Since Kendrick Lamar took aim at Drake with his verse on Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That” in the spring of 2024 March, the Compton and Canadian rappers have traded dozens of dark verses (and counting) in a beef unlike any before it. Since then, there have been accusations of domestic abuse and sexual misconduct lobbed back and forth, a massive victory lap of a concert in Los Angeles, legal filings made, and more. While the pair’s Their War of Words hit its biggest crescendo in May with Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us, on the weekend of May 3, tensions have been simmering for years and have continued to boil over for months. Here we’ll break down every major development in their battle since late March. But first a little background:
How did we get here?
Drake and Kendrick Lamar embraced each other as peers before they were enemies, with Drake featuring Lamar on his seminal 2011 album Take Care. Lamar had “Buried Alive Interlude” all to himself on that record, and even then seemed to contend with some disdain for Drake, though he told XXL at the time, “That’s a real good dude. He got a real genuine soul. We clicked immediately.” Drake returned the favor on “Poetic Justice,” the hit single from Lamar’s critically acclaimed Good Kid, M.A.A.D City, after having Lamar open for him on his Club Paradise tour in 2012. A$AP Rocky opened as well, and the three performed on Rocky’s “Fuckin’ Problems” with 2 Chainz later that year.
But after Lamar dropped a verse on Big Sean’s “Control” in 2013 that challenged several popular rappers by name – including Drake – things started looking icy between the two. “Control” had hip-hop up in arms as Lamar swore, “I got love for you all but I’m tryna murder you niggas,” thought the resulting mayhem was more competitive than cutthroat. Several rappers, including Lupe Fiasco and J. Cole, recorded verses in response, but Drake brushed it off in subsequent interviews.
In a cypher at the BET Hip-Hop Awards in 2013, Lamar used the name of Drake’s album, Nothing Was the Same, to allude to “Control” upsetting the Canadian rapper: “Nothing’s been the same since they dropped ‘Control’ and tucked a sensitive rapper back in his pajama clothes.” They seemingly took jabs less directly post- “Control,” and thus, with less fanfare (songs like Drake’s “The Language” and his feature on The Game’s “100,” plus Lamar’s “Element” and his collaboration with Baby Keem “The Hillbillies” have been suspects).
As years went on, Lamar and Drake – alongside their mutual ally J. Cole – surpassed the stature of their peers. On “First Person Shooter,” a single from Drake’s most recent LP, For All the Dogs, Cole embraced their lore as hip-hop’s “Big Three.” In the same song, Drake equates his success with Michael Jackson’s. Lamar (who’s since been rumored to have been asked to appear on the song, due to one of his later disses and an unofficial mouthpiece of Drake’s parroting as much) didn’t take too kindly to the song’s assertions. Then, in March, things seriously heated up.
March 26: Lamar Sends Shots With “Like That”
“Like That” is a single from Future and producer Metro Boomin’s collaborative album We Don’t Trust You, which has been read as their own proclamation of war against Drake. Future has stayed quiet since, but Metro Boomin has made his disdain known on Twitter and Instagram. In his verse, Lamar calls out “First Person Shooter” by name and taunts Drake with a running canine motif in reference to For All the Dogs. J. Cole becomes a target here seemingly by association, as both Lamar and Drake have gone on to spare him from the kinds of scathing critiques they have of each other. Cole did respond to Lamar with a diss track of his own, though evidently half-heartedly. He apologized for it, ducking out before things got uglier.
Most shocking line: Kendrick Lamar’s “Motherfuck the Big Three, nigga, it’s just big me.”
April 13: Drake Fires Back With “Push Ups”
We Don’t Trust You and its sequel, We Still Don’t Trust You, also features the Weekend, Rick Ross, and A$AP Rocky in anti-Drake cahoots, so on “Push Ups,” Drake targets all of them.
The song initially leaked, sparking suspicion that it might have been AI generated, but Drake seemingly gave streaming personality DJ Akademiks the final version. He later shared it on his official YouTube page. Ross released his own Drake diss, “Champagne Moments,” that day and has continued to taunt Drake online, primarily by calling him “white boy” and alleging he’d had cosmetic work done on his face and body.
