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.
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