Kendrick vs. Drake, One Year Post-Mortem
It’s been a year since the “Not Like Us” summer. What’s next for rap after Drake’s public beatdown?
Single artwork for “Not Like Us”
Let’s start on the internet. That’s where GNX was born, the offspring of a rap beef that frenzied into a culture-shifting controversy, made possible, in part, by the internet’s disposition for rabid content consumption.
Kendrick Lamar has never been known as an internet rapper. How could he be, when the World Wide Web runs on ephemera and K-Dot sees himself as a prophet of truths that never die? He makes music that contemplates the hypocrisies of the human condition. He aspires toward timelessness. He has a Pulitzer.
Kendrick has always held himself away from (and above) the internet’s frothing mass, declining to engage in social media’s crude mores:
I been duckin’ the pandemic, I been duckin’ the social gimmicks / I been duckin’ the overnight activists, yeah / I’m not a trending topic, I’m prophet / I answer to Metatron and Gabriel
-- Kendrick Lamar’s verse on “Family Ties” by Baby Keem (2021)
But when he dropped “euphoria” last April, something changed.
Kendrick runs a felicitous rap game; with him, everything has meaning. In choosing the title “euphoria” to kickstart his unrelenting crusade to tear Drake’s soul apart, he told us a few things. Most obviously, euphoria, as indicated on the single’s cover art, refers to a dopamine hit of elation one might get from sex or drugs, both vices that Drake is rumored to indulge in scandalously.
Euphoria is also the name of Drake’s television pet project. The show’s first season exploded onto the screen with widespread praise. However, the second season exploded in the opposite direction, making a mess of its previous acclaim with sophomoric writing, gratuitous boob shots, and swirling on-set controversies, leaving critics wondering whether their season one assessments were worth the hype.
Nonetheless, Euphoria remained very popular, owing much of its remaining success to a codependency with internet fan culture. It became a show that could only be enjoyed if you watched it while scrolling on Twitter, reacting in unison with the chronically online. To watch without the internet by your side would make plain Sam Levinson’s poor form and bitter misogyny; you’d invariably turn the TV off (see: DJ Mustaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrd).
Euphoria, despite its excellent character acting, has come to represent the type of art that often prevails at this late stage of cyber-capitalism; it is a content farm posing as a creative work. And by virtue, this “art” is rather algorithmic fodder for lining the pockets of our tech overlords. As much as we munch on delicious memes of Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) crashing out in the bathroom or Rue (Zendaya) binge-watching Love Island in the heat of a depressive episode, techno-capitalism eats away at our beloved art forms.
“euphoria,” more than a song title, is an allegory for the willful creative atrophy that Drake trades for money, likes, and power. Lamar says on “euphoria” at the outset:
I make music that electrify ‘em / you make music that pacify ‘em
He then goes on to say:
He [Drake] fakin’ for likes and digital hugs
In other words, Drake’s euphoria comes from the fleeting, empty highs of internet likes. And in pursuit of social currency, his music becomes a pacifying drug, urging the masses away from inspiration and toward mindless participation. Kendrick asserts that he isn’t the only one who thinks this; he says this is “what the Culture’s feeling.”
Consider Yasiin Bey’s (f.k.a Mos Def, a pioneer of East Coast rap) viral interview with Recho Omondi for “The Cutting Room Floor” podcast. Omondi asks Bey, “Is Drake hip hop?” Bey responds, after a considerable pause, “Drake is pop, to me.” Omondi follows up, “In the sense that it’s charting like pop music?” Bey, with a smirk on his face, says, “In the sense that, if I was in Target in Houston and I heard a Drake song—it feels like a lot of his music is compatible with shopping.”
Bey has a point, given that Drake cranks out music at a machine-like pace, rarely stopping to ruminate on his craft. Starting with his first album, Thank Me Later, released in 2009, Drake has dropped sixteen albums in sixteen years—a new album, on average, every year. He’s a record executive’s wet dream. Drake literally proliferates himself into popularity. And just like the other pop divas, he tries on a new persona with each proliferation. He is notorious for appropriating sounds, styles, and slang from queer club culture, the Carribean, the Dirty South, and the Arab world.