Most of Drake’s Lamar-specific barbs are about the rapper being smaller than him in size and cultural stature, alleging he was caught in a bad deal with Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith at his former label, and how that led him to make seemingly out-of-character pop collabs with Taylor Swift and Maroon 5.
Most shocking line: Drake’s “I’ll be with some bodyguards like Whitney.” This double entendre uses the Whitney Houston film The Bodyguard to evoke Lamar’s fiancée, Whitney Alford, who was featured on cover of Lamar’s Mr. Morale the Big Steppers with their two children. It’s jarringly reminiscent of the taunt Drake leveraged against Pusha T in 2018 with a play on Pusha’s then-fiancée’s name, which sent the Clipse rapper nuclear with the revelation Drake had a child unannounced.
April 19: Drake Coaxes Kendrick to Respond on “Taylor Made”
Drake highlighted the way evolutions in AI stoked confusion around “Push Ups” and subsequent bogus or unclaimed tracks by using verses created with Tupac and Snoop Dogg’s voice in an attempt to goad Lamar into replying. In particular, on “Taylor Made,” he claims Lamar was afraid to drop while Taylor Swift rolled out her album.
Pretending to be the West Coast legends advising Lamar, Drake refers to a past concert of his where Snoop and other giants from their area formally passed Lamar their figurative rap torch. The late Tupac Shakur is a known influence of Lamar’s – the rapper previously used interview tape to create “conversation” between him and Pac on his album To Pimp a Butterfly. In Pac’s voice, Drake makes an effort to get ahead of any shots Lamar might take at Drake’s purported affinity for “young girls,” a criticism he’s faced for both rapping about or being seen with women in their early 20s as a 37-year-old, and more nefarious concerns about underage girls (Drake would later strongly denounce the latter).
Most shocking line: Drake’s “You better have a motherfuckin’ quintuple entendre on that shit,” a challenge that Lamar seemingly took him up on, with fans breaking down the rapper’s subsequently dense disses
April 30: Kendrick Lamar Lets His Hate Flag Fly on “Euphoria”
Lamar’s “Euphoria” is over six minutes long, beginning with a strikingly different tone than Drake’s thus far. It starts over a Teddy Pendergrass sample but devolves into chaos, with Lamar ebbing in and out of density and comedy, which he continues to do throughout his next few songs. Lamar takes aim at Drake for working with writers like Lil Yachty, allegedly getting a procedure to enhance the appearance of his abs, owing Pusha T a response to “The Story of Adidon,” and being an allegedly less-present dad than him himself. Lamar also tries to paint Drake as effeminate, using hints of homophobia (“I believe you don’t like women, it’s real competition, you might pop ass with ’em”) and to question his perception of Blackness (“How many more Black features ’til you finally feel that you’re Black enough?”). He ultimately admits that he just plain hates him.
He also offers Drake a bevy of warnings: that he’s got some devastating tea on him, that he knows Drake will “lie” to defame his family while noting that he’s already spoken about them on his own terms on Mr. Morale, and that he’s sparing him of more bars on the age of the girls or women around him.
Most shocking lines: “I even hate when you say the word ‘nigga,’ but that’s just me, I guess/ Some shit just cringeworthy, it ain’t even gotta be deep, I guess.” (A shocking level of restraint here!)
May 3 [6:16 a.m. PT]: Kendrick Doubles Down on “6:16 in LA”
On Friday morning, and without a response from Drake, Lamar drops again, the title of this entry formatted like Drake’s yearslong series of songs denoting a time and location. Though the song sounds lax, with production from longtime Top Dawg Entertainment affiliate Sounwave as well as Jack Antonoff, both of whom are frequent collaborators with Swift, “6:16” is more chilling than chill. Paranoia has long been a theme in Drake’s music, and here, Lamar seems to pose that though it’s for good reason, it hasn’t protected him.
