Pod Insights 60 Songs That Explain the '90s Poetic Justice: The Year of Kendrick Lamar About this episode Ahead of Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime performance, Ringer senior staff writer Justin Charity explores some of the critical moments of Kendrick’s story: from a legendary come-up in the rap blog era of the late 2000s to his early stardom in the 2010s to his fiery resurgence in the past several months as he takes a never-ending victory lap after winning his war against Drake.
Host: Justin Charity
Producers: Vikram Patel, Justin Sayles, Chelsea Stark-Jones, and Bobby Wagner
Story Editing: Aric Jenkins
Sound Design, Mixing, and Mastering: Bobby Wagner
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Transcript 12,121 words · 8 speakers
0:01 Speaker 00 Hello, everyone. We have a special treat for you today. Our good friend, ringer colleague, frequent 60 Songs guest and fellow Ohioan, Justin Charity has put together a fantastic one-off reported podcast about Kendrick Lamar, celebrating and debating Kendrick's career to date, and of course, also taking in more recent events, including his upcoming Super Bowl performance and his scorched earth war with Drake. Shout out to Drake Reddit, where everything's going just fine. Justin is one of my favorite writers, podcasters, rap critics, and saxophonists, and I am very, very excited for you all to hear this. Please enjoy. As a reminder, 60 Songs will be on hiatus for a little bit here, a couple of months at
0:44 Speaker 00 most, nothing serious. We'll be back soon, I promise. Take care in the meantime. Thanks so much for listening, and talk soon.
0:55 Speaker 01 Get this. When you're with Xfinity, you're already a member. No sign up, no cost. Score epic experiences from our family at NBC Universal. Plus movie tickets, discounts on streaming, mobile, and more. Check the Xfinity app every Thursday for exclusive perks and experiences, only with Xfinity. Now that's the way to start a weekend. Let the magic begin. Restrictions apply. Visit Xfinity.com/membership to learn more.
1:26 Speaker 02 From the creators of Zootopia and Frozen comes Disney's Hext. Welcome to Hext and enter the world of witches, where it was foretold that an ordinary girl would become an extraordinary witch and save the world of magic. Disney's Hext arrives in theaters this Thanksgiving.
1:46 Speaker 03 If you told me 10 years ago, five years ago, even one year ago, that Kendrick Lamar would be playing the halftime show at the Super Bowl, not as a guest performer like when he was up there with Eminem and Snoop a few years back, but as the sole headliner, I'd probably ask you to back up a bit.
2:07 Speaker 03 This is K-Dot we're talking about, right? The Pulitzer Prize winner, the reclusive artiste, who's made some of the most important, but also some of the most challenging rap albums of his generation. Don't get me wrong, Kendrick's got the catalog. He's got the hits, absolutely. Five number one singles, 22 songs in the Billboard Top 10. "Humble" was one of the biggest songs of 2017, one of the biggest rap records of the past decade. And Kendrick's got classic albums. He's got five number one albums out of seven total. He's acclaimed, he's adored, and he's a hitmaker when he wants to be.
2:51 Speaker 03 But Kendrick's catalog is eclectic and intense. His music is often so deeply intimate, so closed, that it defies the very thought, at least in my mind, of tens of millions of people rapping and singing along in prime time. Seriously, think back on the headliners of the past decade or so. Usher, Justin Timberlake, The Black Eyed Peas, Maroon 5, Katy Perry, Rihanna. It's still a bit hard for me to wrap my head around the idea of Kendrick Lamar. It'd be different if you were telling me that the halftime performer this year was, I don't know, Drake?
3:37 Speaker 03 But it's likely you already know as well as I do that Drake in particular is in no condition to play the Super Bowl halftime show at this point in his career. Because Drake has been having a tough time lately. Because Drake got his ass beat by none other than Kendrick Lamar in one of the most spectacular feuds in the history of rap. Drake vs Kendrick Lamar was an upset for the ages. The aftershock still reverberates eight months later on the eve of Kendrick's halftime performance. So I wanted to better understand how we got here, and I wanted to help other people,
4:21 Speaker 03 especially the uninitiated, to understand as well. So I talked to some people, writers, podcasters, musicians, who have some feelings about the man of the hour. Together, we're gonna take a look back at how we got here, how Kendrick got here. It's not gonna be the whole saga. That's a series. That's a book, frankly. But for this one episode, we'll explore some of the critical moments of Kendrick's story. From a legendary come up in the rap blog era of the late 2000s, to his early stardom in the 2010s, to his fiery resurgence in the past several months on his never-ending victory lap after winning his war against Drake.
5:03 Speaker 03 From Spotify and The Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Justin Charity, and this is Poetic Justice, a narrative feature about Kendrick Lamar and this incredible run he's on. Los Angeles is a tremendously important city in the history of hip-hop, a city that's produced so many massively successful rappers and producers. New York may be the birthplace of hip-hop, and Atlanta may be its creative epicenter today, but LA has played such a huge part for so many consecutive decades in making
5:45 Speaker 03 hip-hop as big and successful as it's become. Compton alone has produced such a long and legendary hip-hop lineage, from NWA and DJ Quick in the late 80s into the 90s, to Kendrick Lamar and YG in the 2010s.
6:03 Speaker 04 Yo, it's DJ Head. I'm a media personality DJ from Los Angeles, from Carson, to be exact, as Avso would say.
6:12 Speaker 03 Head has known and worked with Kendrick since the beginning. And DJ Head definitely knows LA. He's been in local radio and hip hop broadcasting since about 2004. He got hired by iHeart in 2015 and spent a few years working with Big Boy on Real 92.3.
6:32 Speaker 04 Did the night show for four years. Built a brand called Homegrown Radio with my boy Chuck Dizzle. And ironically enough, Homegrown Radio is where TDE started.
6:44 Speaker 03 TDE, that's Top Dog Entertainment, a rap label founded by the record producer Anthony Tiffith, also known as Top Dog, and based in Carson, California, just south of LA. In the mid 2000s, TDE was home to a young and restless rap crew known as Black Hippie. You had J-Rock from Watts, Ab Soul from Carson, Schoolboy Q from South Central, and K-Dot, that's what they called Kendrick back then, from Compton. When TDE was first coming up, Head says West Coast rap was in something of a dry spell.
7:21 Speaker 04 LA was pretty much dead. And we were fighting a good fight. We were, we had a thing, a moniker that we ran under called the New West. It was headed up by Glasses Malone, Bishop Lamont, Hot Dollar, you know, all of these people that were booming, Gorilla Black, Mike Stroh, and J-Rock was at the forefront of that as well.
7:40 Speaker 03 Initially, J-Rock was the biggest, buzziest prospect out of TDE. But K-Dot was also making moves and finding his own sound at this stage. That's got a bunch of lost mixtapes from this period. Hub City Threat, Training Day, No Sleep Till NYC, and then there's C4.
8:07 Speaker 03 That's K-Dot rhyming over the beat for Lil Wayne's "Amilly." That whole mixtape, C4, is actually an homage to Wayne, who was one of Kendrick's heroes and one of his biggest influences, starting out.
8:21 Speaker 04 Early on, everyone accused K-Dot of being a caricature of Lil Wayne, because Wayne was one of his favorite rappers.
8:29 Speaker 03 When Head mentions TDE starting on Homegrown Radio, he's partly referring to a fateful interview in 2009, when K-Dot came on his show to announce that he was changing his rap name to his real name, Kendrick Lamar.
8:43 Speaker 04 And him changing his name was like, alright, I'm ready to just be me.
8:48 Speaker 03 Kendrick Lamar had a name, and he clearly had talent. He just needed a push. A big cosign from one of the hip-hop gods couldn't hurt. Obviously, Dr. Dre was from Compton, and he'd minted so many rap stars from all across the country: Snoop Dogg, exhibit Eminem, 50 Cent. Dre's last big act was rapper The Game, also from Compton. Dre did eventually link with Kendrick in 2010, when Kendrick was actually warming up crowds as a hype man for J-Rock on the Independent Grind Tour with Tech 9. Here's how an absolutely giddy Kendrick once told the story to Howard Stern.
