Kendrick Lamar vs. Drake: A new rap beef for the streaming era
A volley of diss tracks earns both rappers career boosts and concern about the dark nature of the accusations
For weeks, hip-hop superstars Drake and Kendrick Lamar have been embroiled in a rap “beef,” a tradition where rappers duel lyrically in a fight for the throne.
This past weekend, it got ugly — so ugly that the reputations of two of music’s biggest names may never be the same.
In quick succession, the feuding stars exchanged blows across five tracks with increasingly dark lyrics that had rap fans riveted, shocked and queasy. Then, around 2am on Tuesday, a shooting outside Drake’s $100 million mansion in Toronto left his security guard injured, local authorities say. The shooter was not identified at press time, and it is not clear if or how the incident is related to the beef.
“Can you really listen to them again in the same way after this?” says Mano Sundaresan, editor in chief of the underground rap blog No Bells. “This could end up being an end game for these two artists and the era they represent.” The escalation of the feud started on Friday morning with Lamar — the only rapper to win the Pulitzer Prize — releasing a song, “6:16 in LA,” insinuating that he had a mole in Drake’s camp.
With unusual swiftness, Drake, the most commercially successful rapper of the past decade, fired back that night with “Family Matters,” where he alleged that Lamar had physically abused his fiancee.
Then jaws in the rap world dropped: Lamar, less than an hour later, uploaded another track, “Meet the Grahams,” where he compared Drake to disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein and alleged that Drake both secretly has a daughter and employs sex predators on his team. Some fans saw a strategy at work: Lamar appeared to have baited Drake to go after his family on “Family Matters,” and then pounced with a ready-to-go track when he did.
Representatives for Drake and Lamar did not respond to requests for comment on the feud, and the rappers have not addressed all the allegations in their songs. Drake has said in response to the latest allegations that he doesn’t have a secret daughter and doesn’t abuse underage girls.
Rap beefs have been a part of hip-hop since its early days. Past battles have included personal attacks, and rappers regularly mix fact and fiction. But even by hip-hop standards, Friday’s back and forth stands out as historic, due to the velocity of the “diss” tracks, the disturbing nature of the unverified allegations and the out-size engagement by fans (especially hypercompetitive super-fans) on social media.
“This is now the most significant rap battle of the streaming and digital era,” says Ari Melber, host of “The Beat with Ari Melber,” an MSNBC news show that also covers culture and often features rappers as guests. “The genre’s two undisputed titans are clashing over who and what really should define hip-hop,” Melber says. “It’s not just an argument, it’s a demonstration of the artists’ skills and prowess.” The lyrical feuding extended over the weekend. On Saturday evening, Lamar returned with “Not Like Us,” in which he called Drake a pedophile. The next night, Drake dropped “The Heart Part 6,” defending himself and lobbing more abuse allegations. It all left hip-hop fans glued to their phones, hostage to the latest news — and unsure about how to feel.
“Honestly this s — sad as hell,” the rapper Denzel Curry posted on social media.
Various potential female victims mentioned by Drake and Lamar in their war of words had been treated as mere pawns.
“They’re just using these really serious things as power-ups in a video game for people to kind of fawn over,” Sundaresan says. “We are in a game-ified era of fandom, where you think of these things almost like sports.” As the dust settled, the diss tracks showed signs of helping the two rappers commercially. Both Lamar, 36, and Drake, 37, have seen their grip on pop culture weaken in recent years as they navigate a more mature and less successful period in their stardom. But now their catalogues are getting a sizeable, though possibly fleeting, boost: On May 7, Lamar’s “Not Like Us” and “Euphoria” — an earlier diss track released a week ago — were Spotify’s top two U.S. tracks, with Drake’s “Family Matters” at No. 6. Five of Spotify’s top 10 songs are from the feud.
Rap’s “civil war” — as some have called it — has also been a boon for the hip-hop business, which has flagged in recent years but perked up in early 2024, thanks partly to “We Don’t Trust You,” a chart-topping rap album by Future and Metro Boomin that was released in March and included “Like That,” a No. 1 hit that featured Lamar antagonising Drake, which sparked the latest feud. (Their bad blood goes back more than a decade.) More broadly, rap albums have topped the U.S. music charts six times this year through April, compared with zero during the same period a year earlier. Many fans consider the Drake/Kendrick beef one of the most exciting in hip-hop history, up there with Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. and Jay-Z and Nas. And such a dazzling verbal display by both Lamar and Drake — both artists stepped up their rapping game — is increasingly rare in a genre where artists nowadays sing as much as rap. “We probably won’t see anything like it again,” Sundaresan says.
Yet the beef has gone down such a dark road, industry observers say, that it also raises the risk of lasting damage to both their images. Some don’t see a creative outpouring so much as a self-implosion — a bookend to the last 15 years of hip-hop that Drake and Lamar ruled. The website Pitchfork called it the “most miserable spectacle in rap history.” For the most part, the internet seems to have crowned Lamar the winner. Many fans interpret Drake’s “The Heart Part 6” as potentially his final volley, even if Lamar soldiers on.
In the outro of the track, Drake sounds weary; he reflects on the quality of Lamar’s recent diss tracks and suggests he’s fine if Lamar has “ten more.” “I’m not gonna lie, this s — was some, some good exercise,” Drake says. “I’m happy I could motivate you.”