Lamar’s primary angle is that someone inside Drake’s inner circle is leaking personal information that’s being used as ammo against him. This is a doubling down on the Weeknd’s subliminal claim that “they got leaks in they operation” on We Still Don’t Trust You and Pusha T’s claim that he learned of Drake’s son through a woman who his right-hand producer 40 had told about him. “If you were street smart, then you would’ve caught that your entourage is only to hustle you,” Lamar raps, “A hundred n-ggas that you got on salary, and 20 of ’em want you as a casualty/And one of them is actually next to you.”
Most shocking line: “Have you ever considered OVO is working for me?”
May 3 [8:45 p.m. PT]: Drake Teases Another Diss With a Sequel to “Buried Alive Interlude”
By Friday night, Drake had assembled his response, “Family Matters,” which he teased on Instagram with a reimagining of Lamar’s interlude on Take Care, using Lamar’s voice and flow to mock him.
Most shocking line: “Dreams come true, crodie, this is where you die.”
May 3 [8:50 p.m. PT]: Drake Takes an Even Darker Turn with “Family Matters”
All right, so this is where things get even bleaker. On the seven-and-a-half minute track divided into three sections, Drake repeatedly claims Lamar had been violent toward his fiancée (which unearthed an rumor Lamar previously disputed that he had been involved in a domestic violence incident in 2014). Drake continues evoking their family, accusing their relationship of being long on the rocks and Lamar’s longtime business partner Dave Free of being the real father of one of Lamar’s children.
Drake doesn’t devote the entirety of the song to Lamar, taking time to take aim at Metro Boomin (who he calls a lame), Future (for being influenced by Metro), Rick Ross (for being long accused of being a former corrections officer), the Weeknd (more homophobia), and A$AP Rocky (for being good-looking and untalented but with Rihanna). He also put aesthetic effort into this round, producing an entire music video including a van similar to that on the cover of Good Kid, M.A.A.D City getting destroyed. In another part, he dines at the Toronto restaurant New Ho King, which Lamar previously taunted him for getting robbed outside of in 2009. There, he shows off a ring that belonged to Tupac (that Lamar had previously mentioned would have Pac “turn[ing] in his grave” in “Euphoria”) as well as iconic jewelry formerly belonging to Pharrell (on “Euphoria,” Lamar also said he would inherit Pharrell’s beef with Drake).
Most shocking lines: “On some Bobby shit, I wanna know what Whitney need/All that puppy love was over in your late teens/Why you never hold your son and tell him ‘Say cheese’?”
May 3 [9 p.m. PT]: Kendrick Is Ready for Drake With “Meet the Grahams”
Almost instantaneously after “Family Matters” dropped, Lamar had what sounded uncannily like a response to it online. Further evidencing that song was prepared well before, its single artwork looked like an expanded version of that for “6:16,” revealing not just the glove in that song’s corresponding image, but a slew of items poised to look like Drake’s belongings, including prescriptions for the weight-loss drug Ozempic and the sleep aid Zolpidem with his government name on them.
The song unfolds as a series of verses directed at Drake’s family members, culminating in a jarring accusation that Drake has an unclaimed 11-year-old daughter. He tells Adonis, “It takes a man to be a man, your dad is not responsive, I look at him and wish your grandpa woulda wore a condom,” alludes that Drake let someone pee on his leg, and that he routinely pays for sex. Lamar claims to Drake’s mother and father that their son is a gambling addict and sex criminal who hates Black women, and takes a sidebar to warn LeBron James and Steph Curry, Drake’s associates, to keep their families clear of him. And to Drake himself, Lamar shames him as an alleged substance abuser, chronic deadbeat, and liar who escalated their beef to this point by evoking Lamar’s family.
In the immediate aftermath, Drake only addressed the allegation that he has an unclaimed daughter, writing on Instagram “can someone find my hidden daughter and send her to me pls…these guys are in shambles.”
Most shocking lines: “But I would like to say it’s not your fault that he’s hidin’ another child/Give him grace, this the reason I made Mr. Morale.”
