After a weekend in which two of hip-hop's biggest stars traded increasingly uglier accusations of domestic violence and child sexual abuse, it's almost official: Kendrick Lamar has triumphed over Drake in what many have considered the biggest rap conflict of all time.
The verdict was delivered Monday morning by the self-proclaimed internet annotators whose investment in the battle, as seen on YouTube, TikTok and all other forms of social media given to feverish decision-making, did as much as that of the rappers themselves to fan their flames.
But if Lamar can be said to have won, where does his victory leave him at age 36, a decade and a half into a career about which he sometimes seems ambivalent? How does Drake's loss at age 37 change the perception of invincibility he's been building since the late 2000s? And what does all this say about hip-hop at a time when the genre's commercial dominance appears to be waning?
There's no doubt that Kendrick versus Drake, a long-simmering rivalry that exploded in late March when Lamar dropped a surprise verse on Future and Metro Boomin's song “Like That,” has been good for rap's standing in a crowded attention economy. Countless stakeholders in the form have expressed concern lately about hip-hop's slowing growth: Last year, for example, just four rap LPs, by Travis Scott, Metro Boomin, Drake and the duo of Drake and 21 Savage, They finished 2023 among the 25th of the year. Most consumed albums. (Add in albums by SZA and Bad Bunny, and hip-hop was still far outranked by pop and country thanks to blockbuster hits from artists like Morgan Wallen, Taylor Swift, and Zach Bryan.)
Before “Like That” debuted atop Billboard’s Hot 100 and logged three consecutive weeks at No. 1, the last rap song to have such a long, uninterrupted streak was DaBaby’s “Rockstar” featuring Roddy Ricch back in the summer of 2020.
Now, Drake and Lamar songs occupy half of Spotify's Top 10 in the United States and are expected to appear in the upper reaches of next week's Hot 100; Not only that, but the conflict put hip-hop back at the center of the pop cultural conversation: Watch last weekend's “Saturday Night Live” sketch in which Dua Lipa plays a woman trying to explain the complexities of the dispute. a pair of smiling morning television hosts.
At least in the mind-sharing sense, Kendrick versus Drake has also been a blessing for the two men individually, who have seen them slowly (and naturally) pushed from the center of hip-hop in recent years. generation that comes after them. To put it in rock terms, these guys are approaching the status of U2 or Bruce Springsteen: popular and long-respected legacy acts who left their greatest music behind. However, this struggle made his work seem alive again; made you believe that those legacies are still being written.
Which, of course, is the tricky part. The dispute began along familiar lines on “Like That,” with Lamar, the cerebral Compton native who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for his reflections on family, religion and Black heritage, objecting to the idea that the more oriented Drake to pop, belongs in the same league as him. (You can trace that notion to J. Cole's verse in a song on Drake's 2023 album “For All the Dogs” in which he describes himself, Drake and Lamar as “the big three” of hip-hop modern).
But the feud quickly became deeper and more personal: In his song “Push Ups,” Drake mocked Lamar's small physical stature and that he was allegedly taken advantage of in business; He followed up with “Taylor Made Freestyle,” which used artificial intelligence to emulate the voices of Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg as hip-hop OGs prompting Lamar to respond to Drake's insults. Lamar did it in a song called “Euphoria” in which he called Drake a “hustler” and accused the Canadian rapper of appropriating elements of African-American culture. Then, on Friday, everything went crazy when Lamar dropped another diss track, “6:16 in LA,” with the suggestion that someone on Drake's team was leaking information to him. That led Drake to strike back hours later with “Family Matters,” in which he alleged that Lamar “hit” his longtime romantic partner, Whitney Alford; Almost immediately, Lamar released “Meet the Grahams,” the story's darkest chapter yet: a six-minute catalog of Drake's alleged misdeeds, including Lamar's claim that his enemy has an 11-year-old daughter. that he has kept secret from the world.
Before Drake could respond, Lamar dropped again on Saturday with “Not Like Us,” a sleek, festive (and instantly viral) party record that culminates with what might be Lamar's most direct critique of a hip artist. -hop whose enormous success is inseparable from its ability to identify ascending styles and talents: “You are not a colleague / You are a colonizer.” (He also calls Drake and his crew pedophiles.) With a weariness clearly audible in his voice, Drake finally returned Sunday night with “The Heart Part 6,” a somber track in which he refutes Lamar's claims about his history. with young women and says that Lamar had fallen for the false story that Drake himself had planted about him having a daughter.
So: Grim things, almost all of them unverifiable by any of those who had been in charge of adjudicating the matter. But if it's hard to say how (or if) this information lines up with the actual existence of either man, the way each of them provided it will likely reshape our understanding of their musical characters.
“Meet the Grahams” revealed a level of spite we’d never heard from Lamar, who bookended his most recent album, “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers,” as an extended therapy session; “Not Like Us” shows he's not done yet (as the complicated “Mr. Morale” might have suggested) with catchy club-targeted rap songs.
In fact, it says something that the biggest commercial success to emerge from this dispute will almost certainly be a Lamar song rather than one by Drake, whose hit-making instinct recently led him to surpass the Beatles as the group with the most Top singles. 5 in Hot. 100 history. The key to Drake's chart career has been his strategic mind and his talent for reading a room; No one has proven more adept at anticipating what listeners will want before they even realize it. However, the messiness of his approach in “The Heart Part 6” – his apparent misunderstanding of an earlier Lamar lyric about sexual abuse and his insistence that he couldn't have taken advantage of the girls because he's “too famous” (!? ) – destabilizes its image as the ultimate operator.
So how are Lamar and Drake, the latter whose Toronto home was the site of a shooting early Tuesday in which a security guard was wounded, according to police, get through this? Do they make new work within the parameters of what we have learned about them? Or do they treat the meat as some kind of unofficial exhibition game, as Lamar says in “Meet the Grahams” that he initially intended?
And what about the audience? Social media, where these distortion tracks landed in discourse, has fundamentally changed the way we relate to pop stars; it's what enabled the mentality whereby fans feel like they have a stake in their idols' careers, whether it's rappers making fun of each other or Taylor Swift making fun of an ex. Like “The Department of Tortured Poets,” Kendrick versus Drake has offered a wealth of knowledge to analyze, support, and break down into fragments of parasocial identity. However, the problem with getting what you want is that you might end up getting more.