9:27 Speaker 05 And me and my boy Ali, we was eating at Chili's. I'll never forget, we was eating at Chili's and we got a call like, yo, Dr. Dre likes your music. And it was like, who the fuck is this on the phone? Get out of here, bro.
9:40 Speaker 03 You hung up?
9:41 Speaker 05 Yeah, we hung up.
9:42 Speaker 03 That's the first breakthrough. That's the phone call that ultimately got Kendrick signed to Aftermath and Interscope, got him a real budget and a release date, October 2012, for his major-label debut, "Good Kid: Mad City."
9:59 Speaker 06 Every time I'm in the street, I hear, "Yak, yak, yak, yak." Money Trees is the perfect place for shading. That's just how I be. Frank. Headshot. Frank. Sit down. Frank. They don't get my vibe.
10:20 Speaker 03 Musically, lyrically, narratively, "Good Kid" is gorgeous. And its success was life-changing for Kendrick, for Black Hippie, for TDE. It's one of the best-selling and most highly acclaimed rap albums, definitely the most acclaimed major-label debut of the 2010s. And it had hits. "Bitch, Don't Kill My Vibe" was massive. Its title, its chorus, it was the perfect Instagram caption at a time when that sort of social media stickiness was starting to go a long way to a song's success. "Swimming Pools" was even bigger. "Swimming Pools" was the breakout single. It was a killer radio record, produced by T minus, the same T minus who produced mega
11:04 Speaker 03 hits like "Moment for Life" for Nicki Minaj and "The Motto" for Drake. Drake, in fact, showed up on "Good Kid: Mad City" on a "For the Ladies" joint, Drake's specialty, a song called "Poetic Justice." This was a year or so after Drake featured Kendrick Lamar on his own sophomore album, "Take Care." And this is a few years before this particular relationship, Drake and Kendrick, started to go left.
11:45 Speaker 03 And yet, there was something uncompromising about "Good Kid: Mad City," something relentlessly idiosyncratic about this storybook rap album about street life and puppy love and Compton. Kendrick Lamar was very attuned to the literary potential and the subversive aspects of hip-hop. This only proves more true of Kendrick's musical direction as time goes on.
12:14 Speaker 07 Like making films, like the kind of thing you want to re-watch several times until you've kind of caught all the nuggets. It's something that you know you can grow with because when you watch it again in a year, you've had some different experience, some different take.
12:25 Speaker 03 That's the journalist and podcaster Brandon Jenkins. Most people call him Jinx. He and I worked together for a few years in the mid 2010s at Complex, where I was a writer and he was a web video anchor. He's interviewed Kendrick on camera a couple of times over the years. Back in our time together at Complex, we were watching Kendrick blossom. He was gravitating toward new sounds. He was moving units. He was winning Grammys, all while cultivating a certain preserved, meditative mystique. Kendrick's next album, Tipa Butterfly, exceeded expectations tenfold. Even if some of the early singles worried fans. "I" maybe seemed a little too poppy.
13:11 Speaker 03 "The Black or the Berry" maybe seemed a little too didactic. But the album came together masterfully in the end. Tipa Butterfly is powerful. It's Kendrick preaching peace to gangs in LA, preaching generosity and compassion on songs like "How Much a Dollar Costs" and "I", while otherwise burying the darker parts of his soul and his self-esteem on songs like "You". This Kendrick is righteous, not a role model or a leader per se, but a rapper who clearly sees himself as a protector of hip-hop and black culture.
13:53 Speaker 03 In 2017, Kendrick followed up Tipa Butterfly with "Damn", a fascinating album about life, death, and salvation. Heady concepts, and yet, "Damn" is also catchy as hell. It spawned a few hits, including his biggest up-to-that point.
14:22 Speaker 03 That's humble from Damn. And to Jinx, that's peak Kendrick.
14:28 Speaker 07 That's him kind of meeting us where we're at, but he still is bringing all the elements that I think his other fans really love, which is experimentation, a lot of callbacks. Started creating this myth and lore around himself, his region, you know, his story.
14:42 Speaker 03 Most rappers would have doubled down on their biggest commercial success. But if anything, Kendrick got less and less accessible with time. Sure, in 2018, he scored a sweet gig as an executive producer for the soundtrack to Marvel's Black Panther. But after that, there was a lot of silence until 2022. Then he released Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers. Kendrick got some hits on this one, too. But Mr. Morale was otherwise pretty much the opposite of the commercial Kendrick that Jinx was describing with Damn. Mr. Morale was even more thorny and intense and introspective than To Pimp a Butterfly. Mr. Morale was some deep, dark shit. Not the easiest listen by any means,
15:25 Speaker 03 but one of Kendrick's most engrossing projects. Kendrick Lamar came to be seen as an auteur and a reclusive one at that.
15:34 Speaker 07 I think with Kendrick, he's a filmmaker that shuts the fuck up about it. There's no trailer, there's no rollout, there's no collab with Burger King. You know, it's just like the thing lives and oftentimes he'll walk away from it. You know, it's not Star Wars, man. You know, it's like it's Barry Jenkins. You know, it's closer to that space where like he works the film, it comes out. Like Barry Jenkins, did he even? There's minimal interviews with that man. You know, and he's like the one I want to hear from the most. And I think that's what Kendrick's draw is.
16:07 Speaker 03 Kendrick played the expectations game for his album so masterfully. He conditioned his listeners to trust him, to trust his taste, to trust his musical direction, when some of his peers were more inclined to chase sounds, chase features, ride waves.
16:24 Speaker 06 He pulled apart expectation in the same way that Frank Ocean did.
16:30 Speaker 03 That's Van Lathan, co-host of The Ringer podcast Higher Learning and The Midnight Boys.
16:35 Speaker 06 The music seems so personal and so authentic that there's not- Really a way to contextualize what you're going to expect. You can't really say what you're gonna expect.
16:49 Speaker 03 I talked to Van about Kendrick's albums, about the big and sort of mind boggling differences between them. You know, if somebody asked me to describe Kanye's sound, I'm thinking the samples, the vocoder, the maximalism.
17:10 Speaker 03 You ask me to describe Drake's sound, I'm thinking moody falsetto over these sort of ominously vacant new money beats.
17:26 Speaker 03 But grappling with Kendrick's sound, Kendrick's musical touchpoints from one album to the next, that's a little trickier to pin down.
17:35 Speaker 06 There's not a sonic through line to Kendrick Lamar's music. There's a social through line. There's an intellectual through line. There's a through line of authenticity, of spirituality. There's a thematic through line.
17:50 Speaker 03 There's a rapper who's determined to use hip hop to uplift and enlighten, even when he's making a straight up hit. There's a rapper who's determined to do right by hip hop, to leave the culture better than he found it.
18:05 Speaker 03 Throughout the 2010s, setting aside the older rappers like Jay-Z and Kanye, you had three next gen guys running the rap game. A big three, if you will. There's Drake, there's J. Cole, and there's Kendrick. These three guys each had their own unique strengths. Drake was this hungry hitmaker who raps and sings and churns out music every year, an album for every summer. Cole was this sort of undergrad everyman who produces his own songs and embodies a certain sense of modesty and humility, unlike a lot of other rap stars.
18:42 Speaker 03 And then there's Kendrick, who was a live wire, the furious poet who very desperately, very aggressively wanted to prove he was the best. Not just say that he was the best, prove it in the arena. Now, I'll surely disappoint some number of listeners when I say frankly, we are not here to talk about J. Cole. We will, however, talk about Aubrey Drake Graham.
19:14 Speaker 03 Drake is a rapper who became so big in the 2010s that he increasingly talked and carried himself as if he thought he was bigger than hip hop, as if the culture was something subservient to him, as if his collaborators owed him everything and he owed them nothing.
19:34 Speaker 06 Drake has been on my Spotify rap as long as I've had Spotify, except for this year, ironically.
19:39 Speaker 03 That's Hunter Harris, writer and podcaster. She's a fan of Kendrick and also a very, I would say ruthlessly astute observer of Drake. Hunter is especially attuned to the most essential fact about Drake. He loves women and women love him, or loved him intensely for a time. It's easy to underrate this aspect of Drake's success until you really sit and consider how typical it is for male rappers to mainly pitch themselves and their music to men, how typical it is for male rappers to seemingly go out of their way to alienate female listeners.
