Kendrick vs Drake: Notes on a Massacre

I am going to skip the play-by-play. You were there. Everyone was there. For two weeks in April and May 2024, every hip-hop outlet and a great many outlets that do not normally cover hip-hop ran rolling live coverage of a battle between Kendrick Lamar and Drake that produced, across seven diss tracks in thirteen days, the most intensely-documented public confrontation in rap history.

What I want to do a year later is sort through what the beef was actually about, who won what, and what the cultural landscape looks like now that the dust is mostly settled.

What the fight was about

The inciting incident was the release of “Like That” in March 2024, in which Kendrick, on a Future and Metro Boomin track, delivered a verse that specifically named Drake and J. Cole as no longer being on his level. J. Cole immediately responded, then immediately withdrew his response (“7 Minute Drill”) with a public apology. Drake, reading J. Cole’s withdrawal as the moment to strike, opened the campaign with “Push Ups” in April.

What followed, the rapid-fire exchange of “Taylor Made Freestyle,” “Euphoria,” “6:16 in LA,” “Family Matters,” “Meet the Grahams,” and “Not Like Us,” was the public staging of a conflict that had been building privately between the two artists for more than a decade. The public reasons were specific (accusations about ghostwriting, accusations about paternity, accusations about cultural appropriation). The private reasons were structural.

The structural reasons are the important ones.

The Kendrick argument

Kendrick’s argument, across his tracks, was that Drake represents a specific kind of Black cultural project, one that trades on Blackness in public while neither contributing to nor taking risks for Black community. Kendrick’s term for this, deployed with increasing specificity across the diss tracks, was “colonizer.” The accusation was not primarily about Drake’s biracial identity, though that was an element; it was about Drake’s career-long practice of extracting stylistic material from specific Black regional scenes (Atlanta, Houston, Memphis, Jamaica, UK Afroswing) and deploying that material through his globally-distributed pop apparatus.

This is a real and important argument. It is also the argument a lot of rap critics have been making about Drake for more than a decade. Kendrick crystallised the argument in language that the pop-music mainstream could not ignore.

The Drake problem

Drake’s responses, across the campaign, had a specific weakness that the Kendrick team exploited immediately. Drake is, primarily, a pop craftsman who operates in the diss-track genre on commercial instinct rather than on the specific formal register the genre requires. His tracks were well-produced. They landed jokes. They did not, in the technical sense of the form, win.

Winning a rap battle requires a specific register of moral seriousness that Drake’s catalog has spent fifteen years refusing to develop. He is, fundamentally, an entertainer. Kendrick is, fundamentally, an ideologue. In a genre that rewards ideology inside verbal craft, the ideologue wins.

The specific moment the battle tipped, I would argue, was “Meet the Grahams,” released in the early hours of May 4, 2024, in which Kendrick addressed himself directly to Drake’s son and parents. It was, in the formal terms of the genre, a devastating maneuver, a way of reframing the personal as family-structural in language that Drake’s own family-oriented self-presentation had made him vulnerable to. Drake’s response (“The Heart Part 6”) was the response of an artist who had been rhetorically flanked and did not know how to recover.

Not Like Us, the cultural object

“Not Like Us,” released on May 4, 2024, immediately after “Meet the Grahams,” became the single most impactful popular song of the year. It spent multiple weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, which is itself extraordinary for a diss track. It became, within a week, a stadium and halftime-show anthem. Kendrick performed a revised version of it at the Super Bowl LIX halftime show in February 2025, with the Drake-naming verses kept mostly intact, which is something I still cannot quite believe happened.

As a piece of music, “Not Like Us” works partly because it is, underneath the specific diss-track content, a West Coast club track in the DJ Mustard production register, a genre form Kendrick has historically been less associated with. Kendrick delivered his most viral, most culturally penetrating song in a production mode that did not match his canonical style. That was a specific tactical choice. It rewarded him.

The material consequences

A year and change later, the commercial impact of the beef is clearer:

• Drake’s commercial position has been durably damaged. His early-2025 album releases have underperformed. His touring revenue has contracted. His verse features are down. The specific lawsuits he has filed against Universal Music Group, alleging defamation in the “Not Like Us” promotion and distribution, have been received, inside the industry, as a further admission of loss.

• Kendrick’s position has been consolidated. He released GNX in November 2024, which has been his best-received commercial album since DAMN. He performed the Super Bowl halftime show. He has been, throughout, publicly disciplined in a way that has enhanced his cultural stature.

• Hip-hop itself, as a commercial and cultural field, has been changed. The beef functioned, for several months, as a lightning rod for the industry’s unresolved questions about ghostwriting, racial authenticity, and the economics of streaming-era rap celebrity. Some of those questions are now being discussed more openly than they were a year ago.

What I keep coming back to

The single most interesting cultural observation I have about the whole thing, a year out, is this: “Not Like Us” worked not primarily because of its lyrical content but because of its rhythm. The specific dance the chorus produces, a hopping two-step that dominated clubs and wedding receptions for six months, is the thing that carried the song into mainstream inescapability.

A song about whether Drake is a predator became the song people played at their cousin’s wedding. That is either a damning indictment of how pop music metabolises accusations of misconduct, or it is a testament to how a genuinely great beat can transport any lyrical content into ubiquity. It is probably both.

Watch the Super Bowl performance again. It is the cultural document of 2024 and the first weeks of 2025.