60 Songs That Explain the '90s - Poetic Justice: The Year of Kendrick Lamar

Episode Date: February 6, 2025

Ahead of Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime performance, Ringer senior staff writer Justin Charity explores some of the critical moments of Kendrick’s story: from a legendary come-up in the rap blog era of the late 2000s to his early stardom in the 2010s to his fiery resurgence in the past several months as he takes a never-ending victory lap after winning his war against Drake. Host: Justin Charity Producers: Vikram Patel, Justin Sayles, Chelsea Stark-Jones, and Bobby Wagner Story Editing: Aric Jenkins Sound Design, Mixing, and Mastering: Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, everyone. We have a special treat for you today. Our good friend, ringer colleague, frequent 60 songs guest and fellow Ohioan Justin Charity has put together a fantastic one-off reported podcast about Kendrick Lamar, celebrating and debating Kendrick's career to date, and of course also taking in more recent events, including his upcoming Super Bowl performance and his scorched Earth War with Drake. Shout out to Drake Reddit, where everything's going just fine. Justin is one of my favorite writers, podcasters, rap critics, and saxophonists, and I am very, very excited for you all to hear this. Please enjoy. As a reminder, 60 songs will be on hiatus for a little bit here, a couple months at most, nothing serious. We'll be back soon. Promise. Take care in the meantime. Thanks so much for listening and talk soon. If you told me 10 years ago, five years ago, even one year ago, that Kendrick Lamar would be playing the halftime show, at the Super Bowl. Not as a guest performer like when he was up there

with Eminem and Snoop a few years back, but as the sole headliner, I'd probably ask you to back up a bit. This is KDOT we're talking about, right? The Pulitzer Prize winner, the reclusive artiste, who's made some of the most important, but also some of the most challenging rap albums

of his generation. Don't get me wrong. Kendrick's got the catalog. He's got the hit. absolutely. Five number one singles. 22 songs in the Billboard top 10. Humble was one of the biggest songs of 2017, one of the biggest rap records of the past decade and Kendrick Scott classic albums. He's got five number one albums out of seven total. He's acclaimed. He's adored. And he's a hitmaker when he wants to be. But Kendrick's catalog is eclectic and intense.

His music is often so deeply intimate, so closed, that it defies the very thought, at least to my mind, of tens of millions of people rapping and singing along in prime time. Seriously, think back on the headliners of the past decade or so. Usher, Justin Timberlake, the Black Eyed Peas, a Maroon 5, Katie Perry, Rihanna. It's still a bit hard for me to wrap my head around the idea of Kendrick Blue. Marr. It'd be different if you were telling me that the halftime performer this year was, I don't know, Drake, but it's likely you already know, as well as I do, that Drake in particular, is in no condition to play the Super Bowl halftime show at this point in his career. Because Drake has been having a tough time. Because Drake got his ass beat by none other than Kendrick

in one of the most spectacular feuds in the history of rap people. Drake versus Kendrick Tamar was an upset for the ages. The aftershock still reverberates eight months later on the eve of Kendrick's halftime performance. So I wanted to better understand how we got here. And I wanted to help other people, especially the uninitiated, to understand as well. So I talked to some people, writers, podcasters, musicians, who have some feelings about the man of the hour. Together, we're going to take a look back at how he got here, how Kendrick got here.

It's not going to be the whole saga. That's a series. That's a book, frankly. But for this one episode, we'll explore some of the critical moments of Kendrick's story. From a legendary come-up in the rap-log era of the late 2000s, to his early stardom in the 2010s, to his fiery resurgence in the past several months, on his never-ending victory lap after winning his war against Drake. From Spotify and the Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Justin Charity.

And this is Poetic Justice, a narrative feature about Kendrick Lamar and this incredible run he's on. Los Angeles is a tremendously important city in the history of hip-hop, a city that's produced so many massively successful rappers and producers. New York may be the birthplace of hip-hop, and Atlanta may be its creative epicenter today, but L.A. has played such a huge part for so many consecutive decades in making hip-hop as big and successful as it's become.