20:23 Speaker 03 Drake, he's handsome, he's slick, he's very romantically perceptive, he's the greatest fuckboy a girl could ask for.
20:41 Speaker 06 I mean, that is certainly telegraphing a very clear message about seeing and believing in and understanding women in a way that most men don't.
20:49 Speaker 03 This has been such a huge part of Drake's pitch from the very beginning. Jinx actually made a related observation, telling me about the crowd at his first Drake concert when he was an undergrad at Morehouse.
21:02 Speaker 07 And I went there, it was all women. And this is like 2009, so this is like the era of the dress with like the belt for no reason, you know, and like the like Zelda boots and, you know, and I was like, whoa, there's like a lot of women here. And it's like just me and like my homie and like maybe three other guys in there. I was like, what?
21:17 Speaker 03 This was Drake's great virtue and a real reason to root for him at one point. People called him soft because he was always rapping and singing, God forbid, at girls, about girls, for girls. Drake ignored those detractors and got extremely popular doing so. He was the triumph of a new sort of masculine archetype in rap, for better or worse. He was also, I'd argue, a triumph of pop over rap. DJ Head talks about the machine. You know, the producers and executives at these record labels who have the know-how, power and resources to turn someone who can rap into someone who can make songs. Better
21:59 Speaker 03 yet, someone who can make hits. Each of the so-called big three, to be clear, had some invaluable backing by the machine. Kendrick had Dr. Dre as the executive producer on Good Kid Mad City. J. Cole had Jay-Z in his corner, validating his early talent but pushing him to make hits. But nobody in this period, really nobody in the history of the rap game, was embraced by the machine more warmly than Drake.
22:27 Speaker 07 I wasn't aware of the environment around Drake yet at this time, so we go to the concert at what was then The Loft. I forget what the venue name is now in Atlanta.
22:36 Speaker 03 That's jinx, reminiscing about a concert in 2009, sometime around the release of Drake's breakout mixtape, So Far Gone, and its fateful mega-hit, Best I Ever Had.
22:48 Speaker 07 And I'm looking around and there's people kind of milling around the stage before Drake comes on. I see T.I., I see Usher, I see Jermaine Dupri, like, all these kind of figures. And I'm like, this guy's like a mixtape rapper. Like, I didn't know yet. And then I was like, oh shit, he's chosen.
23:05 Speaker 03 It wasn't hard to see or hear why he was chosen. Drake was a conduit. He was very good at bridging hip-hop and pop culture. There's always been some pop crossover in hip-hop, but with Drake, it wasn't a novelty as much as Pitbull or Flowrider.
23:24 Speaker 03 His music pitched him right down the middle class.
23:28 Speaker 06 That's what we listen to to like drink Malibu rum and Manx Hard Lemonade in someone's poolhouse. There's something about Drake that felt so approachable, attainable.
23:40 Speaker 03 There's a contrast that emerges after a point. After Kendrick releases Tip Emp a Butterfly and certainly Circa, Mr. Morale. Drake is the bigger star by far. Commercially, Drake isn't competing with Kendrick Lamar or J. Cole. Drake is competing with Taylor Swift. For three out of four years, from 2015 to 2018, Drake is the number one artist on Spotify worldwide. Kendrick is popular, but Kendrick is unapproachable, inaccessible at times. Also, increasingly, he's seen as maybe a little too introspective, a little too tortured.
24:24 Speaker 06 At least what I was seeing around the release of like Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers is that sometimes that vulnerability in Kendrick and the real willingness to like live within the internal battle of his emotions is kind of off-putting to people.
24:46 Speaker 03 Off-putting, I'd say by design. Kendrick Lamar is nothing if not anguished. Tupac, Eminem, DMX. You hear all of those influences in him constantly. He's aggressive. He's confrontational. Kendrick is, well...
25:20 Speaker 03 That's Kendrick Lamar's verse on Control, which was released in 2013, still pretty early in his rise. It's a Big Sean song, technically, also featuring J. Electronica. But culturally, this was Kendrick's moment because he was sending shots at everybody. He was the only one of his mainstream peers who wasn't too comfortable or shook to really explicitly voice the competitive spirit of hip hop. Control put a lot of rappers in their feelings, including a bunch of rappers who weren't even mentioned on the song. This was Kendrick flipping the table. As competitive as hip hop can be, rappers can be super passive aggressive, mostly sending subliminal disses at each other,
26:04 Speaker 03 throwing stones and hiding hands. These guys are too scared, too complacent to want to rock the boat too hard. But on Control, Kendrick just says it with his chest. He names names. He's screaming on these dudes. Jinx thinks Kendrick was looking at it like this.
26:26 Speaker 07 Y'all like these motherfuckers. Like, you like them. I don't. And like, if you like them for these reasons, let me defeat them. Like, you might not like me for the same reasons you like them, but I'll defeat them in front of you. And then will you still like them?
26:40 Speaker 03 Kendrick wants to compete with these guys. He's saying, "I got love for you all." But he's also saying, "I will outclass and destroy you lyrically, each and every one of you." With time, though, Kendrick started to develop a low-key rivalry with Drake specifically. Meek Mill famously exposed Drake for using ghostwriters. Kendrick, meanwhile, writes his own shit. And Kendrick clearly doesn't respect Drake positioning himself as the greatest rapper of his generation and one of the best to ever do it, when really, he's got a whole writers' room coming up at his raps. There are rumors of bad blood between Drake and Kendrick behind the scenes.
27:22 Speaker 03 There was media gossip in 2014 about a popular rapper going on ESPN and talking a lot of shit about one of his rivals. Allegedly, that rapper's team then pressured ESPN not to air the taped interview. It was easy enough to connect the dots. This was Drake dissing Kendrick. This rumor was widely reported at the time, and Marcellus Wiley, who was an ESPN host back then, has recently said that the rumor was indeed true. Drake has never commented. It seemed like neither of these guys respected the other. But at the time, it also seemed like Drake was untouchable, unimpeachable. Here's Hunter Harris.
28:02 Speaker 06 There certainly were critics of Drake, but it was that Drake was simply so big, and that even if you really hated Drake, it's like, what are you gonna do? Hate Drake? What are you gonna listen to? What's gonna play on your car?
28:23 Speaker 03 In terms of commercial dominance, in terms of musical ubiquity, Kendrick Lamar wasn't an alternative to Drake. But he was a perfect foil. The culture would inevitably pit these two guys against each other. The Toronto Heart Rock, who sings slick pop choruses and relies on so many ghostwriters, versus K-Dot, the solitary poet, the righteous bomb thrower from Compton, the rightful heir to that long and legendary lineage of Compton rappers, California hitmakers with street sense and bad attitudes and fiery rhetoric. Who doesn't want to see that matchup? To see a man take on the machine.
29:27 Speaker 01 Get this. When you're with Xfinity, you're already a member. No sign up, no cost. Score epic experiences from our family at NBC Universal. Plus movie tickets, discounts on streaming, mobile, and more. Check the Xfinity app every Thursday for exclusive perks and experiences. Only with Xfinity. Now that's the way to start a weekend. Let the magic begin. Restrictions apply. Visit Xfinity.com/membership to learn more.
29:59 Speaker 03 It's me, the
30:02 Speaker 03 We don't need the jingle twice.
30:05 Speaker 03 Stop it. This is about vacation inflation and how Priceline negotiates amazing deals on hotels, flights, and rental cars.
30:14 Speaker 03 Yeah, but I didn't mention that you can save up to 60% off hotels in the Priceline app.
30:20 Speaker 03 Fine. No one deals more deals than Please stop.
30:25 Speaker 03 Touche. Priceline.
30:28 Speaker 02 From the creators of Zootopia and Frozen comes Disney's Hext. Welcome to Hext and enter the world of witchits, where it was foretold that an ordinary girl would become an extraordinary witch and save the world of magic. Disney's Hext arrives in theaters this Thanksgiving.
