Who really lost the Kendrick-Drake beef?

The Case for Drake by Ariel Litwak

I really, really dislike Drake’s music. Trust me, it’s nothing personal — or at least it wasn’t until now. He just doesn’t offer what I want in rap: lyricism, storytelling, complex production … So, if I had to pick a favorite Drake song, it’d be “Poetic Justice,” mainly because it’s a Kendrick Lamar song. But “Poetic Justice” also happens to be my least favorite Kendrick song — because Drake’s on it.

Alleged rapper Aubrey Drake Graham has been the subject of much controversy, as so many people with his status have been in the past. It seems almost unavoidable for a celebrity as big as him to have some real skeletons in their closet, and on the occasions that we have gotten a peek at Drake’s, it hasn’t looked great. But never has he been so overshadowed by his controversy as it is right now, with the rap world-shattering Kendrick v. Drake feud escalating to allegations of race baiting, child neglect, drug abuse, sexual abuse, sex trafficking and pedophilia.

Although all of this happened in the span of a few months, animosity between Lamar and Drake, two of the most successful rappers of the modern era, goes back a long time — yet, as fans, we can’t know when it got personal, or even pinpoint exactly where it started. Ever since Kendrick’s famous “Control” verse, they’ve been subtly dissing each other in songs like “The Heart Part 4” and “The Language.” Then came “First Person Shooter,” a J. Cole and Drake collaboration that is rumored to have originally included Kendrick, hence the bar that would eventually come to define this feud: “Love when they argue the hardest MC / Is it K-Dot? Is it Aubrey? Or me (Cole)? / We the big three like we started a league, but right now, I feel like Muhammad Ali.”

I would argue that Drake’s first mistake was creating this dichotomy between himself and Kendrick Lamar. Now, a lot of rappers claim to be the GOAT — that sort of male bravado is almost inseparable from the genre — but when you’re mentioning specific people as your competitors, it only invites comparison. And while Drake is undeniably one of the most commercially successful rappers of all time, few would argue that any of his albums hold a candle to Kendrick’s Pulitzer-winning oeuvre, at least when it comes to lyricism, storytelling and influence. While Kendrick is known for heartfelt, introspective music, Drake’s music isn’t very personal — hardly surprising, considering that he allegedly doesn’t even write his own songs. As unfair as this could be argued to be, the truth of the matter is that Kendrick is a much more loved and trusted figure in hip-hop, meaning that Drake had a steep hill to climb from the get-go.

One of Drake’s other high-profile feuds — involving Pusha T and Kanye West — was also similar in this sense. The Pusha T beef could be seen as a prelude to this one: Drake started off strong, but simply could not compete with the incisiveness and revelatory nature of “The Story of Adidon,” a diss track so powerful that it forced Drake to acknowledge the existence of his son. Compare this to Eminem’s recent beefs; by responding to Benzino and Machine Gun Kelly, he was punching so far below his level that it was impossible for him to ever lose.

All this being said, “Push Ups” — Drake’s initial response to Kendrick’s verse on “Like That” (a song that I’m sure you’ve heard way too much) and other attacks on him from both of the recent Metro Boomin and Future collaboration albums — was a surprisingly strong start. It hasn’t aged the best, with some of its content really coming back to bite Drake in the ass (for instance, the twenty-v-one line and his mention of Whitney Alford), but it was still a great song that contained maybe the strongest diss in this entire feud: the fact that Kendrick Lamar is short. Allegedly. 

Not even a day later, however, Drake decided to release “Taylor Made Freestyle,” a song that almost single-handedly undid everything that “Push Ups” had done for him. Throughout this entire beef, Drake’s approach seems to have been to throw shit at the wall and see what sticks, perhaps in an attempt to compensate for his lyrical deficits by dominating the discourse with sheer volume. The main claim that Drake made in this song was that Kendrick had been delaying his response to “Push Ups” (a song that was released not even a full day earlier) due to Taylor Swift’s album rollout — essentially, Drake was accusing Kendrick of being in Taylor Swift’s pocket. One might think that he had forgotten the fact that he delayed Her Loss for her, but no, he literally called back to that in the song, actively highlighting his own hypocrisy. 

