Feud between Drake and Kendrick Lamar reaches a boiling point

Grown men driving each other into the ground in rhyme form, from a distance it is almost too absurd for words. But Kendrick Lamar and Drake have got the hang of it. Since the release of “euphoria”, both gentlemen have not been sitting still. The saga between the two biggest rappers of the last decade is developing at breakneck speed, and it is mainly Lamar who determines the speed.

He took his time, but earlier this week Kendrick Lamar fired his first shot with “euphoria”. Anyone who thought that the next shipment would have to wait again was disappointed. The warehouse is far from empty. Three days after his first real diss track, he came up with a second salvo, without waiting for his opponent.

We could write an article on the title alone, “6:16 in LA.” We’ll spare you all the details, but here’s a quick summary: Father’s Day falls on June 16 in America this year, Tupac Shakur was born, the indictment against OJ Simpson was presented (which Lamar refers to with a glove in the artwork for the single), hit series Euphoria premiered and Kendrick Lamar gave his first concert in Toronto, Drake’s home base, in 2011. Lamar also clearly didn’t like the sting he took from his collaboration with Taylor Swift, so he casually brought in Jack Antonoff, Taylor Swift’s regular producer, to co-produce the song. It is built on a sample of Al Green’s “What A Wonderful Thing Love Is,” on which Drake’s uncle provides the guitar part. To say Kendrick Lamar does his homework is an understatement.

In the text, Kendrick alludes that several people in Drake’s inner circle are not as well disposed towards him as he thinks. First he sows doubt by ‘Have you ever thought that OVO is workin’ for me?‘ and booms a few bars later with ‘A hundred n*ggas that you got on salary / And twenty of ’em want you as a casualty / And one of them is actually next to you / And two of them is practically tired of your lifestyle / Just don’t got the audacity to tell you’. That ‘one of them’ could be Noah ’40’ Shebeib, regular OVO producer and best friend of Drake. Pusha T claimed a few years ago that he found out through him that Drake had a son and now Kendrick also seems to have listened to him. He takes another jab at DJ Akademiks, Drake’s most public superfan, who pressured Kendrick Lamar in his livestreams to deliver a rebuttal and then was quite upset when he actually got it.

Drake’s answer came the same day. He lashes out at Kendrick in his third chapter in the saga. “Family Matters” is a highly produced song, a good seven minutes divided into three parts, each with their own beat. With accompanying video clip in which, among other things, a car is demolished – the same model that graces the cover of Kendrick’s debut album good kid, mAAd city decorates. In terms of imagery, we don’t have much to teach Drake.

He claims, among other things, that one of Lamar’s children is not his own child, but is the result of an affair between Whitney, Lamar’s partner, and his childhood friend and creative jack-of-all-trades Dave Free, with whom he has already collaborated on various projects and with which he co-founded their label pgLang. ‘Your baby mama captions always screamin’, “Save me” / You did her dirty all your life, you tryna make peace / I heard that one of ’em little kids might be Dave Free‘s’, he raps. During the second verse, Drake goes wild, throwing punches at The Weeknd, Rick Ross, Baby Keem, A$AP Rocky, Future, Metro Boomin and Kanye West. Or how you can antagonize everyone at record speed. Drake happily plays the victim role, as he himself states: ‘We already know it’s a twenty-v-one’.

Drake saves the toughest words for last. At the end of the song he raps ‘They hired a crisis management team to clean up the fact that you beat on your queen / The picture you painted ain’t what it seems, you dead’. An accusation of domestic violence as a conclusion, that can count.

Thirty-three glorious minutes. For so long, Drake could sit back happily and consider himself the provisional winner of the match. Short-lived joy, because half an hour after “Family Matters” Kendrick was back there. With “meet the grahams” Lamar also pulls the family card under the motto ‘he started’. What follows is an icy Alchemist beat and four verses, addressed – in order – Drake’s son Adonis Graham, his parents Sarah and Dennis, an as yet unknown ‘baby girl’ and Aubrey himself.

“Dear Adonis, I’m sorry that that man is your father,” he opens. It can count as an entry. Then he plays father figure to Drake’s son for 24 bars, because ‘Let me be your mentor since your daddy don’t teach you shit’. In the second verse he accuses Drake and his entourage of approaching underage women and puts him on the same level as Harvey Weinstein. Heavy accusations, but Lamar is not done yet. Verse three goes on the Pusha T tour and insinuates that Drake is hiding another child from the world. An eleven-year-old daughter this time, who, like Adonis in the first part, tries to encourage Kendrick and delicately emphasizes how her alleged father would never do that: ‘I’ll tell you who your father is, just play this song when it rains / Yes, he’s a hitmaker, songwriter, superstar, right / And a fuckin’ deadbeat that should never say “more life”’. In the last verse, in which Lamar directly addresses his opponent, he concludes that this is no longer about rap, but about Drake as a person. Lies and addictions are discussed and summarized at the end with ‘Fuck a rap battle, this a long life battle with yourself’.