May 4 [4:52 p.m. PT]: Kendrick Hits Another Double-Back With “Not Like Us”
If Kendrick Lamar thought he killed Drake’s spirit with “Meet the Grahams,” “Not Like Us” is the Compton rapper dancing on its grave to his chant of “Say O-V-Ho.” This track was far less severe in tone than the previous two, though it leans deeper into Lamar’s disturbing allegations that Drake and his crew are sexually violent, outright calling them “certified pedophiles” with single art depicting Drake’s Toronto home as harboring multiple sex offenders. He makes pit stops to repremand Drake for coming at Serena Williams on Her Loss and leveraging Atlanta rappers like Future, Lil Baby, and Young Thug for his own gain as a “fuckin’ colonizer.” He also makes a grim threat that this song may not be his last: “Rabbit hole is still deep, I can go further, I promise”
Most shocking lines: “Why you trollin’ like a bitch? Ain’t you tired? Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A minor.”
May 6 [6:15 p.m. PT]: Drake Hits Back With “The Heart Part 6”
In a turn of events, Drake claims that his team has intentionally fed Lamar misinformation like that of his alleged 11-year-old daughter. “You gotta learn to fact check things and be less impatient/Your fans are rejoicin’ thinkin’ this is my expiration,” Drake raps.
On “The Heart Part 6,” he then unequivocally denies any involvement with minors, bringing up Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown (even though Lamar didn’t): “Only fuckin’ with Whitneys, not Millie Bobby Browns, I’d never look twice at no teenager.” He tries to flip Lamar’s barbs in that direction on him, saying Lamar is “obsessed” with the topic by misinterpreting lyrics on the Mr. Morale song “Mother I Sober” where Lamar discusses layers of sexual violence and alludes to his mother having survived it as well. There, Lamar raps, “Family ties, they accused my cousin, ‘Did he touch you, Kendrick?’ Never lied, but no one believed me when I said ‘He didn’t.’” Drake, however, says, “That’s that one record where you say you got molested.” To accuse Lamar of being a hypocrite, he reminds the listener of Lamar’s controversial stance in 2018 defending R. Kelly and XXXTentacion songs from being removed from Spotify playlists as the company reckoned with what to do with artists who have caused harm.
Most shocking lines: “And Whitney, you can hit me if you need a favor/And when I say I hit you back, it’s a lot safer.”
May 24th: Drake Flips “BBL Drizzy” Sample on Sexyy Red’s “U My Everything”
After laying low for a while following the rap world’s consensus that he lost the battle with Kendrick, Drake re-emerged on the track “U My Everything” from Sexyy Red’s latest mixtape In Sexyy We Trust. His verse on the song was a familiar Drake flow that made reference to the allegations that he’d had plastic surgery in the past. Drizzy even went so far as to flip Metro Boomin’s now infamous “BBL Drizzy” beat for the second half of his verse. As Billboard reported, the beat’s sample was AI-generated and required a new legal precedent to be established around AI sample clearances for Drake to repurpose the diss freely.
June 6: Drake Wipes All Beef-Related Posts From His Instagram
Roughly a month after releasing “The Heart pt. 6,” Drake appears to have deleted his Instagram posts for “The Heart Part 6,” “Push Ups,” “Family Matters,” and the “Buried Alive (Parody)” he dropped ahead of Family Matters. Last month, after receiving. acease and desist from the Tupac estate, Drake deleted the Instagram post for “Taylor Made Freestyle,” which employed A.I. generated voiceovers from Snoop Dogg and Tupac. Despite Drake’s Instagram being totally beef-free, the tracks “Family Matters” and “The Heart Part 6” remain available on the rapper’s YouTube channel.