And, somehow, that’s not even the most DAMNing part of this song. Drake’s usage of artificial intelligence voice filters to rap from the perspective of Snoop Dogg and Tupac was an … interesting choice, considering how negative the public perception of AI is, let alone using it to insult the legacy of some of hip-hop’s most legendary artists. Expectedly, “Taylor Made Freestyle” was taken down by the Tupac estate. I’d call that a blessing, though, because that song was a bad look, even considering everything that came after. 

Eventually, all of Drake’s goading worked, and on April 30, Kendrick released “euphoria” — a three-beat, six-minute opus of a diss track, one that perfectly predicted almost all of Drake’s subsequent moves and hinted at some of the dark allegations that would later be unearthed while remaining a relentlessly enjoyable song. Calling out Drake’s alleged use of ghostwriters, alleged non-Blackness, alleged child neglect, alleged hypocrisy and alleged cosmetic surgeries, all while imitating Toronto slang and being chock-full of great bars, “euphoria” seemed to be the final nail in Drake’s coffin. 

But, as we all know, it wasn’t: While Drake and the Ghostbusters rushed to respond, Kendrick released “6:16 in L.A.” the morning of May 3, and within just a few minutes of the release of Drake’s “Family Matters” that same night it was completely overshadowed by “meet the grahams” — a dark, grimy and highly accusatory track. Of course, Drake’s response to “euphoria” could never have accounted for this double K.O., but even when comparing it to just “euphoria,” “Family Matters” pales in comparison. It’s a fine song, but Drake’s claims are just less credible than Kendrick’s, which makes them fall flat in comparison. This song feels like it was meant to have the last word, but Kendrick’s rapid response forced Drake into further action. It was in these rushed, unplanned responses that Drake went from losing a beef to becoming a laughing stock.

Drake’s immediate response to one claim in particular (him having a daughter) was complete denial, which would have been fine if not for the return of his throw-shit-at-the-wall approach. His next response, “The Heart Part 6,” was what Drake wanted “Family Matters” to be — the last word. Not because it destroyed Kendrick or even because it restored Drake’s reputation, but because it was so, so horrible that just letting it exist by itself was more damning for Drake than anything Kendrick could ever respond with. Honestly, I don’t even know where to begin. “The Heart Part 6” made Drake’s previous blunders seem like masterful chess plays in comparison. Maybe the only clever thing about it was its title: By using the format of Kendrick’s “The Heart” series, Drake prevented Kendrick from releasing a new installment of this series (and thus a new album) without drawing attention to Drake’s song. The issue is simply that paying attention to this song for even a second makes the winner of this beef clear and indisputable. 

In this song, Drake presented three main claims. First, a returning topic from “Family Matters,” is the allegation that Kendrick’s fiancée, Whitney Alford, cheated on him with pgLang co-founder Dave Free, which seems to be completely based on the fact that Alford doesn’t follow Kendrick on Instagram and on Free commenting a heart emoji under a picture of Kendrick’s family, which not only is a massive reach but also makes Drake look pathetic and childish. I mean, really? You’re basing your diss on Instagram replies? You know who else responds to every single Instagram post with a heart emoji? My goddamn grandmother!

Then, Drake claims that he fed Kendrick false information as bait and that he expected all of his responses. As Anthony Fantano said, this would be much more believable if Drake had anything to show that he had planted evidence, or if, for instance, he had responded to “meet the grahams” with receipts rather than immediate deflection. This was an ill-considered pivot, to say the least, one that seems to have come from reading one too many stan theories. 

His final claim is that Kendrick hasn’t provided sufficient evidence for his allegations. This is a good point, actually — for more on that, see Holly’s article below. But coming from Drake, this is pure hypocrisy, especially considering that he’s saying this in a song full of completely unsubstantiated claims. At least Kendrick does seem to have some sort of mole in Drake’s circle.

Claims aside, the content of “The Heart Part 6” is abhorrent. From claiming that Kendrick’s “Epstein angle” was what he expected and then stating that he’s too famous to be a pedophile (as if that’s ever stopped anybody), to misinterpreting “Mother I Sober” in order to mock victims of molestation, Drake’s argument for his innocence only makes him look worse. The song’s spoken-word outro, with lines like “you’d be a worthy competitor if I was really a predator,” unceremoniously concludes the beef, being as grating to the ears as it is just plain dumb.