It’s not a crime for musicians to self-actualize their music by temporarily adopting subcultural aesthetics (just look at Beyoncé or Madonna), but it is a distinctly pop pastime. Hip-hop, on the other hand, has proud provinces with kings and queens hailing from different cities, each with unique rap signatures. Hip-hop’s revolutionary politic is rooted in a community-based hyperregional ethos that reflects the many faces of Blackness back onto America writ large. A rapper’s sound may evolve as they grow as an artist, but their local flavor is part of what makes them a rapper in the first place. Listen to Outkast, Remy Ma, DMX, Glorilla, or Megan Thee Stallion, and there’s no mistaking where they come from and what style of rap they represent.
Drake doesn’t represent anything. He talks ad nauseam about “the six,” but has yet to offer us Toronto’s spin on rap music. He’s tactless compared to his peers in pop, who orchestrate concerted rollouts for their new cultural eras (think Cowboy Carter). In contrast, Drake’s attempts at this type of versatility seem almost extemporaneous. All of it, a logic of the id, desperate and motivated by lack.
This is one of Kendrick’s central theses. After “euphoria,” he dropped “meet the grahams,” “6:16 in LA,” and “Not Like Us.” In this lethal cadre of singles, he accused Drake of being, at best, a bitch-made, insecure, lightskin, thieving, dead-beat dad and cultural colonizer with a septic father wound; at worst, an alleged pedophile. Drake’s attempted rebuttals were, rather, admissions of guilt.
Drake outed himself as a shameless cultural profiteer, with a diss-track called “Taylor Made,” featuring an AI-generated verse by Tupac Shakur. Shakur’s estate swiftly issued a cease-and-desist order, and the song was taken down. Of the many faces that Drake has stolen, AI-generated Tupac is most dystopian. Not only is this at odds with the art of hip-hop, it’s at odds with art itself. But a man (an actor, lest we forget) who is committed to making mirages of himself surely cannot see the absurdity, nor the indignity, of sidling up to capitalism’s latest strain of dehumanization for the sake of a rap beef. Despite these clear misses, Drake’s fans stood behind him for his money-making mass appeal, something they believed Kendrick could never excel at comparably. However, Kendrick, always two steps ahead, began this beef ready to beat Drake at his own game.
“euphoria” was a criticism, and therefore a spiteful promise, of virality. “Not Like Us” was that promise made God-like in its omnipresence. It’s more than ‘diss-track meets summer anthem’; it’s a humiliation track ritualized through its addictive replay value. It’s catchy and scathing and full of humor. It is unmistakably West Coast. Kendrick proved he could make a hit without compromising the true spirit of rap.
He fashioned his anti-Drake crusade into a love letter to regional rap styles, and in the process, raised money for L.A., united warring gangs, and won five Grammys. He kept his foot on Drake’s neck and dropped GNX, performed it at the Super Bowl with Drake’s scorned enemies in tow, and announced an accompanying tour that would go on to break records. Since then, Drake has filed a dead-end defamation lawsuit, absconded to a tour in Oceania, and, predictably, released another album full of thoughtless bangers. There’s no doubting Kendrick’s victory in this fight, nor Drake’s unflappable armor of $popularity$, which will always keep him insulated from true cancellation. So, what was all of it for?
At first, when Kendrick began taking jabs at Drake, his punches connected with gristle and bone, the weight of his animus touching something real. He was clearing the table, giving rap a reset, trimming the fat to get to the meat. He was fighting for the soul of hip-hop.
But after his third, fourth, fifth victory lap, it began to feel like he was in the ring fighting against an avatar, not an adversary. Drake became a villainous stand-in for all that is wrong with culture and rap and money and men and fame. And in anointing himself rap’s purveyor, Kendrick has become too enthralled by his quest for nobility to see his fist being yanked down by the weight of his blows meeting nothing but a hologram. He is too busy huffing his self-prescribed morality to see that he, just like Drake, is privatizing himself by insisting he be alone on his holy hill:
It used to be “f*ck that n*gga” / but now it’s plural / f*ck everybody, that’s on my body
“wacced out murals” by Kendrick Lamar on GNX
As music writer and poet Harmony Holiday writes: “before the singular solo emcee became the most coveted asset in hip-hop, it was ensemble music, a space of sharing, sparring, trading verses and mythologizing crews of poets and producers who came up together in cyphers and were virtually inseparable creative partners. But the entertainment industry functions better with dysfunction, singular cultural heroes who can be martyred or lauded alone, alienated or surrounded by support contingent on the whims of fans and the market….I can’t think of a thriving group in hip hop today, but I can count several solo emcees obsessed with and foiling one another in search of the same benefits their profession used to derive from forming cliques and ensembles…These men yearn to make amends but are too proud to admit it…They understand one another better than anyone else.”