June 19: Kendrick Lamar Performs “Not Like Us” for the First Time
Kendrick Lamar takes a clear victory lap with a massive concert at Los Angeles’ Kia Forum on Juneteenth called The Pop-Out: Ken & Friends. (If you’re counting by how many times he performed “Not Like Us,” there, five victory laps). The show was announced less than two weeks before, with tickets for sale to the public. Those of us who couldn’t make it to Los Angeles were able to watch on a crispy Twitch stream compliments of Amazon Music. As dozens of LA rap stars massive (Tyler the Creator, Dr. Dre, YG) and ascending (Cuzzos, G Perico, AzChike) alike take the stage before Kendrick and subsequently with him for his “Not Like Us” marathon, the Compton native insisted the show was about something bigger: West Coast unity. “We done lost a lot of homies to this music shit, a lot of homies to this street shit,” he said, noting that the show featured artists from several different gang factions.
July 4: “Not Like Us” Gets a Glossy Music Video
The weapon of war really becomes a proper single as it’s christened with an impressively executed music video, shot right in Compton and across LA (a shoot so populous that it disrupted local businesses). The “Not Like Us” video takes Lamar to the Compton Courthouse, Rosecrans Avenue, and back to Nickerson Gardens Housing Projects – the hometurf of TDE’s founder – with Jay Rock, Schoolboy Q, and Ab-Soul. It features several of the dancers and stars from the Pop Out as well as former Toronto Raptor DeMar Rozan, who had previously been friendly with Drake (those two have had public beef since.)
July 18 and 30: Toronto Venue Cancels Concerts for Kendrick’s Former Labelmates
Rapper ScHoolboy Q and singer SiR, longtime acts on TDE’s roster, both have shows scheduled at the Toronto concert hall History suddenly canceled. The Live Nation venue opened in 2021 in collaboration with Drake, though his current affiliations with History are unclear. Q – a particularly close friend of Lamar’s featured in the “Not Like Us” video – had sold out the place for the opening night of his “Blue Lips Weekend” tour on July 18, but announces the cancellation on X a few days prior. While Q’s first message relays that the Canadian police didn’t want TDE artists to perform, the Toronto Police Department deny this, placing the blame squarely on the venue. According to SiR, his Life is Good tour suffered the same fate on July 30. He and Q share a laugh over it on X. “They DON’T like us,” SiR wrote to his labelmate.
September 8: Kendrick Named Super Bowl LIX Halftime Headliner
However, there are few American venues more storied than the Super Bowl stadium – and Kendrick, the NFL and its halftime show partners Roc Nation and Apple Music all announce that the rapper would be the musical main event in 2025, giving grounds for the potential performance of Kendrick’s Drake disses on the nation’s biggest stage. Drake’s YMCMB colleagues Nicki Minaj and Lil Wayne were among several stars upset with the decision to have Lamar headline in Wayne’s hometown under Jay-Z’s oversight.
September 11: Kendrick Lamar Promises to “Watch the Party Die”
Kendrick seems to lay out a mission statement of sorts for the havoc he wreaked in his beef with Drake as well as what’s to come in an untitled song exclusively released via social media. It drops just days after his Halftime performance announcement and right at the start of the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards. “Why argue with these clowns if the circus is well at work?” Lamar asks in rhyme. “Just walk that man down, that’ll do everyone a solid/
It’s love, but tough love sometimes gotta result in violence.” Lines like “How many bitches harder than a lot of you niggas?/Would trade all of y’all for Nip” and “Street niggas and the corporate guys/The rappers that report the lies/I need they families mortified” imply Lamar is chastising hip-hop and its culture as something that needs revolution. “My nigga Jay Estrada said I gotta burn it down to build it up,” he says.
October 9: J. Cole Returns With “Port Antonio”
Since ducking out of the beef in April, J. Cole largely has minded his business – a horny collaboration with “sexy drill” star Cash Cobain here, a rap-war-agnostic and potentially pre- “Like That” feature on Metro and Future’s follow-up We Still Don’t Trust You there. However, in October, he releases a contemplative loosie where he openly reflects on what went down, surmising that, “I wouldn’t have lost a battle, dawg, I woulda lost a bro/I woulda gained a foe/And all for what? Just to attain some mo’/Props from strangers that don’t got a clue what I been aimin’ for?” He cushions the admission in a larger narrative on his arduous journey from poor Carolina kid to top MC, and his struggle to know and live his values in the sticky world of rapping for profit. The song is not officially available on Spotify or Apple Music, but is on YouTube.