Compton alone has produced such a long and legendary hip-hop lineage, from NWA and DJ Quick in the late 80s into the 90s, to Kendrick Lamar and Y. in the 2010s. Yo, it's DJ Head. I'm a media personality, DJ from Los Angeles, from Carson, to be exact, as Abso would say. Head has known and worked with Kendrick since the beginning. And DJ Head definitely knows L.A.

He's been in local radio and hip-hop broadcasting since about 2004. He got hired by IHeart in 2015 and spent a few years working with Big Boy on Rio 92.3. Did the night show for four years, built a brand called Homegrown Radio with my boy Chuck Dizzle. And ironically enough, Homegrown Radio is where TDE started. TDE. That's Top Dog Entertainment, a rap label founded by the record producer Anthony Tiffith, also known as Top Dog, and based in Carson, California, just south of L.A. In the mid-2000s, TDE was home to a young and restless rap crew. known as Black Hippie.

You had Jayrock from Watts, Ab Sol from Carson, schoolboy Q from South Central, and KDOT. That's what they called Kendrick back then, from Compton. When TDE was first coming up, Ed says West Coast rap was in something of a dry spell.

L.A. was pretty much dead. And we were fighting a good fight. We had a thing, a moniker that we ran under called the New West. It was headed up by Glasses, Malone, Bishop Lamont. Hot Dollar, you know, all of these people that were booming in Gorilla Black, Mike Stroh, and Jayrock was at the forefront of that as well. Initially, J. Rock was the biggest, busiest prospect out of TDE.

But KDOT was also making moves and finding his own sound at the stage. That's got a bunch of lost mixtapes from this period. Hub City Threat, Training Day, No Sleep till NYC. And then there's C4. Like a boy, man. That's KDOTRIN' to rappers because I'm poised to rappers for no me get bent Back with Stumping on.

That's KDOT rhyming over the beat for Little Wayne's Amilly. That whole mixtape, C4, is actually an homage to Wayne, who was one of Kendrick's heroes and one of his biggest influences starting out. Early on, everyone accused KDOT of being a caricature of Little Wayne

because Wayne was one of his favorite rappers. When Head mentions TDE starting on Homegrown radio. He's partly referring to a fateful interview in 2009. When KDak came on his show to announce that he was changing his rap name to his real name, Kendrick Lamar. And him changing his name was like, all right, I'm ready to just be me. Kendrick Lamar had a name, and he clearly had talent. He just needed a push. A big co-sign from one of the hip-hop gods couldn't hurt. Obviously, Dr. Dre was from Compton, and he'd minted so many rap stars from all across the country, Snoop Dog, Exhibit, M&M, 50 Cent.

Dre's last big act was rapper The Game, also from Compton. Dre did eventually link with Kendrick in 2010, when Kendrick was actually warming up crowds as a hype man for Jayrock on the independent grind tour with Tech Nine. Here's how an absolutely giddy Kendrick once told the story to Howard Stern. And me and my boy, Y'all leave, we was eating at Chili's, I never forget. He was eating at Chili's and we got a call like, yo, Dr. J likes your music. And we're like, who fuck is this in the phone?

It's out of here, bud. You hung up? Yeah, we hung up. That's the first breakthrough. That's the phone call that ultimately got Kendrick signed to Aftermath and Interscope. Got him a real budget and a release date, October 2012 for his major label debut, Good Kid, Mad City. Every time I'm in the street, I hear. Yacht, yaw.

Money trees is the perfect place for shade and that's your side. Poor. Trank. Headshot. Trank. Sit down. Trank. Bitch don't kill my vibe.

Bitch don't kill my vibe. Bitch don't kill my vibe. Bitch don't kill my vibe. Musically, lyrically, narratively, good kid is gorgeous. And its success was life-changing for Kendrick, for black hippie, for TDE. It's one of the best-selling and most highly acclaimed rap albums, definitely the most acclaimed major label debut of the 2010s. And it had hits.

