Rap beef has no rules. When rappers clash, they can and do say whatever it takes to discredit their rivals. To win, emcees have lied, presented hearsay as gospel, and disclosed opponents’ intimate secrets. Collateral damage is common and often deliberate. Spouses, children, cities, record labels, radio stations, magazines, clothing brands, and even blogs have been caught in the figurative crossfire. Beef is a bloodsport.
This year’s spat between rap titans Drake and Kendrick Lamar has exemplified the highs and lows of the form. Beginning this March, the feud between the two—which extends back to the early 2010s, when they last worked together—erupted into a multimedia war of words and images. In six weeks, a dozen songs (and countless social media posts) from Drake, Kendrick, and adjacent parties snowballed into a zeitgeist event. The cadence and scale of the beef are unprecedented. Past rows, like the historic contest between Jay-Z and Nas, simmered across months and years. This one boiled over.
Instead of exchanging songs back and forth, Kendrick and Drake opted for combos, dropping songs in pairs and at broadband speeds. In one jarring moment, Kendrick replied to tracks Drake had dropped the hour before, and it was his second release that day. Then, a day later, before Drake had responded, Kendrick dropped a third that effectively settled the conflict.
This adrenaline-fueled timeline and the prescient, tabloid content of the songs suggested leaks in the artists’ respective entourages, a fascinating story in itself. But it was the shifty music that made this tiff so engrossing. As Kendrick and Drake cycled through sounds and attack strategies, they sounded feral and triumphant, their mutual contempt amplifying their virtuosity. The striking wordplay, artful song structures, and shocking allegations of the best of these songs illustrated the ways beef pushes rappers to be inventive and daring.
Unfortunately the realpolitik of the bout soured its many pleasures. Alongside the cleverness of the rapping and cunning of the pageantry came outsized levels of misogyny and homophobia, a reckless embrace of trolling, and troublingly cavalier accusations of domestic violence and pedophilia. In the attention era, beef is no longer just a bullish exhibition of skills. It is a no-holds-barred war, in which smothering a rival in misinfo may prove more important than outcompeting them. Even when Drake and Kendrick were in rare form, their rapping often felt secondary to their crowd work.
In the early stages of the fight, Drake and Kendrick seemed to agree that they were contending for rap primacy. “Ain’t no big three, nigga, it’s just big me,” Kendrick snarls on the brash Future and Metro Boomin song “Like That,” which cracked open the longstanding rift. The line dismisses the idea that Kendrick, J. Cole, and Drake are the faces on rap’s Mt. Rushmore, an image the latter two endorsed on their 2023 collab “First Person Shooter.” “I love a dinner with some fine women when they start debatin’ about who the G.O.A.T.,” Drake raps collegially on that song. Following “Like That,” he boots Kendrick from the ranking. “Pipsqueak, pipe down/You ain’t in no big three,” he spits on the menacing and club-ready “Push Ups.”
In Drake’s view, his dominance is material fact. The figurehead of modern commercial rap, the Canadian rapper has reigned over the genre for a decade through aesthetic innovations, pop savvy, and canny curation of regional sounds and trends, all of which have fueled outrageous sales figures and an unusual longevity. “I’m the hitmaker y’all depend on,” Drake raps on “Push Ups,” relishing this status. A few lines later, he casts Kendrick’s challenge to his long rule as envy: “I’m at the top of the mountain, so you tight now/Just to have this talk with your ass, I had to hike down.”
Kendrick strategically leaned into this rabble-rouser versus throne dynamic. The Compton artist, who notably wore a crown (of thorns) on his last album, is not truly the antithesis of Drake, but the David and Goliath narrative fits snugly. The only rapper to win a Pulitzer, and the reluctant populist symbol of hip-hop’s muddled conscience, Kendrick embodies the idea of the rapper as soothsaying street poet. His championing of albums, storytelling, and lyricism over club singles naturally contrasts with Drake’s trend-hopping hitmaking. Most importantly, though Kendrick is a global superstar in his own right, he has not crossed over to pop listeners the way Drake has, retaining an authenticity and edge that he touts on the manic 6-minute tirade “Euphoria”: “I make music that electrify ’em, you make music that pacify ’em.”
The battle seemed poised to pivot on this axis of merit and stature, but later in “Euphoria,” Kendrick dispenses with talk of legitimacy to confess that he simply, and viscerally, hates Drake:
This ain’t been about critics, not about gimmicks, not about who the greatest
It’s always been about love and hate, now let me say I’m the biggest hater
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 diss, if I catch flight, it’s gon’ be direct
Kendrick doesn’t want to dethrone his adversary; he wants to destroy him.
That naked pettiness, though exhilarating, marks where the beef became a zero-sum grudge match. Kendrick saw Drake less as a nemesis and more as a pestilence, a framing that allowed him to attack the idea of Drake as much as the man himself. He described Drake with increasing virulence with each subsequent song. Drake goes from a rival on “Like That” to a bully on the soulful “6:16 in LA.” Then, on “meet the grahams,” a vicious dirge set to a dreary piano vamp, Kendrick casts Drake as a deadbeat dad, an absentee father, and a misogynistic narcissist who is ashamed of his racial identity. It sounds like Black Skin, White Masks set to music.