November 8: “Not Like Us” is Nominated for Five Grammys
In the heat of their battle this summer, Drake sarcastically rapped, “Kendrick just opened his mouth, someone go hand him a Grammy right now” on the track “Family Matters.” Well, the Recording Academy decided to actually put Kendrick in the running for five for his magnum opus of a response, “Not Like Us.” The song is nominated for both Record and Song of the Year, Best Rap Song, Best Rap Performance, and Best Music Video. Additionally, Mustard, the record’s producer and an architect of modern Los Angeles hip-hop, earned a nomination for Producer of the Year, Non-Classical, largely because of it. Drake, who has amassed a whopping 55 Grammy nominations and five wins, has had major beef with the Recording Academy, too, taking jabs at them as he accepted an award in 2019, withdrawing his nominations in 2021, and declining to submit his work for consideration since.
November 22: Kendrick Releases a Whole Album, GNX
Without warning and on the heels of a victorious year, Kendrick Lamar drops his sixth studio album, GNX. While Drake isn’t named on the album, Kendrick takes the energy and controversies of the previous months into it, addressing Lil Wayne’s disappointment in his Super Bowl selection by name, enlisting some local artists who performed alongside him at the Pop Out, and evoking the “Party” he wants to see die and/or plans to kill himself. He also releases his own “Heart pt. 6,” defying Drake’s interruption of his rap series. The album debuts at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, cutting the highly anticipated Wicked soundtrack out of the top spot.
November 24: Drake Discounts “Fairy Tales” and Comes for Steve Lacy (?) on XQC stream
As a guest of popular streamers’ XQC’s Thanksgiving weekend broadcast, Drake takes somewhat subtle aim at his perceived enemies. Introducing himself on camera, he offers, “I’m here, as you can see, fully intact. You need facts to take me out. Fairytales won’t do it.” Later in the roughly two-hour stream, he stops XQC from playing the Weekend (“We only play real sixers around here,” he says) and throws an unexpected jab at Steve Lacy (calling him a “fragile opp”). Lacy, who performed at the Pop Out, took it lightly with some memes in response.
November 25 and 26: Drake Accuses Universal Music Group of Payola and Racketeering to Boost “Not Like Us”
On November 25, in a “pre-action disclosure” for information filed on behalf of Drake’s company Frozen Moments, Drake’s attorneys accuse the major label he shares with Kendrick Lamar, Universal Music Group, of false advertisement, deceptive business practices, and violating the RICO Act. They allege that the company illegally bolstered streams of “Not Like Us” with bots and payola on platforms like Spotify and Apple and through undisclosed payments to social media influencers. The attorneys also claimed, without naming sources, that UMG workers who are “perceived as having loyalty to Drake” were fired.
While a rep for Spotify did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone‘s request for comment, a spokesperson for UMG denied Drake’s allegations. “The suggestion that UMG would do anything to undermine any of its artists is offensive and untrue,” they said. Then, on November 26, another filing petitioned on behalf of Drake himself requested pre-lawsuit depositions from iHeartMedia and UMG, alleging a pay-to-play scheme on radio and defamation. (A rep for iHeartMedia did not immediately reply to a request for comment.) “[UMG] could have refused to release or distribute the song or required the offending material to be edited and/or removed. But UMG chose to do the opposite. UMG designed, financed, and then executed a plan to turn ‘Not Like Us’ into a viral mega-hit,” the filing states.
On the back of these legal moves, many question Drake’s motives and asserted the filings further undermined his standing in rap.
November 28: Drake Announces the Anita Max Win Arena Tour
Drake announces that his first tour of Australia and New Zealand since 2017 is set for 2025 and will be named for a gambling-inspired alter ego he debuted last December. Oh, and it’ll kick off on the day of the Super Bowl. (On December 3, Kendrick and former labelmate SZA announce a North American stadium tour of their own, including two nights at two nights at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles in May.)
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