless scope, the contradictions smeared all over everything—has ensconced how this collision will be remembered, in ways that will stretch beyond the mere conflict alone, and into the realms of legacy and moral appraisal. This affects both combatants, but for the immediate victor it holds doubly true: This collision and its fallout will stick to Lamar from these times forward, in places where it ought to, and also in places where it probably shouldn’t.

More than standing or heritage or even ideology, Kendrick was motivated by a populist mandate in this dispute, and he wielded hip-hop tribalism as a cudgel against his opponent. As the forays escalated, Kendrick armed himself with common weaponry to dissuade, counter, and eventually hammer home the brand of misdeed gossip that now envelops the entire dispute. If Drake’s swipes on his four disses boiled down to a series of personalized, individual affronts (“You gon’ feel the aftermath of what I write down”), Kendrick’s were often communal (“Notice, I said ‘we,’ it’s not just me, I’m what the culture feelin’”), even when shrouded in the artifice of a more personalized attack.

On “Euphoria” he paints Drake as a composite, pilfering accents and lingo, hairstyles, and origin stories from across the diaspora. In a battle royale stuffed with rap’s most audacious deceivers, Kendrick brands Drake as the “master manipulator,” unparalleled in the lack of trust he should engender in listeners. Like Pusha T before him, he attempts to erode perceptions of Drake’s sense of self and identity, while highlighting his cultural faux pas. “6:16 in LA,” the second bombardment in K-Dot’s offensive, is basically an incantation on Drake’s dopey-ness and affected street sense over peak Al Green croons—a sample of a song that features Drake’s actual uncle on the original.

By the time that “Meet the Grahams” dropped before midnight last Friday, Kendrick wasn’t just making the argument that the Toronto pop maven was a fundamentally “horrible person”; he was connecting that moral rot to the decay of the rap industry in general. When Lamar ends the track with the hypothetical “Why believe you? You never gave us nothing to believe in,” the trick isn’t that he’s brought Drake’s reliability into question; it’s that he’s put up a wall between Drake and the listener while, at the same time, eroding the distance between those same listeners and himself.

This makes “Not Like Us” not only the catchy culmination of all of this groundwork but a distillation of each of these themes in a tribal form. The digs themselves are actually pretty limited: Drake’s general lameness, his proclivity toward cultural theft, his unabated seediness (sorry), and the haymaker, of course, of his supposed proximity to underage women and outright pedophilia. Truth matters less than the breadth and tinge of its shadow in this theater. That last claim is a clear lunge toward mutually assured destruction after Drake hinted at—and then blurted out—abuse and “crisis management team” accusations on his own intended knockout, the carefully curated “Family Matters.”

There’s been a strain of pearl-clutching in the reaction to these maneuvers that would frame them as something beyond the pale of rap beef mudslinging, but this elides the uncomfortable truth that rappers have been calling each other everything but a child of God since they first picked up microphones. (Is the act, for instance, of branding a fellow MC gay, in a time in which homesexuality was treated as a disease and mental illness by heterosexual society, any less craven than any of the bullshit these two boys are doing right now? What about Pac raging “I fucked your wife” to Biggie on “Hit ’Em Up”? Or the hydrochloric acid Ice Cube belched all over Eazy-E in “No Vaseline”?) For Lamar there is certainly a cost to going Bossip meets #MeToo, and it is not merely the act of using an unknown number of potential underage female victims of sexual violence in a scorched-earth tactic on what’s not inconsequentially the best-streaming debut of his career.

It’s the cumulative toll of choosing this route on top of all of the other semi-questionable stands and positions that mark the underbelly of his career, recently and in a wider sense. Featuring Kodak Black—who previously took a plea deal in a sexual assault case—on Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers might’ve had more to do with Kenny trying to prove that anyone is capable of some version of pseudo-religious redemption in his new self-help-inflected world, but it’s the kind of creative choice that hamstrings him in his current crusade. How you talk about “real women,” or who can be a “bad bitch,” or who should or shouldn’t complain about “sugar daddies in the club” obfuscates and might even soften your concern about raising your daughter “knowin’ there’s predators,” like your opponent, “lurking.” Doesn’t mean Cornrow Kenny doesn’t care about it, but it does mean he doesn’t just care about it, if you catch my drift.

He’s never been as one-note as his detractors, Drake included, would like to believe. That R. Kelly–XXXTentacion kerfuffle, where Spotify was pressured to reverse a decision to remove both artists’ music as part of an ultimately revised “hateful conduct” policy, didn’t actually involve Kendrick directly. (Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith, Lamar’s then–label head, was the one who threatened to pull TDE’s music from the platform, and he said he didn’t do it out of loyalty to either Kelly or XXX but, rather, because he was concerned about the “slippery slope if you start censoring music.”) It doesn’t take much of a leap to criticize K-Dot’s early work with Dr. Dre, whose history of violence against women is well documented—a fair point in the abstract, but much dicier when you’re in the shoes of a 25-year-old attempting to successfully launch a solo rap career out of the same barbed and snare-loaded former suburb turned ghetto that Dre put on the map in the first place.

In 2015, when Lamar told Billboard that social change is partly dependent on Black communities showing more “respect for ourselves,” folks were quick to rightly brand it generally wack (no amount of respect sedates empire) but also just as quick to unduly connect it to his incendiary trunk rattler “The Blacker the Berry,” a song that’s less political manifesto than journal entry about Lamar’s internal struggles over guilt and resistance. Lamar’s track record of actual social activism stretches as long as he’s been in the public eye: over a million in donations to his childhood school district in Compton, multiple charity tours, holiday concerts and toy drives, to say nothing of protest work like his unannounced participation in the 2020 Black Lives Matter marches in L.A. If there’s a unifying ethic that binds Kendrick in every period of his public-facing life, it’s that he’s a Black male evangelical who’s centered his music on his quest to conquer his own imperfections. (Dude literally asked whether we’d believe if he told us he “killed a n—- at 16” on his official debut.) He’s not telling us how we should get free; he’s only ever said that he’s trying to do that for himself and his folks.

All of that is now caught squarely within the blast radius of this radioactive tête-à-tête with Drake—doubly so until there’s some level of clarity on the validity of the most pernicious clay hurled on either side. Hip-hop, that indefinable, enduring godbody, is going to remember what went down, into its very psyche. It is also going to remember how it went down, and that “how” has the potency, consequences, and appeal to engulf belief, output, nuance, and even truth. In the rap beef to end all rap beefs, no one’s coming out clean, not even the one coming out on top.

Whether this is ultimately worth it or not to Lamar is probably beside the point. Professionally, dominance in this style of lyrical trench warfare was basically the final obstacle left for him to big-step over and through. Given his general lack of personal disclosure, we’ll probably never find out how it all sits with K-Dot, unless he waits another half decade and opens his mouth on another instant-Grammy-nominated album. His regional and non-regional peers seem to have almost universally sided with him—circled and solidified their wagons around the crown. The beef is over, but if the things Drake said about Kendrick prove to have even a little bit of traction, you’d hope that’d recast everything in a different, harsher light. Best hint as to the future might be putting an ear to the streets. With beefs like this it’s the crowd that sees all, says all, and heralds the evident-if-not-absolute truth of who and what really is or ain’t bumping.