In March of 2024, Kendrick Lamar launched a rap beef with fellow rapper Drake through a feature on Future and Metro Boomin’s joint album, “We Don’t Trust You.” After months of back-and-forth diss tracks between the two—involving other artists like J.Cole and Rick Ross— it seemed as though Kendrick Lamar had emerged as the winner with his hit song “Not Like Us.”
However, it looks like Drake is not taking the loss in stride. Currently, he has filed two petitions against Universal Music Group (UMG). In them, he alleges that UMG artificially inflated Lamar’s song with the knowledge that the allegations in it were false. He has now withdrawn one of the petitions and filed a lawsuit for defamation, harassment, and deceptive practices.
To add salt into the wound, Lamar has won five Grammys this year for the song, making it the first diss track to ever win Record of the Year and Song of the Year.
The Compton-born rapper also went on to perform the hit song as the headliner for this year’s Super Bowl Halftime Show. He even addressed the lawsuit during the performance, stating, “I want to perform their favorite song, but you know they love to sue.”
For Drake fans, his handling of the feud seems unlike him, especially considering this isn’t his first public rap beef. Normally, Drake’s feuds don’t result in a direct response, let alone lawsuits. While fans on social media argue that the feud has done little to hinder Drake’s career, I would argue that this public dispute is just one part of his fall from grace.
There has been a plethora of fellow hip-hop artists that have clashed with Drake, including Meek Mill, Pusha T and Megan Thee Stallion. Until Kendrick Lamar, it seemed as though only Pusha T had done any real damage to Drake’s reputation. In his song “The Story of Adidon,” Pusha T announced to the public that Drake has a son named Adonis that he is hiding from the world.
The cover art for the song, released in May 2018, features Drake in blackface, adding fuel to the allegations of Drake’s exploitation of Black culture found in the song.
What came out of this feud: Drake publicly claiming his son, and a slew of jokes about Pusha T being able to bully Drake into fatherhood. However, I believe this was the beginning of the end of Drake’s seemingly never-ending streak of hit songs and super-stardom. After this beef, conversations about Drake’s relationships with women, his connection to Black and hip-hop culture, and allegations about inappropriate associations with minors began to circulate.
Even now, on his “The Anita Max Win Tour” in Australia and New Zealand, Drake seems to be acknowledging the number of hits his career has taken over the past few years. At the first show, Drake walked out with a bullet hole-filled hoodie with smoke releasing out of it.
For some, this seemed like a message to fans that he was still standing, even after taking years of damage.
In my opinion, this is just Drake’s inner theater kid being more dramatic than Shakespeare. After all, he did start out as an actor on the Canadian TV show “Degrassi.” There’s no way to tell for sure if Drake’s rap career will ever reach the height it once was, but if he keeps up his theatrics, he could always go back to being an actor.