30:49 Speaker 03 The history lesson is over. It's March 2024, and it's been 11 years since Control. It's been a couple of years since we last heard from Kendrick Lamar, whose most recent album, Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, was his most divisive album to date. Drake is still churning out hits, but he's somewhat similarly on a run of projects that aren't quite popping. Both these guys are at strange points in their respective careers. They're also at a strange point in their coexistence as hip-hop superstars. That these two guys don't quite like or respect each other is, at this point, obvious.
31:33 Speaker 03 These guys haven't been on a song together since ASAP Rocky's fucking Problems more than a decade ago. And while the simmering feud that began with Control never boiled over, there's all sorts of online hip hop forensics suggesting veiled shots on various songs from both camps aimed at each other. Kendrick grumbling about a rapper with a ghostwriter on King Kunta. Drake addressing a fake woke fake deep adversary who goes unnamed on At The Gates. It's a cold war that doesn't seem like it'll ever be settled, but also doesn't seem like
32:13 Speaker 03 it'll ever have a real cause for either of these guys to really heat up and pop off. They're in a decade-long deadlock, but Kendrick Lamar is about to seize the upper hand.
32:27 Speaker 07 Everybody likes a fight.
32:33 Speaker 07 Don't sit up here and people tell me that you don't like watching a fight or that you won't, you, you can't get mesmerized by a fight.
32:41 Speaker 03 That's Joel Anderson, a senior staff writer here at The Ringer and also a former host of Slow Burn, a podcast series at Slate. Joel reported and hosted a season of Slow Burn about Biggie and Tupac. So Joel has spent a lot of time in his professional capacity as a journalist, thinking about rapping, about the motivations, about the skill, about the stakes, which sometimes get to be tragically high, as in the case of Big and Pac. But beef, at its purest, at its best, beef is a crucial part of the art form. Beef, ideally, isn't about wanton violence or random disrespect. Beef is about proving you are who you say you are.
33:25 Speaker 03 Beef is about backing up all those brags on all those records about you being the best. It's been that way since rappers were first rocking Adidas and Kangols on Queens Boulevard.
33:39 Speaker 07 And when it's like people that seem like they're equally yoked.
33:43 Speaker 04 When LL Cool J and Cool Mo D getting the beef, that seems like a big deal. Like, both those dudes are cool. Who's gonna lose?
33:53 Speaker 03 We'll hear the answer to that question as it relates to Drake and Kendrick Lamar soon enough.
34:04 Speaker 03 On March 22nd, 2024, Future and Metro Boomin drop a collab album, "We Don't Trust You." Kendrick is on here on a song called "Like That." His verse is aggressive. His verse is shockingly direct.
34:20 Speaker 06 Okay, let's get it up. It's time for him to prove that he's a problem.
34:24 Speaker 03 Oh, is Kendrick Lamar about to start naming names again? Is this about to get dramatic?
34:32 Speaker 06 Fuck Sneak Dis and First Person Shooter. I hope they came with three switches. I crap.
34:37 Speaker 03 Well, well, well. Drake recently had Cole with him on a song called "First Person Shooter" on Drake's last album, "For All The Dogs." Kendrick is going at Drake and Cole together.
34:51 Speaker 03 "First Person Shooter. I hope they came with three switches."
34:54 Speaker 06 For all your dogs getting buried. That's a K with all these nines. He gonna see pet cemetery, nigga.
35:01 Speaker 03 Hmm, I get the feeling that this is really ultimately about Drake, though. Kendrick Lamar wants to bury him once and for all. Every generation of hip-hop gets the defining blockbuster rap beef it deserves. MC Shan versus KRS-One, Jay-Z versus Nas, Gucci versus Jeezy. And now Kendrick versus Drake. Fucking finally.
35:33 Speaker 03 Drake has been on top of the rap game for a very long time, an unprecedented stretch. He's outwitted, outplayed, outlasted. He isn't about to be overthrown by a hip-hop monk who releases 12 songs every three years, right?
35:51 Speaker 03 The hip hop writer Jason Buford thinks Drake just fundamentally doesn't respect Kendrick's approach to rap stardom.
35:59 Speaker 04 Kendrick has that thing where he like takes like years off and you don't hear from him. And I think Drake finds that corny and he doesn't understand why people like that.
36:09 Speaker 03 Jason Buford is something of a Drake defender. That's why I wanted to talk to him because I do think it's important to consider both sides and grapple in good faith with his position in this beef and his legacy in hip hop. 78 top 10 hits, 13 number ones, 13 chart topping albums. Drake was the hip hop soundtrack to so many summers. He's not going out without a fight. Like That becomes the number one song in the country. Drake can't ignore it at this point. He can't let this shit slide, especially given the number of people who are suddenly publicly fouling him at this point.
36:53 Speaker 03 Future, Rick Ross, The Weeknd, ASAP Rocky, Ja Morant. His one crucial ally in all of this, J. Cole, fumbled his own response to Kendrick and then quickly wisely backed out of this beef altogether. So now Drake is caught out, but he also lives for this sort of drama, this sort of opportunity to talk down to his lessers. It's a little less than a month after Like That dropped that Drake responds. He drops Push Ups dissing, well, everyone. The whole situation was, in his words, a 20 v. 1, but primarily Drake setting the stage
37:38 Speaker 03 for a big showdown with Kendrick.
37:41 Speaker 04 When I heard Push Ups, I was like, okay, okay. I didn't think it was great, but I did think it was funny and I did think he gets at a lot of things that I find a little bit irritating about Kendrick Lamar. He gets that in Push Ups. I wouldn't say I was confident, but I was like, okay, we might have ourselves a little bit of a sparring match here. I didn't think it would end up being a football brawl, but I was like, okay, we might have a little bit of a sparring match.
38:08 Speaker 03 Push Ups is jokes mostly, stuff like.
38:16 Speaker 03 How the fuck you big stepping with a size seven men's on? Because Kendrick is five foot five. The shoe size bit is the first of a dozen or so jokes that Drake will make about Kendrick's height throughout this beef, which to be clear, I actually think were mostly pretty good jokes. The thing is Drake is funny. In general, Drake is at his worst when he's on songs, taking himself super seriously and trying to sell this moody mob boss persona that he's been retreating into for the past decade or so. He's at his best when he's self-aware and just straight up clever. Here's Hunter Harris.
38:58 Speaker 05 Pushups is a fun song. What can I say? And so the fact that he responds to Kendrick and it's kind of like the most alive he sounded in the studio in some time, I think is very telling.
39:12 Speaker 03 Pushups is a corrective. You think Drake sings too much? You think he's got to stick up his ass these days? But now he's going to rap and he's got jokes. He's rapping for his life. He's going to overwhelm Kendrick Lamar the same way he overwhelmed Meek Mill almost a decade earlier and the rap beef that really cemented Drake's status as a sort of apex predator at the top of the rap game. Pushups leaks initially. It takes a week for Drake to officially release the song, but then on the Friday when it does drop, Drake then also drops a second diss, Taylor Made Freestyle. This is a more forgettable sort of gimmick track where he further taunts Kendrick with
39:54 Speaker 03 sarcastic and weirdly AI assisted impersonations of Snoop and Tupac. Joel and Jason both saw Taylor Made Freestyle as an unforced error on Drake's part. The Tupac thing was a misstep though, right?
40:09 Speaker 04 You don't have enough stripes on the wall to do that. Okay, Drake, you're getting to be a little bit of a, you know, Snapchat cornball. Like, there's just too much technology for hip-hop right now.
40:22 Speaker 03 It's at this point in the beef that DJ Head is acting as a sort of unofficial emissary for Kendrick's camp on Twitter, where this beef is quickly becoming an all-time social media spectacle, but also a one-sided one, as everyone is waiting for Kendrick to respond to both Push Ups and Taylor Made freestyle at this point.
40:41 Speaker 04 When I got involved, it wasn't pretty over here, because the homie wasn't saying anything. People love to forget that part, that everybody, everybody, Charlamagne texting me, "I don't know, Head, they on your ass." The homie whack, "Hey, Head, hey, man, I don't know," you know, so everybody.
