‘Lost a rap battle he provoked’: Drake’s label takes Kendrick’s side

It seems fitting that in Drake’s latest single, Gimme A Hug, the Toronto rapper desperately asks people to show him some love. “So come over here and give me some love,” pleads Drake. “Yeah, give me a hug.”

But no number of hugs might soften the rapper’s latest setback.

Universal Music Group has filed a motion to dismiss Drake’s defamation lawsuit against it, arguing that the Canadian rapper’s claims are “no more than Drake’s attempt to save face for his unsuccessful rap battle” with Kendrick Lamar.

The label behind Drake and Kendrick Lamar filed a motion on Monday to dismiss Drake’s lawsuit, which accused it of defamation and harassment.

Drake “lost a rap battle that he provoked and in which he willingly participated”, UMG stated in a court filing. “Instead of accepting the loss like the unbothered rap artist he often claims to be, he has sued his own record label in a misguided attempt to salve his wounds.”

The feud between Drake and Lamar exploded last year when, between March and May, the pair traded intensely personal diss tracks that included accusations of grooming, illegitimate children and violence against women, at a frequency designed to break the internet. Drake has denied all the allegations against him.

Not Like Us served as the knockout blow, damaging Drake’s reputation and becoming one of Lamar’s most successful releases ever, picking up five Grammy Awards and forming the centrepiece of Lamar’s Super Bowl half-time show. The track includes the line, “Say Drake, I hear you like ’em young”.

Kendrick Lamar performed his Drake diss track during his Super Bowl performance this year.Credit: Getty Images

In January, Drake lodged a defamation lawsuit claiming that UMG, which represents both artists, spread defamatory allegations that he’s a paedophile by making secret payments and offering reduced licensing rates to third parties to promote the song to devalue his music and brand amid contract negotiations.

The lawsuit, UMG said in its filing, “disregards the other Drake and Lamar diss tracks that surrounded Not Like Us as well as the conventions of the diss track genre”, adding: “Diss tracks are a popular and celebrated art form centred around outrageous insults, and they would be severely chilled if Drake’s suit were permitted to proceed.”

In Drake’s own diss track, Family Matters, the rapper claims Lamar abuses his wife and isn’t the father of his son. “When you put your hands on your girl/is it self-defence ’cause she bigger than you?” Drake raps. “They hired a crisis management team/To clean up the fact that you beat on your queen.”

UMG cited this lyric in its filing, claiming that “Drake has been pleased to use UMG’s platform to promote tracks levelling similarly incendiary attacks at Lamar”, therefore, the context of the back-and-forth made “the defamation claim impossible to prove”.

UMG argues that, having come off second-best in the court of public opinion, Drake is now trying to secure victory in a court of law.

The label also accuses Drake of hypocrisy for having signed a June 2022 petition that criticised prosecutors using artists’ works against them in criminal cases, and declared such works the product of artists’ “vision and imagination” only to now brand Lamar’s lyrics as literal fact. “Drake was right then and is wrong now,” UMG says.

In response to the filing, Drake’s lawyer, Mike Gottlieb, said: “UMG wants to pretend that this is about a rap battle in order to distract its shareholders, artists and the public from a simple truth: a greedy company is finally being held responsible for profiting from dangerous misinformation that has already resulted in multiple acts of violence.”

The single artwork for Not Like Us is an image of Drake’s home in Toronto, Canada.

Drake alleges it is edited in a way that suggests people convicted of sex crimes live there. Drake claims that following the single’s release, he experienced several break-ins and was forced to pull his seven-year-old son from school in the Toronto area.

Drake visited Australia in February as part of his Anita Max Win tour, but cut the tour short due to “scheduling conflicts”.

With Jonathan Stempel, Reuters

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