Rap fans all around the world are watching as Kendrick Lamar and Drake are taking back and forth shots at each other.
Drake and Kendrick Lamar are the two biggest rappers in the world. Kendrick Lamar is known for winning a Pulitzer Prize and 17 Grammy awards. The only rappers who have more Grammys than Kendrick Lamar are Kanye West and Jay-Z.
While Drake may not have those same awards, he makes up for that through his chart dominating catalog, having 330 charting songs, 77 of those being top 10 hits, and 13 being number 1 hits. This ties him with Michael Jackson as having the 4th highest number 1 hit count. The only artists ahead of him are The Beatles, Mariah Carey, and Rihanna. Using numbers from Spotify, the dominant music streaming service, we can see that Drake has 82,700,000 monthly listeners and Kendrick Lamar has 66,100,000, both of which are very high numbers in terms of listeners.
On October 6, 2023, Drake dropped his album “For All The Dogs”. This album contained the song “First Person Shooter” that featured J. Cole. This song ended up charting at the number 1 spot on October 21, 2023. One of the lyrics read “Love when they argue the hardest MC. Is it KDot? Is it Aubrey? Or me? We the big three like we started the league” (J. Cole). What Cole is saying here is that the big three of rap that are Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and himself.
Kendrick Lamar and Drake have had well known animosity towards each other for nearly a decade. So, Kendrick Lamar did not like being put in the same top 3 like Drake, as he feels that he is leagues better than Drake. Roughly 6 months after Drake and J. Cole dropped “First Person Shooter”, Kendrick Lamar hopped on a track called “Like That” with fellow rapper Future and producer Metro Boomin. Both Future and Metro Boomin have recently revealed that they have problems with Drake. This song “Like That” features direct insults at Drake.
Shortly after, a leaked Drake track began circulating around the internet, titled “Push Ups”. Here, we see the first real “diss track”. With the previous diss, it was a song that had certain lines with evident shots at Drake. However, with “Push Ups”, Drake dedicates the whole song to everyone that took shots at him. The biggest key takeaway from this song were all of the shots that Drake took at Kendrick Lamar’s label deal. He keeps insinuating that Kendrick Lamar is nothing more than a puppet for the label, and his label completely owns him. Drake claims that Kendrick has to give up 50 percent of his proceeds to his former label. In this song, Drake says “Extortion baby, whole career you been shook up. Cause Top told you “Drop and give me 50” like some push ups”. Drake continuously takes jabs at this deal that Kendrick has.
Shortly after, Drake dropped “Taylor Made Freestyle”. In this song, Drake uses A.I. to take more jabs at Kendrick. Since Kendrick is a west coast rapper, Drake used Tupac and Snoop Dogg for the A.I. With both of these rappers, the A.I. is used to send a message, essentially begging Kendrick to diss Drake, while also taking shots at Kendrick. The song opens with the voice of Tupac, rapping “Kendrick, we need ya, the West Coast savior. Engraving your name in some hip-hop history if you deal with this viciously. You seem a little bit nervous about all this publicity.” This was all made by Drake as a method of baiting Kendrick into releasing his other diss tracks. However, shortly after, the Tupac estate sued Drake to take the song down.
Despite Drake’s song being taken down, it still did work to get Kendrick to release the next diss track, titled “Euphoria”. Many view this to be the most disrespectful song until this point. This began the point of Kendrick Lamar taking real jabs at Drake and taking this beyond the music. He called out Drake for being a liar, manipulative, deceptive, and a scammer. “Know you a master manipulator and habitual liar too.” He takes jabs at Drake being light skinned and claims that Drake is just trying to claim the black culture that he was never a part of. He claims that Drake is not a part of this culture and the culture hates Drake as well. “It’s always been about love and hate and let me say I’m the biggest hater. I hate the way that you talk, the way that you walk, I hate the way that you dress.” Kendrick followed this by releasing 6:16 in LA.
Drake responded to these tracks by releasing “Family Matters”. This track was unique in its own way, featuring three different beats, making it feel like three different songs. Drake begins to double down on many things and reveal new things to us about Kendrick Lamar. Drake brings up the fact that Kendrick Lamar’s children may not be Kendrick’s, but instead, they are his managers. Drake also claims that Kendrick Lamar beat on his fiance. One final accusation that Drake is making is that Kendrick Lamar isn’t as much of a black activist as he lets on in his songs.
Not even an hour later, Kendrick Lamar shut down “Family Matters” with his song “Meet the Grahams”. This song was incredibly disrespectful, going out to Drake’s family. Kendrick apologized to Drake’s son, Adonis, for his father being Drake, such a terrible person.
Kendrick then dropped the biggest and most successful song of this beef, “Not Like Us”. This song has broken so many records at the time of this recording. It has broken records related to songs within the first days streaming and first week of streaming. This song features many lyrics, insinuating that Drake is a pedophile.
The final song of this album is “The Heart Pt. 6” by Drake. In this song, Drake resents the allegations of being a pedophile and repeatedly denies it. He doubles down on his allegations of Kendrick Lamar being abusive to his fiance and asks Kendrick Lamar to respond to these allegations, claiming that Kendrick must answer for his crimes. However, on this entire track, something about Drake sounded tired and defeated. Because of this, Kendrick Lamar never responded to Drake. This was the last song of the beef.