By “Not Like Us,” a bouncy SoCal cut made for cookouts and pool parties, the analogies fuel allegations as well as insults. Kendrick calls Drake a pedophile, a colonizer, and the devil, each claim delivered with puckish brio. “Why you trollin’ like a bitch? Ain’t you tired?/Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A-Minor,” he taunts, delivering the standout line of the beef. The verse is glib, but Kendrick sounds absolutely exuberant as he piles on the blows, his flows buoyant and spry.
Drake, by contrast, prioritized poise and precision over force. In some ways, this was a function of the asymmetry of the beef. “Like That,” after all, features on Future and Metro Boomin’s We Don’t Trust You, half of a double album that in full includes jabs at Drake by multiple artists including the Weeknd and A$AP Rocky. To manage all these combatants (and further underscore his own prowess), Drake addressed them en masse. “Push Ups” unfolds like a John Wick sequence: Drake sneers, “What the fuck is this, a 20 v 1, nigga?” then proceeds to clear the room with trick shots, like the Keanu Reeves character.
He briefly abandons that mode on the peevish “Taylor Made Freestyle” to deepfake the voices of 2Pac and Snoop Dogg in mockery of Kendrick’s West Coast roots. And he again targets just Kendrick on a very meta parody of “Buried Alive Interlude,” a song the two collaborated on for Drake’s 2011 sophomore album. But by the masterful “Family Matters,” his best entry in the beef, Drake is back to stylish meleeing. After opening with parries of Kendrick’s claims (to that point), Drake pauses to dispatch his assailants in one swoop, his voice nimbly weaving between twitchy road rap drums as he lands punchline after punchline. This resolve is revealed as confidence in his salacious trump card by the end of the song. You can hear the smug satisfaction in his voice as he drops the final bombshell, accusing Kendrick of domestic abuse: “There’s nowhere to hide, you know what I mean/They hired a crisis management team/To clean up the fact that you beat on your queen/The picture you painted ain’t what it seem, you’re dead.” In Drake’s telling, his opponent is beneath him both artistically and morally. Buried alive, indeed.
Deepfakes, devilry, child sexual abuse, intimate partner violence, parental abandonment, colonialism—what the fuck, right? Yes, but let’s acknowledge the QAnon-ness of it all, a label I use not to undermine the more sordid claims, but to highlight that beef is a terrible venue for determining or establishing truth. It is a dark and amoral art of jockeying and positioning, of courting attention and shaping perceptions. Information is valued less for its accuracy and more for its tactical value, a precedent established by artists like Nas, Nicki Minaj, and 50 Cent, and supercharged by social media. Beef epitomizes the internet adage that “jokes>facts.”
That dynamic greatly benefitted Kendrick, who landed more jokes and enjoys a rosier public profile than Drake, the ostensible face of the establishment. Instead of defending himself against Drake’s claims, Kendrick leaned into the collective desire for the Canadian’s comeuppance, padding his insults with scuttlebutt about Drake’s sexuality, medical history, and paternity. His many lines about truth, such as “You playin’ dirty with propaganda, it blow up on ya,” and “Why believe you? You never gave us nothin’ to believe in,” might apply to himself as much as Drake. But in an age where shitposts and attention-seeking drive discourse, the burden of proof is on the defendant, a role Kendrick shrewdly, and self-servingly, refused to play.
Drake, on the other hand, sounded like O.J. Simpson: “If I was fucking young girls, I promise I’d have been arrested,” he raps on “The Heart Part 6,” the queasy finale of the beef. Yikes. And that’s one of many clunkers from the deflated song, which finds Drake insisting on the truth of the matter—a tacit admission that he has run out of spin. “You gotta learn to fact check things and be less impatient,” he limply taunts, strangely asserting he used double agents to feed Kendrick false information. The weakest diss of the fracas, the song offers no new angles, revelations, or musical ideas. (And it is curiously loose with facts itself, offering an inept reading of Kendrick’s 2022 song “Mother I Sober.”) Hate wore Drake down.
It’s an anticlimactic but fitting end for a fight that was always disingenuous and contradictory despite the rappers’ moralizing about kids and family and truth. Kendrick and Drake have both defended and collaborated with convicted abusers, from Kodak Black to XXXtentacion to Tory Lanez to Baka Not Nice. Their catalogs contain comparable levels of toxic masculinity. They are both trolls and egoists who carefully manage their public personae. And they are both generational talents.
Regrettably, their acumen as rappers so often felt incidental to the tabloid innuendo that the ostensible purpose of the beef—to establish who is the more skilled artist—still feels undecided, despite Kendrick’s obvious victory. As the public spends this summer dancing to a wacky anti-pedophile anthem, we probably will feel electrified. But when the shock fades, I’m not sure we’ll agree we got the title fight we wanted. When a sport has no rules, what does it really mean to win or lose?
So far, the final tally has left a lot of fans feeling both dazed and giddy. Every time I talk to my fellow rap nerds, we volley questions that swing between distress and anticipation. Are all future beefs going to be this rapid-fire and dirty? Is Nicki Minaj coding a bot army this very second to crush some woman she doesn’t like? When did the Boy and the Good Kid become these bitter, mercenary men? Will this animus define their solo music going forward? Are Drake’s signature paranoia and Kendrick’s signature messianism going to get cranked to even higher levels? And since when were listeners so damn gullible? If the average rap fan believes everything Kendrick says just because they like him, what chance does Young Thug stand against the district attorney who uses lyrics as evidence? We don’t have the answers, but we keep playing these stunning, cursed songs.