Fish Don't Kill My Vibe was massive. Its title, its chorus, it was the perfect Instagram caption at a time when that sort of social media stickiness was starting to go a long way to a song's success. But Swimming Pools was even bigger. Swimming Pools was the breakout single. It was a killer radio record, produced by T. the same T-minus who produced mega hits like Moment for Life for Nicky Monage and the motto for Drake. Drake, in fact, showed up on Good Kid Mad City on a for the ladies joint, Drake's specialty,

a song called Poetic Justice. This was a year or so after Drake featured Kendrick Lamar on his own sophomore album, Take Care. And this is a few years before this particular relationship, Drake and Kendrick, started to go left. I really hope you play this because oh girl you test my patience. And yet, there was something uncompromising about Good Kid Mad City,

something relentlessly idiosyncratic about this storybook rap album about street life and puppy love and Compton. Kendrick Lamar was very attuned to the literary potential and the subversive aspects of hip-hop. This only proves more more true of Kendrick's musical direction as time goes on.

This guy is like making films, like the kind of thing you want to rewatch several times until you kind of caught all the nuggets. It's something that you know you can grow with because when you watch it again in the year, you've had some different experience, some different take. That's the journalist and podcaster, Brandon Jenkins. Most people call him Jinks. He and I worked together for a few years in the mid-2010s at Complex, where I was a writer and he was a web video anchor.

He's interviewed Kendrick on camera a couple times over the years. Back in our time together at Complex, we were watching Kendrick Blossom. He was gravitating toward new sounds. He was moving units. He was winning Grammys, all while cultivating a certain reserved meditative mystique. Kendrick's next album, To Pimp a Butterfly, exceeded expectations tenfold. Even if some of the early singles worried fans, I maybe seemed a little too poppy.

The black or the berry maybe seemed a little too didactic. But the album came together masterfully in the end. Tip-up a butterfly is powerful. It's Kendrick preaching peace to gangs in L.A., preaching generosity and compassion on songs like How Much a Dollar Cost and I. While otherwise, bearing the darker parts of his soul and his self-esteem on songs like youth, This Kendrick is righteous, not a role model or a leader per se, but a rapper who clearly sees himself as a protector of hip-hop and black culture.

In 2017, Kendrick followed up to Pippa Butterfly with Dam, a fascinating album about life, death, and salvation. Heady concepts, and yet, Dam is also catchy as hell. spawned a few hits, including his biggest up to that point. That's humble. That's humble from damn. And to jinks, that's peak, Kendrick. That's him kind of meeting us where we're at, but he still is bringing all the elements that I think his other fans really love, which is like experimentation, a lot of callbacks,

started creating this myth and lore around himself, his region. you know his story? Most rappers would have doubled down on their biggest commercial success. But if anything, Kendrick got less and less accessible with time. Sure, in 2018, he scored a sweet gig as an executive producer for the soundtrack to Marvel's Black Panther. But after that, there was a lot of silence. Until 2022. Then he released Mr. Morrell and the Big Steppers.

Kendra got some hits on this one, too. But Mr. Morale was otherwise pretty much the odd. opposite of the commercial Kendrick that Jinks was describing with Damn. Mr. Moral was even more thorny and intense and introspective than to pimp a butterfly. Mr. Moral was some deep, dark shit. Not the easiest listen by any means, but one of Kendrick's most engrossing projects. Kendrick Lamar came to be seen as an a chore and a reclusive one at that. I think with Kendrick, he's a filmmaker that, like, shuts the fuck up about it.

There's no trailer. There's no, there's no, there's no, like, collab with Burger King. You know, it's just, like, the thing lives, and oftentimes he'll walk away from it. You know, it's not Star Wars, man, you know? It's like, it's Barry Jenkins, you know, it's closer to that space where, like, he works the film. It comes out. Like, Barry Jenkins, did he even, there's minimal interviews with that man, you know? And he's, like, the one I want to hear from the most.

And I think that's what Kendrick's draw is. Kendrick played the expectations game for his album so masterfully. He conditioned his listeners to trust him, to trust his taste, to trust his musical direction, when some of his peers were more inclined to chase sounds, chase features, ride waves. He pulled apart expectation in the same way that like Frank Ocean did. That's Van Lathen, co-host of the Ringer podcast Higher Learning and the Midnight Boys. The music seems so personal and so authentic that there's not really a way to contextualize what you're going to expect. You can't really say what you're going to expect.

