Anatomy of a rap feud: The real winner of the Kendrick and Drake beef

For millions of hip-hop fans around the world, the past weekend was an incredibly stressful time.

A simmering feud between the two biggest rappers of the past decade, Kendrick Lamar and Drake, went nuclear when both artists dropped intensely personal diss tracks that included accusations of grooming, illegitimate children and violence against women, at a kind of frequency designed to break the internet.

Drake and Kendrick Lamar have sunk to new depths of vicious insult.

It felt like a new chapter in the infamous history of rap beef was being written, released, dissected, and debated in real time. The sheer volume of music being released, the status and calibre of those involved and the eye-popping accusations helped nudge the feud into the mainstream while also raising questions about the authenticity of these kinds of battles in a modern music landscape.

How did we get here?

The feud went ballistic at the weekend, but there’s a bit of history to the Kendrick-Drake tension. The pair appeared together on several tracks in the early 2010s before the relationship cooled in 2013. Kendrick’s verse on a Big Sean track Control called out his competition at the time, including Drake. He then poked fun at the rapper during an onstage performance at the BET Hip Hop Awards that year: “Nothing’s been the same since they dropped Control and tucked a sensitive rapper back in his pyjama clothes.”

Simpler times. Long before their feud Kendrick and Drake would feature on each others’ records.Credit: Instagram

But it wasn’t until March of this year that the spark was properly lit. Responding to a verse from J.Cole on Drake’s track First Person Shooter, Kendrick jumped on Future and Metro Boomin’s Like That and took issues with the suggestion that he, Cole and Drake were the three biggest names in rap: “Motherf--k the big three, n---a, it’s just big me.”

From that lyric, a relatively uncontroversial claim to be the greatest rapper of the current era, a feud was born that would put the entire hip-hop world on notice. Cole replied first with a track called 7 Minute Drill before realising he was in over his head, apologising to Kendrick and deleting the song. Drake retaliated with two tracks released in April – Push Up and Taylor Made Freestyle – the latter calling Kendrick out on his slow response time: “I guess you need another week to figure out how to improve. What the f--k is taking so long? We waitin’ on you.”

In a case of be careful what you wish for, Kendrick replied with two tracks—Euphoria and 6:16 in LA— over four days between April 30 and May 3. At this stage, most of the disses each rapper was aiming at the other revolved around their music, their labels and their personas. But things quickly took a darker turn.

The same day 6:16 was released, Drake dropped Family Matters, a seven-and-a-half-minute response that claimed Kendrick was physically abusive to his wife. Twenty minutes after the release of Family Matters, Kendrick returned serve with Meet The Grahams, an equally personal diss that alleged Drake has a secret daughter, that he preys on underage girls and is running a sex-trafficking ring in his mansion.

On May 4, Kendrick fired off another track, Not Like Us, doubling down on his accusations that Drake has a history with underage women. Drake re-entered the chat two days later with The Heart Part 6, where he claims to have baited his rival with false information about his daughter (“We plotted for a week, and then we fed you the information”) before spending five minutes defending himself against the accusations he grooms underage women.

Is this beef overcooked?

Beefs have long been part of the rap game, flaring up every few years, often between the two most dominant artists of the era. The 1990s gave us Tupac vs The Notorious B.I.G., while the early 2000s were defined by the battle between Jay-Z and Nas.

Biggie Smalls (left) and Tupac Shakur (right) had a rap beef that consumed hip-hop in the 1990s.

Generally considered the two biggest beefs of all time, both covered similar ground. There were exaggerated claims of being on top, homophobic slurs slung back and forth, and grandiose threats of violence occasionally rooted in reality (shout out Who Shot Ya?).

On his 2004 track, Supa Ugly, Jay-Z claimed to have had an alleged three-year-long affair with Nas’ girlfriend, Carmen Bryan. The response? Jay-Z’s mother, Gloria Carter, called into local radio station Hot 97, saying he should apologise to Nas and his family, which is precisely what he did.

While undeniably crossing various lines, those feuds didn’t quite reach the depths of vicious animosity that Drake and Kendrick have sunk to. Over the course of a few days, we have heard the worst kind of accusations, packaged up and spat out for entertainment – with various innocent parties becoming collateral damage. With each new track, the bar for what is passable as a punchline seems to get lower, even as the stream count climbs higher.

While it might be a stretch to say there was ever any honour in rap beef, this feud is beginning to feel like a reflection of the most cynical parts of the modern music landscape.

Take the two biggest names in hip-hop, flood the market with a strategic content rollout that sucks up all the oxygen, throw in enough Easter eggs to argue about and then watch the internet collapse in on itself.

One big winner and plenty of losers

So much of the conversation around the Kendrick-Drake beef focuses on who is “winning”, and the consensus seems to be that, on paper, Kendrick, is in the lead.

But amid all the talk about which lyrics hit hardest, it’s worth remembering that both Kendrick and Drake belong to the same label: Universal Music Group.

Kendrick is signed to Interscope, but he inked a global distribution deal with Universal in 2020. Drake releases under Republic Records, an imprint of Universal Music Group. Both artists are undoubtedly set to profit handsomely from the hundreds of millions of streams this beef has drawn so far, but many of those dollars will also flow into Universal Music’s coffers.

Weighing into the debate over the weekend, fellow rapper Vince Staples name-checked Taylor Swift as one major artist who is using her clout for good, while Drake and Kendrick ultimately squabble over split profits.

“Taylor Swift is fighting for people to be able to have streaming money, [Drake and Kendrick] is on the internet arguing with each other about some rap s--t,” said Staples.

Rather than get hung up on the winners, though, this feud will be remembered for who lost out, the collateral damage who never asked to be a part of rap’s latest civil war. Kendrick’s wife, Drake’s (maybe real, possibly false) daughter, ex-girlfriends, current girlfriends, and extended family.

Writing in The Ringer, Charles Holmes said that “as with most hip-hop beefs, we’ve ended up where we were always destined to — men using women, wives, baby mothers, parents, and children in increasingly gross and depraved ways to satisfy their rabid egos”.

At 37 and 36 respectively, Drake and Kendrick are grown men with endless resources who have turned a sometimes funny, sometimes sharp, often brutal rap beef into a game of schoolyard taunts that no longer seems to serve a greater purpose. There is one big winner and a bunch of losers, but the two protagonists don’t slot into either category.

In The Heart Part 6, Drake raps that “this is about to get so depressing”, but it’s clear to anyone paying attention that we’re already there.

Find more of the author’s work here. Email him at [e-mail] or follow him on Instagram at @thomasalexandermitchell and on Twitter @_thmitchell.

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