Even through all this, it’s not particularly difficult to spot Drake’s fatal mistake – making it personal. Had Drake kept the beef purely competitive, rather than bringing up Alford in “Push Ups,” Kendrick likely wouldn’t have been the one to escalate it with personal attacks. As he warned Drake on “The Heart Part 4” and later again on “euphoria:” “don’t tell no lie about me / and I won’t tell truths ‘bout you.” In trying to score a cheap shot in a rap beef, all Drake did was open the door for Kendrick to remind us of his long history of controversies. Unless him kissing a 17-year-old on stage was also part of his long-term plan to bait Kendrick into calling him a pedophile?

Drake seems to want to move past this, as shown by his appearance on Sexyy Red’s album over the BBL Drizzy beat. In one way, his claim that he’s “too famous for this shit (Kendrick) just suggested” is true: It’s not that he’s too famous to be an (alleged) pedophile, but that he’s too famous to ever face consequences for it. Unfortunately, even if all of Kendrick’s allegations were true, it’s unlikely that Drake’s actions would lead to real consequences — his music is just too profitable. 

The Case for Everyone by Holly Tsch

So, yes, obviously, Drake didn’t win. Who else lost?

In professional wrestling, there’s an idea called kayfabe. Basically, though the outcomes of wrestling may be fake, the show benefits from a consistent fictional lore. The two people on the stage don’t really want each other dead, but in kayfabe, they do. The reason for using wrestling as the lede in here is because the line between reality and kayfabe is blurry, and it’s so exciting when something provably real crosses into the fiction of the show.

The greatest crossing of the line moment in kayfabe history isn’t a wrestling moment at all. In my humble and sanctified opinion, that greatest moment is when Pusha T revealed Drake’s hidden son Adonis, calling him a deadbeat and taking a permanent notch out of his public standing with his song “Story of Adidon.” I was there, it was incredible. It was unbelievably real, like something out of one of Pusha T’s songs: Extortion, a closed-casket finish to the most one-sided beef in rap history. 

There’s a new win condition in this game, and it’s exposing your opponent as a genuinely bad person. Jump cut to the middle of the beef. Drake has dropped “Push Ups,” Kendrick has dropped “euphoria” and both intend to escalate. They do. Drake made his name in his beef with Meek Mill with a tactical play, rather than a lyrical one. By double-dropping, he boxed out Meek’s ability to command the narrative and shut him down completely. Now, I have a suspicion this is what everyone is actually tuning in for. As J. Cole presumably drinks a Long Island iced tea and takes a beautiful walk on a sunlit beach, Drake, Kendrick and their respective teams enter a grueling tactical showdown. If you want to see what this feels like, watch one of the thousands of channels reacting and sigh in exasperation as another stealth drop hits and lights the world on fire. Narratives of Kendrick boxing Drake seem to be more interesting than the actual bars to most people. For the kill shot, it escalates.

In order: Drake calls Kendrick a sellout; Kendrick calls Drake a snitch and a culture vulture, draws attention to his association with notable rap big bad Birdman, double drops, says Drake’s colleagues are compromised and everyone’s praying on his downfall. Drake calls Kendrick Lamar a wife-beater and claims that Kendrick’s son is the child of an affair. Less than an hour later Kendrick alleges Drake has another secret child and, far more seriously, that he is orchestrating a sex trafficking ring and, concurrently, that he is a pedophile. In his final song, Kendrick doubles down hard on the pedophilia accusation, as well as bringing back the snitch accusation, relating Drake to Tekashi69, an alleged pedophile and a non-alleged snitch. Drake quietly drops his last song half-heartedly rejecting all accusations, saying that Kendrick needs receipts while providing none himself. It is a whirlwind of serious accusations. It’s a rhetorical cage match. People on Twitter and YouTube are posting reactions to each twist: The narrative, like a prestige TV show, is at the scale we were all promised, two titans battling with everything available to them.

Then, well, yeah, if you think about it for any time at all, it’s pretty gross. The final track, “Not Like Us,” is a club banger that has people across the country singing along to wordplay about Drake going after “A MINORRRRRRRRRRR.” It’s pretty macabre, and a lot of people have rushed to try and answer for it, saying Kendrick is playing the part of a vigilante, that this song is a sexual assault victim’s anthem, etc. I should be clear. Kendrick won. He got everybody singing along to career-ending accusations without posting a single receipt. So why am I saying that everyone loses?

Everybody loses this round because of how goddamn distracting and entertaining this whole thing was. Drake, for his pretensions of being the greatest, is still putting out danceable yet mid tracks, and Kendrick, now more than ever, feels like he’s coasting on his reputation of rapping about important things. 

