One year ago this week, Kendrick and Drake engaged in a monumental rapid-fire rap beef, trading scathing diss songs like “Euphoria” and “Family Matters” back-to-back, sometimes in a matter of minutes. On the night of May 3, fans couldn’t even absorb the potency of Drake’s “Family Matters” before Kendrick dropped the even more scathing “Meet the Grahams” 24 minutes later. The two rap icons had been in a cold war for years, but social media started buzzing once their subliminals turned into headline-worthy accusations of assault, infidelity, and hidden children. Rap fans couldn’t put their phones away. Hip-hop heads got to see two respected lyricists going for blood, and proponents of Shaderoom-style gossip had more than enough drama to feed off of.
A year later, no one can get over the Kendrick and Drake beef. Stans on both sides continue to speculate and re-litigate the battle as if it were still going in real-time, convinced that their fave has one more diss in the tuck. There are communities like r/DarkKenny that have popped up to speculate on Kendrick’s seedier allegations against Drake. At the same time, Twitter’s OVO Community mounts daily evidence insisting that Drake won the duel. Drake himself refuses to move on, filing a lawsuit against UMG alleging that they artificially inflated “Not Like Us’” popularity. And in turn, Kendrick has lampooned Drake’s litigious streak during his Super Bowl LIX Halftime performance and most recently, during his Grand National Tour.
No matter what any court rules, the impact of the nine-times-platinum “Not Like Us” is already too massive to roll back. “Family Matters,” which dropped the night before, was Drake’s strongest effort in the beef. Drake went low, but Kendrick got subterranean on “Meet The Grahams.” And the next day, he expertly switched the vibe with a DJ Mustard-produced slapper. It was impossible not to hear its bouncy swing, recite lines like “a minor” along with the song’s affirmatory hook, and not feel like it was a celebration, one that happened to be atop Drake’s figurative grave. Kendrick had “certified pedophile” accusations blaring through the speakers of Kamala Harris events, NBA games, and eventually the Super Bowl. It was an impeccable chess move that marked him as the victor of their week-long duel, which we’re reminded of every time it plays.
So far on the Grand National tour, Kendrick has prefaced the record with a skit that plays on the set’s big screen. In the short video, Kendrick is being deposed, with a prosecutor asking him if he was familiar with the term “drop, drop, drop” — Drake’s refrain on “Family Matters.” Then, he performs the smash that’d be a disservice to his fans not to play. Even Drake played the Meek Mill diss track “Back to Back” years after it dropped.
Last November, Drake filed petitions accusing UMG, iHeartRadio, and Spotify of colluding to inflate the streaming numbers and radio play of “Not Like Us.” He’s settled with iHeartRadio and Spotify, but is still at odds with UMG, amending his lawsuit last week to include Kendrick’s Super Bowl halftime performance as additional evidence of defamation. While Drake’s fans believe he’s calling UMG to account on behalf of artists, many others feel like it’s just sour grapes. His lawyers claim UMG, “approved, published, and launched a campaign to create a viral hit out of a rap track that falsely accuses Drake of being a pedophile and calls for violent retribution against him.” Still, he also issued defamatory claims against Kendrick throughout their war of words. Some fans believe he’s using the courts to penalize Kendrick’s diss, a move not far off from prosecutors using lyrics against rappers in court.
As long as Drake’s litigation continues, and Kendrick continues to perform “Not Like Us,” the hip-hop community will keep talking about the beef. The rap world may hold on even longer, as we’ll likely never see anything of the same magnitude. Many of the world’s biggest rap stars no longer value lyrical supremacy, and the artists who covet their pen can’t capture the world’s attention like Drake and Kendrick’s beef did. Last year’s showdown was a perfect storm of rap superstars who were reared in the era of rap battles as a rite of passage, and just so happened to hate each other. Both felt they had to go through the other to be viewed as the “king” of their era.
This is by no means the first rap feud to drag on over time. Nas and Jay-Z fans still argue about “Takeover” versus “Ether,” even as the two rap icons have been friends and collaborators longer than they were at odds. 50 Cent and Ja Rule still trade shots more than twenty years after their first skirmish. And it feels like we’re always one Pusha T subliminal away from reigniting the Drake-Pusha cold war. To quote Nas, “some beef is everlasting.”
But stan culture makes Drake versus Kendrick more annoying than anything we’ve ever seen. A look back at hip-hop message boards in the heat of aughts-era rap beefs shows a simpler time. Rap fans took sides during these disagreements, but aside from the Death Row and Bad Boy clash of the nineties, which ended in tragedy, it rarely seemed like fans of yesteryear felt compelled to genuinely hate one rapper over another in a beef. But today, rap beef is propagandized by stans consumed as much by slandering their supposed enemy as celebrating their fave. The women’s rap scene is its very own Game Of Thrones, with stan clans constantly clashing in support of their girls.
In the months following the Drake and Kendrick beef, fans have become hypervigilant of every piece of news, labeling each tidbit as a win (W) for their person or a loss (L) for the other. Kendrick and Drake stans argue whether the World Cup or Super Bowl Halftime Show means more, and track Kendrick and Drake’s monthly Spotify listeners as if their self-esteem is tied to the results. Years ago, rap beef was about who had the best rhymes. Now, it’s about who has deeper parasocial ties.
These fans are taking cues from Drake and Kendrick’s mutual personal vitriol. On “Meet The Grahams,” Kendrick told Drake’s mom, “I think niggas like him should die;” the beef got darker and more personal than many expected. Both men manipulatively used accusations of violence against women as their main gripe against the other, turning what was supposed to be a debate about the better MC into a competition about who could sell themselves as the better person. We heard accusations about infidelity, secret children, abuse, and sex trafficking when we would’ve been fine with wordplay and height jokes.
Since that fateful week last spring, devoted fans on both sides have been obsessed with proving their man right. Random children have been posted on social media in attempts to validate Kendrick’s “Meet The Grahams” claim that Drake has another child. When two women filed a sexual assault complaint against TDE executives, onlookers viewed it through the prism of an “L“ for Kendrick instead of two women being coming forward about misconduct. People plunged to conspiratorial depths about how Kendrick received the items on the “Meet the Grahams” cover, prompting journalist Christopher Alvarez to debunk salacious rumors.
And that’s exactly why we should probably let it go. There’s no further depth these men can go to that’s productive for anybody. And because they were so outwardly vitriolic toward each other, we don’t have to fish for subliminals in their music. When Drake posted an ominous clip of Rasheed Wallace opining, “We will win Game 2,” fans speculated that he was about to reignite the beef. But the last time he wanted to go at it with Kendrick, he taunted him for weeks and dropped two disses. The extreme nature of last year’s exchange indicates that neither man is scared to take it there if they wanted to. Therefore, fans should stop overanalyzing every line and scene of a video as a shot at the other. If they ever want to say fuck the other guy again, we will all know.
