This past weekend, after a month of flirting with open warfare, the battle Drake and Kendrick Lamar finally tipped over into three days of exhilarating back-and-forth, and we’re still feeling the aftershocks. 2024’s biggest rap beef reached its presumed conclusion Sunday night with Drake’s despondent “The Heart Part 6,” but the online world hasn’t stopped reacting. The West Coast is treating “Not Like Us” like a triumphant battle cry. Educators are dissecting the lyrical complexities of the disses. Superfans of both artists appear to be spiraling.
Kendrick and Drake are the two most prominent rap superstars of the millennial generation, and over the years they’ve been framed as each other’s antithesis— Kendrick, the tastefully restrained storyteller who pops out every few years when he really has something on his heart to share, versus Drake, the decadent, ever-present workaholic who’s never let more than a few months of his 17-year career pass without releasing new material. Their struggle to upstage each other—culminating in the release of six tracks between them just in the last week alone— offered no shortage of spectacle. Drake used A.I. to troll Kendrick in the voices of his West Coast heroes to strike a nerve on “Taylor Made Freestyle”; Kendrick responded, on “Euphoria,” by paraphrasing the late DMX’s anti-Drake sentiments, drawing blood in a lower-tech way. “6:16” samples “What A Wonderful Thing Love Is,” a 1972 Al Green song that features Drake’s uncle Teenie Hodges on guitar; Drake promoted “Family Matters” on his Instagram by sharing “Buried Alive Interlude, Pt. 2,” named for a song from his 2011 Take Care album that featured Kendrick back when things were copacetic. Both rappers also swiped each other’s trademarks: Kendrick’s “6:16 in LA” played on Drake’s timestamp-in-a-specific-city song-titling convention, while Drake pulled a Young Thug Barter 6-esque move by naming his final entry “The Heart Part 6,” after Kendrick’s career-spanning series of the same name.
“Not Like Us,” meanwhile, has been read as a message to Drake fans who claim Kendrick isn’t capable of making club-ready anthems. But if you ask the right self-appointed internet rap analyst, every move that’s been made in this conflict has had a quadruple meaning. What we can say for sure: Regardless of their rivalry, these are men who’ve been acutely dialed into each other’s careers from the very beginning, which meant this standoff was always destined to be about more than deciding who was the best at rapping. It was destined to become what it became—a high-stakes battle to see who could obliterate whose integrity first.
Truth be told, the apparent end of the beef feels like the closing of a chapter in hip-hop’s story, where the teachings of the old guard met the interconnectedness of the new age. When’s the last time rappers born in the 80’s commanded this much of our attention? Save for Drake, none of the people who came in during the blog era’s latter years still mean something to any generation other than their own. Drake and Kendrick’s places within the genre’s pantheon of legends are pretty much established already. Anything that we get from them now is ornamental, which is why the sheer effort they both put in over the last few weeks has been something to marvel at. It also probably represents the end of an era: There’s so little material return for Gen Z’s biggest rappers to go toe-to-toe with one another outside of trading insults on livestreams and in interviews that this will likely not happen again. Not like this. This is for people who spent their childhoods watching rap superstars freestyle at radio stations and on BET’s after school television lineup in the early-to-mid 2000s. People who remember a time—even if it was their early childhood— when an MC was only as good as their staunchest competition, and calling yourself a rapper meant being ready to prove your superiority at any second.
In that respect, the feud has been a joy to witness. But it’s also been a reminder that, at its worst, hip-hop incentivizes the infantilization of grown men who need to be able to hold the attention of people in their teens and early 20s to remain powerful. In their late 30s, these brothers should be receptive and responsible enough to refrain from dangling abuse of women and children as a means to demonstrate dominance. That kind of decency is apparently too much to ask of men fighting desperately for a generational crown. And the consequences of those failures are already revealing themselves.