40:59 Speaker 03 11 days after Push Ups, Kendrick Lamar drops Euphoria. This, too, is a corrective, to an extent. You think Kendrick is this sort of cartoonishly intense firebrand? You think he's off-putting? Well, the first minute of Euphoria, Kendrick is chilling.
41:21 Speaker 06 Them superpowers get neutralized. I can only watch in silence. The famous actor we once knew is looking paranoid and now spiraling.
41:30 Speaker 03 You think Kendrick is elusive? Well, the rest of Euphoria is him saying, very plainly, what his problems are with Drake.
41:41 Speaker 06 I hate the way that you walk, the way that you talk. I hate the way that you dress. I hate the way that you sneak this. If I catch flight, it's gonna be direct. We hate the bitches.
41:49 Speaker 03 His pettiness was something else. His bluntness was a balm. It was so incredibly thrilling, liberating even, to hear someone so unencumbered by hip-hop's late tendency toward passive aggression. Hunter Harris felt that deeply. I listen to Euphoria a lot, and my boyfriend is like, whoever hears me listen to it, he's like- This is so like energizing to you in a like in a frightening way. Kendrick had pettiness and he had jokes, but he also had a more severe indictment of Drake, largely on racial grounds.
42:30 Speaker 06 I even hate when you say the word nigger, but that's just me, I guess.
42:35 Speaker 03 This is the sore spot. This is the crux of Kendrick Lamar's resentment of Drake, the crux of the case that Kendrick builds against Drake. To Kendrick Lamar, Drake is an interloper, a cosplayer, a light-skinned, mixed-race Canadian actor who's gotten a little too familiar with urban black American culture. Sure, back in 2009, Bun B co-signed Drake, then Lil Wayne co-signed Drake. Everyone gave him a pass. There was too much money to be made working with Drake. But now Kendrick is pulling Drake's card, poking at the sore spot repeatedly, and then stabbing at it, twisting the knife.
43:19 Speaker 03 Rick Ross also got at this idea on Instagram to more comedic effect in the hours and days after Drake leaked pushups when he mocked his one-time collaborator repeatedly.
43:31 Speaker 05 Tell your mama you stayed out past your curfew, white boy. You wanted to hang at the pub with the niggas, smoke weed with the niggas while we washed our old-school Chevys.
43:45 Speaker 03 This is an unwelcome, uncomfortable, unfavorable discussion for Drake. Whatever you make of the substance of the criticism, that Drake only acts black in a sort of cynical, exploitative way. Here's Joel again.
44:03 Speaker 05 For my white people who have never had to, you know, fight these charges, if somebody calls you white or alleges that you like something white or you're a goofy white boy or whatever, anything like that, like even if it's not true, the allegation itself is damning enough.
44:21 Speaker 03 Drake has been ducking these charges for much of his career, and now Kendrick is determined to make them stick. Van thinks they hit at something crucial for Drake. When you listen to him talk about what's going on culturally with him and how it hasn't always been.
44:36 Speaker 04 Been easy for him to be accepted by either world that he's been in. You wonder if there's a large portion of his identity that came from the fact that he was the biggest rapper in the game and people had to accept him.
44:50 Speaker 03 Had to accept him. There's a resentment that comes with having to accept someone who you don't respect. That's the subtext of the sort of cultural corruption case that both Kendrick and Ross are building against Drake. That he's a leech, that he's an imposter, that for as much as he raps about fake friends, Drake is the fakest guy you know.
45:15 Speaker 04 But when he actually got wind of the fact that a lot of these people didn't fucking like him, that they didn't fuck with him for real. These are people he had been around a lot. This is Rick Ross. This is Future. These are people that he had hung around. This is YG who scouted up with the other side. This is when it was time to make a decision about whether or not I was one of them. Everybody was kind of like, no.
45:44 Speaker 03 It's such a dark catharsis, more than a decade in the making at this point.
45:53 Speaker 03 For so long, Drake was the consummate collaborator and the ultimate gatekeeper. He was the last artist you wanted to cross if you were trying to build or advance a mainstream rap career in the 2010s. Meek learned the hard way. Drake made an example of him and everyone else, well, everyone but Pusha T and Kanye and Sauce Walker, shut the fuck up, held their tongue, smiled through their teeth, bided their time. Kendrick is saying a lot of things that a lot of people already knew or had already been thinking about Drake for a very long time. This is a deliberate aspect of Kendrick's campaign against Drake, a crucial aspect.
46:36 Speaker 03 Because ultimately Kendrick is dissing the most popular rapper of the past decade and he needs his criticisms to resonate deeply and immediately. Van compares it to the case that Jay-Z built against Nas on Takeover during their legendary feud in the 2000s. Jay's insults resonated before even put them on the record. Nas has been making some wack songs lately. He's fallen so far from Illmatic. What's with all this weird mafioso tough talk? It's so fake. That's not him. He's having an identity crisis. Truthfully, we were already thinking it.
47:15 Speaker 04 But then Jay said it. But then Jay went, oh, wait a minute. You are not living up to what we thought you were gonna be. You are in a rut, in a funk. And when Jay said it, we were like, oh, shit, somebody said it.
47:31 Speaker 03 Jason Buford draws a similar comparison in my conversation with him about Jay-Z and Nas and the whole saying the quiet part out loud aspect of rap beef.
47:41 Speaker 04 People thought for years that Nas was, you know, this fake, woke cornball and like Hove exposed that. People thought for years that Hove was this careerist who was like jumping from like mentor to mentor and Nas exposed that.
47:55 Speaker 03 Drake, up to this point in his career, had experienced a different sort of rap beef.
48:04 Speaker 03 When Pusha T got on a record and said to Drake and announced to the world, you are hiding a child, blowing up his spot so dramatically. He maybe inadvertently popularized this sort of revisionist notion that beefs are won or lost on revelations. That was clearly Drake's outlook on the beef with Kendrick. Drake was out to expose Kendrick in some novel way. But Kendrick wasn't strictly out to expose Drake. He chased a few rumors about Drake's personal life, rumors about him getting cosmetic surgery on his abs, for instance. But Kendrick was mainly following the Jay-Nas example.
48:41 Speaker 03 Kendrick was out to reinforce every bit of existing criticism of Drake, every bit of skepticism, every bit of disgust that had at that point been festering for more than a decade. This is a referendum and people don't always turn on you because of the facts or because you did one specific thing. You can lose people over time for a variety of reasons, reasons that add up until a critical mass of people are fed up. Hunter Harris again. There were so many disparate, you know, reasons to hate.
49:12 Speaker 06 But that someone said them all together at once in the same body of work. And the thesis was that I hate you. And the subhead was that I'm going to keep hating you and it's for a good reason. That I think is where it all comes together.
49:29 Speaker 03 By this stage of the beef, things have gotten rude, certainly. But Kendrick still maintains an air of cordiality, of sportsmanlike conduct. On Euphoria, Kendrick says, this is a friendly fade. Let's keep it that way. It's a warning, but a hopeless one. We know that he knows, that Drake knows, that this is about to take a nasty turn. Here's DJ Head explaining Kendrick's initial restraint and engaging with Drake on Euphoria.
49:59 Speaker 04 A friendly means we get down, there's a victor, we shake hands, we go to lunch. That's a friendly. If it's up, you're getting maxed out, you're getting packed out, you're getting violated.
50:14 Speaker 03 We've all come so far up to this point in the story since Like That dropped way back in March. On May 3rd, a Friday, three days after Euphoria, it's up. Drake posts a new song to YouTube. This is it. Drake's red button, supposedly the last word of this whole conflict. The song is called Family Matters. It's seven and a half minutes long with three parts. And it premieres with a big music video that shows a van similar to the one pictured on the cover of Good Kid Mad City getting crushed in a scrapyard.
50:59 Speaker 03 Drake is out to disfigure Kendrick's public image as a model of black self-esteem, as a righteous father, as a man of God. Drake goes on to make a series of disturbing allegations about Kendrick. He physically assaults his fiance. He cheats on her with white women. Also, his manager, Dave Free, is the true father of one of his kids. Family Matters is this wild barrage of bombshells meant to destroy Kendrick's reputation, to disgrace Kendrick Lamar the same way that Pusha T once disgraced Drake.