If Drake is an embodiment of the id, then Kendrick is the superego incarnate, obsessively moralizing himself beyond reproach, and then proclaiming that it’s lonely at the top. Yet, as members of the world-famous elite, Drake is one of the few people on Earth who can truly know Kendrick. In fact, perhaps my favorite of Kendrick’s work is his interlude featured on Drake’s 2011 album Take Care called “Buried Alive,” a soliloquy that laments their shared burden of fame, as if it’s a damnation:
So blame it on Mr. OVO XO / The reason why I’m breathing all the vanity, I know … / The reason why the highlight was when he [Drake] said / You belong to the people when you outside / So dig a shovel full of money, full of power, full of p*ssy, full of fame / And bury yourself alive, then I died
Kendrick has been committed to a false binary that unequivocally places him and Drake in opposition with one another (as if id and superego don’t need each other), when in reality, over the course of this year, Kendrick has become the very thing he is obsessed with abnegating. On “Family Matters,” shortly after Drake’s misguided jab at Kendrick for “trying to free the slaves,” he says, “you just be actin’ like an activist, it’s make believe.” Drake knows better of him than Kendrick would like us to believe.
Kendrick couched his criticisms of Drake in a broader political conversation about hip-hop’s foundational integrity. He implicates hip-hop in the fight for freedom against exploitation. Yet, if Kendrick is asking us to join in the chant to mark Drake a colonizer, if he’s asking the next generation of artists to “respect the artform,” if he’s fighting for the soul of hip-hop, then he’ll need to extend these shrunken platitudes beyond NFL halftime shows.
Hip-hop was born of an apocalypse in 1973, when the Bronx was burning at the hand of state-manufactured urban decay. Hip-hop was made for and by people fighting to stay alive. Now, we watch new state-sanctioned apocalypses every day, live-streamed through our phones, in Gaza, Congo, Tigray, Sudan, and Kendrick is conspicuously silent. If he refuses to use the word “colonizer” to bear witness to genocide, then it doesn’t belong in his toothless mouth. It makes him just as corny and blinded by self-interest as Drake. It reduces hip-hop to a performance (just as Drake does) and turns its political affect into mere set dressing for his hero’s journey. It’s been a year since the “Not Like Us” summer. Drake is still a millionaire. Kendrick is too. And the U.S. war machine still launders taxpayer dollars in blood.
If Kendrick won’t use the power of hip-hop to decry some of the most violent atrocities of our time, he has at least forced us into a conversation about who will. Who, on the global stage, holds the soul of hip hop? Who represents its past, present, and future?
Doechii. Doechii, a rapper who abides by an ideology other than herself. She is among the few major hip-hop artists who have had the moral courage to decry family separations, U.S. imperialism, and the Gazan genocide, while in Kendrick’s hometown, no less, with much more to lose than he does. Doechii is a fierce contender for the new top spot in rap, yet I pray the preoccupations of being “The G.O.A.T.” never find her. While the men of hip-hop (and Nicki Minaj) are fighting for first place, Doechii is fighting to be seen, to make art as authentically as she can. And if Kendrick were to contend with his peers outside of the male-centered ego-driven rap beef paradigm, I have no doubt that his craft, and by extension, his moral clarity, would be pushed by engaging with what Doechii represents for the future of rap.
Imagine an album sharpened by Kendrick's appreciation of Doechii’s unique and undeniable talent, rather than dulled by his infatuation with taking Drake down. This isn’t to say that Drake shouldn’t be critiqued. This isn’t to say that Kendrick’s art doesn’t have some collaborative and liberatory elements. It is to say that rap is at its sharpest, most potent, and most radically world-changing when it's rooted in community, wholesale, not just when it applies to one’s own vested interests. In Kendrick’s words, “At the end of the day, nothing’s more powerful than rap music, I don’t care what it is. We are the culture.”
