{"id":63852,"date":"2026-05-04T18:27:39","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T18:27:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/04\/can-drake-ever-escape-not-like-us\/"},"modified":"2026-05-04T18:27:39","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T18:27:39","slug":"can-drake-ever-escape-not-like-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/04\/can-drake-ever-escape-not-like-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Can Drake Ever Escape \u2018Not Like Us\u2019?"},"content":{"rendered":"


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\n\tKendrick Lamar<\/a>\u2019s \u201cNot Like Us\u201d<\/a> dropped two years ago this week. At the time, Joe Biden was still president, \u201cBrat Summer\u201d<\/a> had yet to enter the zeitgeist, and \u201cAI slop\u201d had not yet become the default texture of being online. Even so, the song\u2019s impact lives on, able to recalibrate the architecture of the entire rap world. Even if you don\u2019t count Drake<\/a>\u2019s now-dismissed lawsuit<\/a> against Universal Music Group \u2014 in which his lawyers argued that the label knowingly published and promoted \u201cNot Like Us\u201d despite allegedly knowing its accusations were false and defamatory, a claim that he is currently trying to revive<\/a> \u2014 the song\u2019s afterlife has been unusually protracted. Most people can concede that, in the court of public opinion, Drake lost the battle<\/a>, but there hasn\u2019t yet been any sort of closing treatise from either of the two.<\/p>\n

\n\tNow, with the upcoming release of Iceman<\/a><\/em> \u2014 Drake\u2019s first solo album since the conflict \u2014 it feels as if we\u2019re back to square one, with fans relitigating the affair across social media. It is, in a way, a testament to how thoroughly \u201cNot Like Us\u201d succeeded in its mission. But something still seems unsettled. Consider the genre\u2019s last heavyweight title fight: Jay-Z<\/a> and Nas<\/a>. The pair didn\u2019t officially make peace until 2005, roughly four years after the height of their feud. But even two years in, the conflict had already begun to cool into mythology, as Jay used The Black Album<\/em> to change the subject from his beef with Nas to his own legacy.<\/p>\n

\n\tUnlike the songs volleyed in Jay and Nas\u2019 beef \u2014 which had the fortune of occurring before stan culture, brain rot, misinformation, phone addiction, and AI turned every public dispute into content \u2014 \u201cNot Like Us\u201d feels engineered to make any kind of resolution impossible. The song does not merely beat Drake in public; it seeks to make him permanently illegible as a sympathetic figure, recasting the literal Aubrey Drake Graham not as a rival to be defeated, but as a man to be condemned. That so many former allies and peers seemed willing to line up against him only deepened the effect. The listening public could only assume the worst.<\/p>\n

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\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s why two years later, it still doesn\u2019t feel settled into history. What was<\/em> everyone\u2019s issue with Drake? The people closest to the spark have mostly chosen opacity. Even Metro Boomin, who helped light the fuse with We Don\u2019t Trust You<\/a><\/em>, has since sounded less like an instigator than a man slightly unnerved by what the internet did with the match he struck. Speaking at the Forbes Under 30 Summit, Metro compared the Drake-Kendrick conflict to Jay-Z and Nas\u2019 battle, but argued that the terms had changed. \u201cBack in the day, Jay-Z and Nas went at it, but I was a fan of both of \u2018em,\u201d he said. \u201cMost people were.\u201d Now, adding,\u00a0 \u201cThe internet just makes it a little too wild now.\u201d In a GQ<\/em> interview that was only published in print, Future all but pretended the beef had never happened. \u201cThere was a beef?\u201d he asked, according to reports of the interview. \u201cI didn\u2019t even know there was a beef.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tKendrick, too, has offered little in the way of explanation. Even after performing \u201cNot Like Us\u201d at the Super Bowl<\/a>, he has mostly declined to describe why, as he said on \u201cMeet the Grahams,\u201d he believed Drake\u2019s moral failings meant he \u201cshould die.\u201d Indeed, much of the lingering weight of the Drake and Kendrick beef is how potently it curdled into a moral reckoning as opposed to a rap battle. By the end, as Kendrick is warning various NBA players to keep their children away from Drake, the public\u2019s view of the conflict entered much darker territory.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a Harper\u2019s Bazaar<\/em> interview with SZA, when asked what \u201cNot Like Us\u201d meant to him, Kendrick\u2019s answer was less a clarification than a reframing. \u201cNot like us is the energy of who I am, the type of man I represent,\u201d he said, describing that man as someone with \u201cmorals,\u201d \u201cvalues,\u201d and the willingness to recognize his mistakes. \u201cIf I\u2019m thinking of \u2018Not Like Us,\u2019 I\u2019m thinking of me and whoever identifies with that.\u201d To a die-hard Kendrick fan, that answer may scan as spiritual discipline. To everyone else, it was maddeningly evasive.<\/p>\n

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\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n

\n\tTo their credit, both J. Cole and A$AP Rocky, who you could describe as ancillary characters in this whole thing, are among the only people to actually speak openly about the feud in anything other than riddles. Cole, who famously bowed out early, later told Cam\u2019ron that the beef had turned rap fandom into politics: \u201cYou either Kendrick, or you Drake, and you got to pick a side.\u201d Rocky, too, was unafraid to say his piece, telling DJ Akademiks ahead of the release of his album Don\u2019t Be Dumb<\/em> that his issue with Drake stemmed from shots Drake had taken at Rihanna, the mother of his children.<\/p>\n

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\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n

\n\tNow, with Iceman<\/em>, all signs point to an album where Drake tries to set the record straight. So far, his longform rollout has given fans a giant ice cube<\/a>, a few mysterious livestreams<\/a>, and a smattering of serviceable enough snippets and loosies. (Ironically, the last rap single to reach the Top 10 on the charts was Drake\u2019s \u201cWhat Did I Miss?\u201d ) His lawsuit also isn\u2019t helping. At one\u2019s most charitable, you could argue that the whole thing is the equivalent of corporate damage control \u2014 how is one supposed to react to the word \u201cpedophile\u201d being so catchily attached to their name? \u2014 but that still doesn\u2019t shield Drake from embarrassment. The impression remains that he was beaten so badly that he had to go to court to clear his name.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSo Iceman<\/em> has to do a lot of work. It has to provide some insight into what the hell happened between Drake and basically everybody<\/a>, while also getting the public to forget not only \u201cNot Like Us,\u201d but the fact that he took UMG to court over it. Two years later, that may be the real legacy of Kendrick\u2019s song. More than just winning the battle, it changed the atmosphere around rap itself.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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Kendrick Lamar\u2019s \u201cNot Like Us\u201d dropped two years ago this week. At the time, Joe Biden was still president, \u201cBrat Summer\u201d had yet to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":63853,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pop","article","has-excerpt","has-avatar","has-author","has-date","has-comment-count","has-category-meta","has-read-more","thumbnail-"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63852\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}