51:41 Speaker 03 Kendrick never addresses any of these rumors of domestic violence or anything else raised on Family Matters. But in his responses to Drake, in so many words, he says Drake is chasing some bad leads, acting on some bad gossip. To this day, there's been no corroboration of any of the major claims that Drake makes about Kendrick on Family Matters. In the moment, though, no one knows what to believe. But this is the most confident, arrogant even, that Drake has sounded since he beat Meek Mill with back to back. He thinks he's already won this thing. He ends Family Matters telling Kendrick, "You're dead. You're dead." Drake clearly thinks he's thoroughly, totally disgraced Kendrick Lamar, that Kendrick
52:26 Speaker 03 will never recover from these supposed revelations about him. And it's easy enough to see why Drake makes this assumption. Here's Hunter Harris. The lowest point in Drake's career was Pusha T revealing something about him that he did not want revealed, that he was hiding a child, that he had this son, and that, you know, he kind of finally got like caught up. I think when Drake makes Family Matters and says all of this stuff about how Kendrick and his fiance have this like weird relationship, is there abuse, like, is his child really his own, all of this stuff. And I think Drake thinks that Kendrick is like him, and that this will hit Kendrick the same way Pusha
53:11 Speaker 03 T, "You're hiding a child," hit Drake. As Joel sees it, though, you can't just run the same playbook against every opponent. If any of this happens against anybody else, it works, you know? But this is Kendrick, man. Family Matters drops. It's late. It's a Friday.
53:32 Speaker 03 People are staying up to watch all of this play out to see if Kendrick responds to at least some of these allegations in some form or fashion. There's so much tension in the air at this point, so many unresolved threads, so many uncomfortable possibilities. It's hard to see Kendrick surviving some of these allegations if they're left to fester for too long. But Kendrick responds almost immediately with a song, a nuke, that he'd clearly been sitting on, waiting for this very moment to drop. The trap is sprung. Less than an hour after Drake drops Family Matters, Kendrick releases a song that very
54:13 Speaker 03 quickly comes to be regarded as the most cursed, unnerving diss track in the history of rap beef.
54:21 Speaker 07 It's Twilight Zone level shit, right? Yeah.
54:26 Speaker 03 It's a song that begins so strikingly, so disrespectfully, with Kendrick addressing not Drake, but rather Drake's six-year-old son.
54:42 Speaker 06 Dear Adonis, I'm sorry that that man is your father. Let me be honest, it takes a man to be a man. Your dad is not responsive. I look at him and wish your grandpa would've wore a condom.
54:54 Speaker 03 Rapdices get personal. Rapdices get ugly. And Family Matters was already pretty grim with its reams of innuendo about domestic abuse and cuckoldry. But Meet the Grams is bleaker than bleak. Meet the Grams, true to its title, is addressed to Drake's whole family. First verse, Kendrick addresses Drake's son. Second verse, he addresses Drake's parents. Here's Joel again.
55:25 Speaker 07 He started addressing his dad in the song, man. You raised a terrible fucking person. Like, when have you ever heard that in a rap line? And it stings.
55:34 Speaker 03 Kendrick then addresses the third verse of Meet the Grams to a, quote, "baby girl", setting up the bombshell allegation, which Drake has denied, that Drake actually has a second kid whose paternity he's also denied and who's also being hidden from the world, like Adonis was. And finally, on the fourth verse, Kendrick addresses Drake.
55:58 Speaker 03 Here's Jinx again, summarizing Kendrick's evisceration of Drake at this point in Meet the Grams.
56:04 Speaker 04 Kendrick's like, yo, you're a bad person, nigga. Let me tell you why, and you come from a bad family and you're building a bad family and your friends are gross and you're bad to the music industry and you don't really do this. And here's all these things that are about you and I'm still telling you, I'm scratching the surface, like, would you like more?
56:25 Speaker 03 Kendrick was cold and Kendrick was focused. And here Kendrick was on a record, addressing his rival's family, basically daring Drake to defend their honor, his honor. You're a deadbeat. Your dad is a deadbeat. Yeah, you heard me. What now? What are you going to do about it?
56:45 Speaker 04 Meet the Grams is scary. And it's like people in my age group that were like, yo, I'm kind of like, I'm getting kind of good on this beef. Like, yo, he's saying, he's, he's saying shit that I don't ever want to like hear about, like me or anyone else.
56:59 Speaker 03 I'm with Jinx. At the time, on first listen, I actually imagined this song totally backfiring. I imagine people thinking, okay, Kendrick is rapping at people's kids over creepy piano loops. He's pushing a sketchy, seemingly bassless theory that Drake is hiding another child. He's kind of taking this to a weird extreme. So why does Drake come out of that Friday night looking like the loser? Because Drake had been ducking so many fades and deflecting so many of these criticisms for so long. And now Kendrick has written him into a corner.
57:34 Speaker 07 People start looking at you like, well, yo, bro, like, people had to embarrass you into admitting you had a son? Maybe you got another kid out there like?
57:43 Speaker 03 Meet the Grams serves a couple of different purposes against Drake. It's a scorched earth campaign against this public image and it's psychological warfare against him.
57:54 Speaker 07 Some people are so empathetic and so situationally aware that they can think of the thing to hurt you better than anybody else. But the way that they think of it is like, I know the things that will hurt you the most. I know these things so that I don't hurt you. So I don't trip on these wires. I don't trigger you. Clearly these are sore spots for you. Kendrick has all that information and he used it for evil and I respect that.
58:23 Speaker 03 Meet the Grams diminishes Drake thoroughly. It totally trivializes Family Matters and all its wild innuendo with a single bar in that last verse when Kendrick is directly addressing Drake.
58:36 Speaker 06 Why believe you? You never gave us nothing to believe in.
58:41 Speaker 03 If these guys had both stopped dropping diss's then and there, after Meet the Grams, this beef might be judged a bit differently today. Meet the Grams was a masterful gambit, but Family Matters was still the best rapping we'd heard from Drake in years. Euphoria and Family Matters were both hits. Euphoria peaking at number three on the Hot 100, Family Matters peaking at number seven. Maybe Drake loses to Kendrick, but narrowly, respectably, and not nearly as badly as Drake lost to Pusha T six years earlier. But Kendrick isn't done. He scores his knockout on Drake the very next day with his fourth diss in just the past five days. I see dead people.
59:31 Speaker 03 The song is called "Not Like Us," and it makes quite the entrance.
59:37 Speaker 04 That day, I was DJing a private party for Roddy Ricch and his family.
59:42 Speaker 03 DJ Head again.
59:44 Speaker 04 I was there, Terrace Martin was there, in walks mustard, the song drops.
59:51 Speaker 03 4:50 PM Pacific. No warning, no teaser, no music video, just a song uploaded to YouTube with some utterly diabolical cover art. An aerial photo of Drake's $100 million mansion on the Bridle Path in Toronto, riddled with 13 pins, the sort used to mark the home addresses of people on sex offender registries.
1:00:17 Speaker 04 Now, this family function was for Roddy's, like, whole fam- his real fam- his grandmother's there, like, all old people. We playing "Not Like Us."
1:00:25 Speaker 03 This is a record so immediately catchy, so inevitably viral, so unbeatable.
1:00:33 Speaker 04 And we just sitting there like, oh my God, because none of us knew it was coming.
1:00:38 Speaker 03 It's such a perfect follow up to the scattershot of songs of the previous night. If Meet the Grams was super dark and dingy and depressing, Not Like Us was sunny, energetic. Not Like Us was fucking fun.
1:00:52 Speaker 06 Trying to strike a chord and it's probably A minor.
1:01:01 Speaker 03 This is the sound of a masterful prosecutor wrapping up his closing argument against Drake.
1:01:08 Speaker 06 No, you're not a colleague, you're a fucking colonizer.
1:01:13 Speaker 03 This isn't just a knockout. This is a number one record, which surprises some people. Not Like Us is produced by the legendary LA producer DJ Mustard, the man behind hits in the 2010s like Rack City and I'm Different. But those songs charted years ago and Not Like Us is almost too flamboyantly West Coast. Jinx admits he wasn't sure at first whether it was going to connect with the broader audience.