Just recover? None of it. Kendrick is at cruising speed. A fourth diss track followed on Saturday night, entitled “Not Like Us”. Once again, the artwork of the single speaks volumes: a Google Earth photo of Drake’s estate, edited with small pins like they use in America in the public register where you can look up sex offenders in your area. Done with the cold, quiet beats that the previous two songs had, this time Lamar Drake continues to stride over a clubby instrumental that immediately made it to Rick Ross’ pool party, and seemed to be appreciated there. The fact that the latter is partying happily by the pool less than twenty-four hours after his private jet almost crashed is beyond Rozay’s imagination. He even joked on social media that his plane was shot down by a ‘Drake OVO F16 fighter’ in retaliation for his diss track.

“Meet the Grahams” went far, but on “Not Like Us” the concealment is finally over. The second song in particular is very tough and builds on the accusations of sexual offenses that Kendrick previously made. In the same breath he first raps ‘Say, Drake, I hear you like ’em young / You better not ever go to cell block one / To any bitch that talk to him and they in love / Just make sure you hide your lil’ sister from him’, then ‘Certified Lover Boy? / Certified pedophiles’ and closes with ‘Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A-minor’. Later he gives a history lesson about the slave trade in Atlanta and makes the comparison with Drake, who goes to the hip-hop metropolis to buy credibility by entering into collaborations with ATL rappers such as Future and 21 Savage. Kendrick portrays him as culture vulture: ‘You run to Atlanta when you need a few dollars / No, you not a colleague, you a fuckin’ colonizer’. For the umpteenth time, the Canadian is portrayed as an outsider in the hip-hop world.

Back to Drake then. He also only needed a day to write down his answer – with or without some help. With “The Heart Part 6” he hijacks the long-running series of which Kendrick has already released five parts, usually as a precursor to a new album. The fact that this has ended up in part six suits Drake – he regularly uses ‘The Six’ to refer to his home base of Toronto and thus himself (as 6 God). For the beat, Boi-1da samples Aretha Franklin’s “Prove it” in the intro, but beyond that there is little to say. This is by far the easiest instrumentation we have received so far.

Compared to the manic energy that Lamar unleashed on “Not Like Us,” Drake sounds exhausted and bored on this song. He claims that he and his entourage staged his alleged daughter and the artwork for “6:16 in LA” and passed it on to the Kendrick camp, who eagerly jumped on it without doing a fact check first. ‘We plotted for a week and then we fed you the information / A daughter that’s eleven years old, I bet he takes it / We thought about giving a fake name or a destination / But you so thirsty, you not concerned with investigation‘, it sounds. After the sample, he again tells him that he has no evidence for his claims, but he doesn’t seem to realize that he is actually doing the same thing. He simply does not demonstrate that they have planned everything this way, it remains word against word. Later he attacks Kendrick again about his alleged violence towards his wife – ‘And Whitney, you can hit me if you need a favor / And when I say I hit you back, it’s a lot safer’ – and claims that Lamar himself has not seen his children for six months, but again cannot substantiate this.

But what’s most striking about this diss is how it addresses Lamar’s strongest claims. He raps ‘Speakin’ of anything with a child, let’s get to that now / This Epstein angle was the shit I expected’, which is a downright baffling way to start his plea for innocence. He then misinterprets the lyrics of “Mother I Sober”, an emotional highlight op Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers where Lamar explains the history of sexual abuse in his family but explicitly clarifies that he himself was not a victim of it. Drake chooses to interpret it that way and then accuses him of portraying the Canadian as a predator because he has not processed his own traumas. A little later he also brings in Millie Bobby Brown, with whom he built a friendship in 2018 when she was 14 – he was 31 at the time. It goes without saying that this raised a few eyebrows, but Drake brushed it off in “Another Late Night” from above For All The Dogs already off the table and is doing so again here. Not that anyone asked for it, anyway. He simply cites an example from his shaky past with underage girls. This last throw is a bit of a weakness, Drake seems to be hanging on the ropes.

Meanwhile, the beef is no longer limited to Kendrick Lamar, Drake and to a lesser extent Rick Ross. On “Push Ups,” Drake rapped “Metro shut your ho ass up and make some drums.” So Metro Boomin did just that, posting his diss beat “BBL Drizzy” online and promising a free beat to the rapper who could provide the best verse for it. Just to clarify: BBL stands for Brazilian Butt Lift, in addition to reworking his abdominal muscles, another plastic procedure attributed to Drake. Soundcloud rappers worldwide are already gurgling with joy, Drake is being bashed in all languages. If you feel called, you can also find the beat below. Even Masego took out his saxophone and actually turned it into a jazz diss.

There have been no plagues here for a long time. What originally seemed to be a competitive duel for the rap crown has turned into a bitter feud, hard versus soft, all stops. The two are on a collision course, and it doesn’t look like this will be over anytime soon. Wild accusations are flying around, without hard evidence for the time being. If what Drake says is true, it’s a big dent in Kendrick Lamar’s image. If what Kendrick Lamar says is true, a dent in his image might be the least of Drake’s worries. To be continued no doubt.

Drake: Facebook / Instagram / X / Website
Kendrick Lamar: Facebook / Instagram / X / Website