The low point that has stuck with me this whole time is the line in “euphoria,” where Kendrick says “I make music that electrify ‘em, you make music that pacify ‘em.” It speaks to an obviously true image of both musicians so vividly it flies completely under the radar. That being said, this is obviously stupid! This whole thing is so transparently spectacle on both sides; it’s embarrassing that Kendrick acts like a vigilante bringing Drake to justice. If everything turns out to be true, this is just such an obviously silly way to go about broaching the issue. I’ve heard theories that this is the only way Kendrick could reach this many people, but exposing his alleged sexual abuse within the spectacle of the beef only serves to undercut its severity. 

At best, it centers a mob justice kind of response to only one person, while the news shows that abuse is a systemic problem. As an attack on systems of abuse, it’s completely neutered. Even if Drake is the mastermind he’s made out to be here, his actions are the culmination of a system of power imbalances that can’t be dealt with in one track, even if it does happen to be six and a half minutes long. Blending these ideas — Drake’s fakeness with Drake’s alleged misconduct — weakens the case for the latter but strengthens the case for the former. Because it is a rap beef against a single opponent, every attack must be directed at a single emblematic individual. Calling someone this type of music industry predator becomes merely the most severe ad hominem attack available rather than the manifestation of previous cycles of abuse and opportunity that it really is.

I feel like I’m explaining that wrestling is fake right now, but I have no doubt in my mind that Kendrick wanted this all to play out exactly like it did because he likes money, and it makes him look good. That’s fine, anyone would do the same, but that “I make music to electrify ‘em” line has just stuck itself in my brain forever now. The crescendo of this whole thing is a club track that has people across the country singing along to an accusation of pedophilia. It’s a fun track! I’ll say it as many times as I need to, but it’s not addressing systems of abuse — it’s shit-talking one “freak.”

The rapping necessarily fell by the wayside in favor of the juicier things. Allegations, whatever they may be, get the people going. Wordplay will always be wordplay.

OK, penultimate question: Was the rap that good? Like, was it really the best it’s been, two titans going at it? I mean, there are glimpses of it, but all the blows were traded past each other. Drake knows how to do a stupid playground diss where he calls Kendrick short fifty times, and that’s fun, and Kendrick knows how to write a ludicrously self-serious condemnation, and that’s neat, but there wasn’t much back and forth. Kendrick’s two victory lap songs were both musically competent, but their best moments are rhetorical, not musical. The “A minor” bar isn’t, like, era-definingly clever as wordplay or particularly insightful about Drake, it’s just a really artful uppercut. That’s great, as I’ve already said: I was entertained and happy to hear both artists putting in effort, but I don’t think this is redefining the genre or even redefining rap beef. We’ll probably see more because this was stupidly lucrative, but the most impactful thing was just the scale of it. I mean, that and the allegations.

Last question: Did the victims win? Serious allegations have been rolled into kayfabe. Kendrick using the pedophilia accusations as background in “euphoria”, then focusing in on that pressure point is the clearest show of this. Drake is sloppily transparent with this the whole time, shouting out Chris Brown, the (not alleged) perpetrator of felony assault against his then girlfriend Rihanna. Brown has become a sort of a portrait for domestic abuse in the music industry, and shouting him out shortly before trying to discredit Kendrick with a specious, victimless claim of the same behavior is, again, almost suspiciously sloppy. 

Questlove, drummer for The Roots and hip-hop historian, was one of the musicians who came down clearly against the entire spectacle, saying, “This wasn’t about skill. This was wrestling match-level mudslinging and takedown by any means necessary — women & children (and actual facts) be damned.” I don’t agree with Questlove’s first statement. This was absolutely about skill. Not musical skill, but narrative skill, the sheer combat of public personas. It’s awe-inspiring, like seeing the match at the end of years of buildup. It appears, at least, to be a truly maximum stake, no-holds-barred championship throwdown. The second part of that quote, though, feels self-evidently true. Victims of sexual assault, trafficking, domestic abuse and pedophilia have, again, been made one of the rhetorical tools in the prospective diss artist’s toolkit. For Kendrick’s extensive engagement with concepts of carcerality and dynamics of abuse in his album tracks, he took the shortest path to the win, at everyone’s expense.

Daily Arts Writer Ariel Litwak and Summer Senior Arts Editor Holly Tsch can be reached at arilit@umich.edu and htsch@umich.edu.

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