1:01:40 Speaker 04 He introduces sonic elements that I'm always a little afraid of at first, you know, like I heard the horns in Not Like Us and I was like, people ain't going fuck with this.
1:01:50 Speaker 03 But people do, in fact, fuck with it. To date, more than a billion streams on Spotify alone. Not Like Us is the song of the summer. It goes on to win five Grammys, Grammys, including Record of the Year. I think back to what Hunter Harris told me about Drake thinking he could beat Kendrick Lamar in a rap battle by revealing something about him, by exposing him in some crazy unexpected way. The truth is, both these guys were playing that game to an extent. They were both slinging mud, but Drake was slinging it randomly, chaotically, just throwing everything at the wall. He was sloppy.
1:02:33 Speaker 03 There was very little cohesion to what he was saying about Kendrick. And on top of that, he spent half of both Push Ups and Family Matters letting himself get bogged down in secondary arguments with The Weeknd and ASAP Rocky and Metro Boomin. He was all over the place. Kendrick, on the other hand, painted a very clear target. I said it before, he was building a case, establishing a very specific and deeply unflattering characterization of Drake. He's a creep. He's got Peter Pan syndrome. He's a fucking loser. He can't rock with us, not in this culture, not anymore. The most startling bit of Not Like Us is Kendrick calling Drake and his crew, quote,
1:03:18 Speaker 03 "certified pedophiles."
1:03:20 Speaker 06 And Baka got a weird case, why is he around? Certified lover boy, certified pedophiles. Wop, wop, wop, wop, wop. That fuck him up.
1:03:29 Speaker 03 He's pulling at a few different threads here. Most explicitly, Kendrick is referring to Drake's longtime associate, Travis Savery, AKA Baka, who in 2014 faced charges of human trafficking, procurement of prostitution, and assault. This was after a domestic dispute with an adult sex worker with whom Baka had a, quote, "on-again, off-again relationship," according to prosecutors. The trafficking and procurement charges were ultimately dropped after the woman at the center of the case declined to testify against Baka, though he did plead guilty to assault. He's never actually accused of pedophilia. But then Kendrick also meant for the "certified pedophiles" bit of Not Like Us to describe Drake himself.
1:04:12 Speaker 03 Kendrick is gesturing, for one, at the famous friendship that Drake struck up with Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown when she was only 14 years old, a relationship that's long been the subject of some speculation. Brown is in the past gushed about her, quote, "lovely friendship with Drake," and she shot down the suggestion that there was ever any sexual or romantic overtones to their interactions. Drake is also denied as much. Then, on "Not Like Us," Kendrick is also alluding to an old clip of Drake kissing and hugging on a 17-year-old fan whom he brought up onstage at one of his concerts. Ultimately, Kendrick Lamar is making Drake and his crew out to be sexual predators
1:04:53 Speaker 03 in a devastating hit to Drake's historically high approval rating with women. Of course, Drake disputes all of these characterizations on "Not Like Us." In fact, he's currently suing Universal Music Group, which is his own record label, but also Kendrick's, for defamation, harassment, and deceptive business practices in the label's promotion of the song. In any case, "Not Like Us" is the closing argument. "Not Like Us" is the knife-hitting bone, because even beyond the cover art and the digs at Baca, Kendrick is othering Drake, telling him he's a vulture circling other, more creative rappers, telling
1:05:33 Speaker 03 him simply that he's not like Kendrick, not like us. Van Lathan again.
1:05:41 Speaker 07 And if you can find the right button to press, there's no such thing as a human being you can't bother. And for some reason with Drake, the right button to press is cultural belonging, is whether or not he is inside of this thing. That button scrambles him, and he just starts making wrong moves.
1:06:07 Speaker 03 The rest of that weekend is almost too pathetic to want to recount. Late Sunday afternoon, Drake drops a song called "The Heart Part Six," sort of hastily recapitulating a lot of what he said on Family Matters and saying he's done addressing Kendrick, but not before spitting some of the most awkward bars of his career.
1:06:36 Speaker 03 The heart part six at least goes to show just how badly Drake had lost the plot during this whole ordeal. He goes out of his way to bring up Jeffrey Epstein, just to insist that he's no Jeffrey Epstein. He says he's quote, "way too famous to be getting away with the stuff that Kendrick is accusing him of." Drake is digging his own grave at this point, thinking he was fighting a tabloid war and not a battle for the soul and essence of hip hop. Thinking he was going to win with gossip, accusations, insults, and innuendo, when what he really needed, what he produced so reliably for
1:07:18 Speaker 03 so long, up until this point, when he needed it most, was the bigger hit. Drake misread the room and he lost track of the score. Here's Hunter Harris. God forbid I open up genius.com and need to like get a ledger out and say like, "Okay, side one, we have everything, all of the Drake allegations. Side two, we have all the Kendrick allegations." That's not what like a beef is supposed to be.
1:07:48 Speaker 03 So what was this beef supposed to be? A friendly fade? An assassination of Julius Caesar? A botched opportunity for Drake to redeem himself after how badly he'd lost his beef with Pusha T six years earlier? It could have gone any number of ways, really. If any number of things had gone just slightly differently. For Kendrick, ultimately, this beef was poetic justice.
1:08:21 Speaker 03 A week or so after "Not Like Us" drops, we see a clip circulating of LeBron James, Drake's BFF LeBron, dancing to the song, dancing on Drake's grave. Now it's as clear as it's ever going to be that this thing is over. Kendrick Lamar got his shot at Drake, and against all odds, he won. The machine collapsed. The man prevailed.
1:08:54 Speaker 03 Throughout our conversation, ask DJ Head to help me understand why the West Coast always seems to be the underdog in mainstream hip hop. Even after decades of producing so many superstars and so many hits, even now that New York isn't so dominant and so many regional rap scenes are flourishing.
1:09:14 Speaker 04 That same question I've asked literally almost everyone. I asked Snoop, I asked Q, I asked Warren G, I asked Dot, I've asked D40. The sentiment is always the same. They don't fuck with us.
1:09:30 Speaker 03 That can't be right, right? People love Dre, people love Snoop, people love Kendrick. But the more I listen to Head and the more I think about it, I get where he's coming from. California is a strange place. LA is a very strange city. Head notes the demographics. It's the rare US metro that doesn't actually have that many black people, less than 9% of the population. A lot of people like the idea of LA, the women, the weed, the weather, but they can't fully connect with it.
1:10:06 Speaker 04 People want West Coast culture. They just don't want it from us.
1:10:11 Speaker 03 Kendrick said as much on Euphoria. What I learned is niggas don't like the West Coast and I'm fine with it. I'll push the line with it.
1:10:19 Speaker 05 This has always been the argument. We go back to Biggie and Pac where it was like you had the whole East Coast, West Coast rivalry where, you know, who's the more dominant coast? Who's really dictating the terms of rap and hip hop?
1:10:32 Speaker 03 Jason Parram is from LA. I know of going back a decade or so, when we were both living in New York and both mostly writing about hip hop. Going back further, though, Jason recalls a time when he was in grad school at UCLA and otherwise freelancing for Vibe, profiling up and coming rappers in LA, including a bunch of artists who came out of the same scene as Kendrick. Head and Parram both talked to me about the dark days before Kendrick when LA radio was playing a lot of hip bull, a lot of LMFAO, and not a lot of LA hip hop, or a lot of hip hop in general. It's hard enough for West Coast rappers to break through on the West Coast, but nationally?
1:11:17 Speaker 05 I do think Kendrick Right. It's like a lot of people haven't really respected the sound of the West Coast, the rappers that have come out of the West Coast. It has a little bit more of a boogie to it. The rhythms of it are a little looser and different.
1:11:30 Speaker 03 Granted, a lot of cities that aren't New York can seem to have a bit of a chip on their shoulder in terms of hip hop dominance. Houston, Memphis, Atlanta, New Orleans, Miami, Chicago. These scenes have always had to fight a little harder for legitimacy to some listeners, especially older listeners who maybe prefer more traditional styles of hip hop. But LA has fought this fight 10 times over for half a century. Kendrick is just the latest in a very long series of victors from this side.
1:12:05 Speaker 05 You can never take this away from us. Like, this is just, this is ours.
