Kendrick Lamar Proves World Peace Is Possible Through Mutual Hatred of Drake
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Unless you live under a rock, you have likely seen at least a snippet of the historic rap beef unfolding between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. A quick summary for the uninitiated living under said rock: Kendrick is called King for a reason, as his music and writing is generally accepted to be unparalleled in the modern rap industry (“fuck the big three it’s just big me” as Kendrick has said), while Drake is the avatar for the pop-ification of rap. Add in the fact that Drake grew up in Toronto under a white Jewish mother and spent summers with his black father in Memphis, and there are myriad uncomfortable dynamics raised by a rapper who has been accused of being a “culture vulture.”
Kendrick is a hothead who styles himself as Tupac’s successor as the voice of west coast hip-hop, and this soft boil of hatred reached a crescendo when something happened between Drake and Future to drive a wedge in their amiable business partnership. This launched a three-way rap beef that included J. Cole reenacting the Grandpa Simpson walk in/walk out meme as soon as he realized what he had gotten himself into, and Kendrick unleashed a decade-plus of frustration at Drake.
This culminated in Kendrick Lamar dropping Meet the Grahams twenty minutes after Drake’s best punch in the fight, Family Matters, where Kendrick wrote shocking lines directed at Drake’s parents like “And we gotta raise our daughters knowin’ there’s predators like him lurkin’, Fuck a rap battle, he should die so all of these women can live with a purpose.”
This is not some made-up cheap shot, as Drake is known to do weird stuff with underage girls on stage at concerts, and this 30-something man has a long history of texting and contacting teenagers. That Kendrick says he has proof of what Drake has implicated himself in is not exactly Earth-shattering news.
A couple days later, Kendrick Lamar would end the beef by releasing the seminal hit of the summer…year…decade…century?
Not Like Us is the national anthem of Los Angeles now, and it is an all-time banger whose catchiest lines revolve around calling Drake a pedophile. This is a surreal moment in music history. No one alive has ever lost a rap beef as badly as Drake has.
Kendrick’s bars are so good he negotiated a détente over them to bring crips and bloods together last night at his “Ken & Friends” Juneteenth concert in LA, when he performed Not Like Us live for the first time ever with Dr. Dre.
KENDRICK LAMAR & DR DRE — NOT LIKE US
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📍 LOS ANGELES, CA pic.twitter.com/6wBiMmKcef