1:12:10 Speaker 03 Jason is back in LA these days, and he had the rather enviable opportunity to attend Kendrick's big victorious pop out concert on Juneteenth, 2024. There were 25 acts, including DJ Head, performing for 16,000 fans at the Forum. This is an all LA show.
1:12:30 Speaker 05 Roddy Ricch, YG, Steve Lacey, Ty Dolla Sign. You know, Tyler, the Creator got the biggest reaction.
1:12:37 Speaker 03 This thing was announced with just a couple weeks' notice. Amazon streamed the concert live on Prime Video and Twitch for millions of viewers. But obviously, nothing beats being at something so momentous in person.
1:12:52 Speaker 05 I'm somebody, when I go to concerts, I typically don't like to take a lot of footage. I just like to experience it now. But I probably have over like 100 videos in my phone from that night because I was like, I want to remember this. I have to capture this.
1:13:06 Speaker 03 The pop out was the grand epilogue to Kendrick's victory over Drake, or at least its biggest stage before this Sunday's Super Bowl halftime show. But it was also a larger statement about the West Coast, about LA. You can't imitate this.
1:13:23 Speaker 05 It really does mean something special to see all these artists come on stage who are part of this early
1:13:29 Speaker 06 Vanguard of LA, you know, rap during the 2010s with Kendrick. And then to now sort of, you know, 14, 15 years later, come together again. When you all have grown and become, you know, matured in your careers and done all these, you know, amazing things, I think it really, you know, hit me in my heart in a way that I'll be talking about for a long time.
1:13:52 Speaker 03 Beef is often selfish and petty. Rappers don't always have the most honorable reasons for dissing each other. Drake beat Meek Mill for Drake. Push beat Drake for Push and for Kanye and Pharrell, of course, but mostly for Push. And while Kendrick mostly beat Drake for Kendrick, it really can feel like he did it for every last person in that auditorium.
1:14:20 Speaker 06 Seeing him perform Not Like Us five times in a row, back to back to back to back.
1:14:33 Speaker 06 As much as I would have loved being on the internet during that moment, I was so happy just to be there to see it as well.
1:14:41 Speaker 03 Euphoria, Not Like Us. These songs pose a lot of tough, contentious, interesting questions about hip hop and black culture and belonging. Who is us? Who belongs in this subculture that might have once been limited to the streets, but as early as LL Cool J and NWA started to open itself to the suburbs and then ultimately became the most popular music genre in the United States? How do you patrol the borders of something so popular and porous? What does it even mean to expel someone from the culture? To pull their car, to rip it up and tell them, you don't really live this and you
1:15:24 Speaker 03 don't really love this the way you should?
1:15:28 Speaker 04 That is really from Compton. To Pimp a Butterfly, those are his real home. I know that those dudes are really from over there.
1:15:36 Speaker 03 Heads referring to the cover art for To Pimp a Butterfly. An unruly group photo of a couple dozen shirtless dudes from around the way, including Kendrick, cast against an image of the White House.
1:15:49 Speaker 04 Those are real Compton reps. You know what I'm saying? The homie, shout out to the homie G. Weider, the homie Lil' Ail. Like them is really my homies. Like they really from over there. That's not no Photoshop, like we got, we paid extras to pull. That ain't none of that.
1:16:11 Speaker 03 Rappers have been scrapping over credibility and authenticity for most of hip hop's 51 year history. Those ideals are fraught. Authenticity can mean a lot of things. I think Drake and his most hardcore fans interpreted it one way, as a race thing. Are you black enough to be doing what you're doing? And yeah, I think Kendrick was playing the race card to an extent in a kind of cruel way. But I also think Kendrick meant it in a different way, in a way of asking, are you comfortable in your own skin? Do you know yourself? Do you understand what you're doing to the culture and the heritage and the legacies
1:16:56 Speaker 03 that I care about? That produced me, that produced you? And frankly, ultimately, I don't think Drake had good answers to any of these questions. So he choked. That's my interpretation at least. Drake is an important figure in the history and advancement of hip hop. And Drake is unquestionably black. His dad is Dennis Graham, a drummer and singer out of Memphis. And his uncle is Larry Graham, the legendary bass player for Sly and the Family Stone. I'm sorry, but you don't get any culturally blacker than Sly and the Family Stone. Aubrey Graham is a legitimate descendant of the black musical tradition in North America.
1:17:39 Speaker 03 Drake, whether you like him or not, is a big part of the culture, undeniably. But Drake thought, or at least acted like, he was bigger than the culture, that he could boss the culture around, that the culture owed him something. And that's how you lose her.
1:18:01 Speaker 03 Kendrick Lamar was massively successful even before his beef with Drake. He's got hits, he's got billions of views on YouTube, he's got 22 Grammys. He's got a Pulitzer. Hip-hop has made him rich and better yet, respected. He's found so much success and yet, he's still rapping, as Drake so obnoxiously put it, like he bout to get the slaves free. Which, as Van Rutherford passionately tells me, just phrasing it that way shows how disconnected Drake was from the culture.
1:18:42 Speaker 07 Yeah, we doing everything like we trying to free the slaves. We going to Starbucks like we trying to free the slaves. We shooting basketball like we trying to free the slaves. We watching Pornhub like we trying to free the slaves. We are black, nigga, we black!
1:18:57 Speaker 03 Drake was once a genuinely admirable upstart who rapped against the grain, who marketed a refreshing sort of vulnerability and emotional intelligence. But over the course of a decade, Drake came to embody all the wrong things. A vapid permissiveness, a wicked sense of entitlement, a corrupt bargain, a tyranny of the machine, an anti-hero who lost his way and became the villain. A rapper who'd eventually be reduced to suing his label for defamation for promoting Not Like Us, a rapper trying to sue his way out of losing a rap beef. It's still hard for me to wrap my head around the thought of Kendrick Lamar, halftime headliner
1:19:41 Speaker 03 for the Super Bowl. But after Not Like Us, after the pop-out, and now only a week after he swept the Grammys, you can underestimate Kendrick only so many times. His ability to move a crowd, his ability to shift the culture, his ability to make it all come together in the end. It's been nearly a year since Kendrick Lamar vanquished Drake. And then Kendrick stepped into the void. He inserted so much more than just himself. A mustard drop, a banging chorus, a funky breakdown, a crip walk on a tightrope, a gang truce onstage, a proud city, a proud coast, a proud lineage.
1:20:27 Speaker 04 Not saying that the other side don't have real people. I don't think it's the same. I don't think it's a one to one. Not discounting, you know, Toronto culture at all. I've never been to Toronto. I plan to go one day, hopefully, you know, and have a good experience. But I don't think that it's the same thing. I'm not saying that they, that they're soft or anything like that. I'm just saying, I don't think it's a one to one.
1:20:51 Speaker 03 They not like us. They not like us. They not like us. They play it all the time, everywhere. You've been sick of hearing it for a while. And you're about to hear him probably perform it three times in a row for the halftime show. Back to back to back. But then I think back to that night when a lot of us really should have called it, logged off, gone to bed, caught up on this bullshit in the morning. This beef was, is exhausting.
1:21:32 Speaker 03 Those horns though.
1:21:36 Speaker 03 They really wake you the fuck up, don't they?
1:21:41 Speaker 06 They not like us. They not like us. They not like us.
1:21:53 Speaker 03 This narrative audio feature was reported, written, and hosted by me, Justin Charity. The executive producers are Juliette Littman and Sean Finacy. Story editing by Eric Jenkins. This feature was produced by Bobby Wagner, Chelsea Stark Jones, Justin Sayles, and Vikram Patel. Fact checking by Juliana Ress. Copy editing by Craig Gaines. Sound design, mixing and mastering by Bobby Wagner. The music you heard in this feature is from Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Special thanks to Nora Princiati and Steve Alman. Thanks for listening.
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1:23:05 Speaker 02 From the creators of Zootopia and Frozen comes Disney's Hext. Welcome to Hext and enter the world of witches. Where it was foretold that an ordinary girl would become an extraordinary witch and save the world of magic. Disney's Hext arrives in theaters this Thanksgiving.
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