I talked to Van about Kendrick's albums, about the big and sort of mind-boggling differences between them. You know, if somebody asked me to describe Kanye sound, I'm thinking the samples, the vocoder, the maximalism. Tell me when you think we crossed the line. You asked me to describe Drake sound. I'm thinking moody falsetto over these sort of ominously vacant new money beats. But grappling with Kendrick's sound, Kendrick's musical touchpoints from one album to the next.

That's a little trickier to pin down. There's not a sonic through line. to Kendrick Lamar's music. There's a social through line. There's an intellectual through line. There's a through line of authenticity, of spirituality. There's a thematic through line. There's a rapper who's determined to use hip hop to uplift and enlighten.

Even when he's making a straight-up hit, there's a rapper who's determined to do right by hip-hop to leave the culture better than he found it. Throughout the 2010s, setting aside the older rappers like Jay Z and Kanye, you had three next-gen guys running the rap game, a big three, if you will. There's Drake, there's Jay Cole, and there's Kendrick. These three guys each had their own unique strengths. Drake was this hungry hitmaker who raps and sings and churns out music every year, an album for every summer. Cole was this sort of undergrad every man who produces his own songs and embodies a certain sense of modesty and humility, unlike a lot of other rap stars.

And then there's Kendrick, who was a live wire, the furious poet who very desperately, very aggressively, wanted to prove he was the best. Not just say that he was the best. Prove it. In the arena. Now, I'll surely disappoint some number of listeners when I say, frankly, we are not here to talk about J. Cole. We will, however, talk about Aubrey, Drake, Graham. Drake is a rapper who became so big in the 2010 that he increasingly talked and carried himself as if he thought he was bigger than hip-hop, as if the culture was something subservient to him, as if his collaborators owed him everything. thing, and he owed them nothing. Drake has been on my Spotify wrapped as long as I've had Spotify,

except for this year, ironically. That's Hunter Harris, writer and podcaster. She's a fan of Kendrick, and also a very, I would say, ruthlessly astute observer of Drake. Hunter is especially attuned to the most essential fact about Drake. He loves women and women love him. or loved him intensely for a time. It's easy to underrate this aspect of Drake's success

until you really sit and consider how typical it is for male rappers to mainly pitch themselves in their music to men. How typical it is for male rappers to seemingly go out of their way to alienate female listeners. Drake, he's handsome, he's slick, he's very romantically perceptive. He's the greatest fuck boy a girl could ask for. Sweatpants, hair, tired, chilling with no makeup on. That's when you're the prettiest.

I hope that you don't take it wrong. I mean, that is certainly telegraphing a very clear message about seeing and believing in and understanding women in a way that most men don't. This has been such a huge part of Drake's pitch from the very beginning. Jinks actually made a related observation telling me about the crowd at his first. Drake concert when he was an undergrad at Moorehouse. And I went there was all women. And this is like 2009. So this is like the era of the dress with like the belt for no reason, you know, and like the like Zelda boots. And, you know,

and I was like, whoa, there's like a lot of women here. And it's like just me and like my homie and like maybe three other guys in there. I was like, what? This was Drake's great virtue and a real reason to root for him at one point. People called him soft because he was always rapping and singing, God forbid, at girls, about girls, girls. Drake ignored those detractors and got extremely popular doing so. He was the triumph of a new sort of masculine archetype in rap, for better or worse. He was also, I'd argue, a triumph of pop over rap. DJ Head talks about the machine. You know, the producers and executives at these record labels who have the know-how, power, and resources to turn someone who can rap into someone who can make

songs. Better yet, someone who can make hits. Each of the so-called Big Three, to be clear, had some invaluable backing by the machine. Kendrick had Dr. Dre as the executive producer on Good Kid Mad City. Jay Cole had Jay Z in his corner, validating his early talent but pushing him to make hits. But nobody in this period, really nobody in the history of the rap game, was embraced by the machine more warmly than Drake. I wasn't aware of the environment around Drake yet at this time. So we go to the concert at what was in the loft.

I forget what the venue name is now in Atlanta. That's Jinx. Reminiscing about a concert in 2009. Sometime around the release of Drake's breakout mixtape, so far gone. And it's fateful mega hit, best I ever had. And I'm looking around and there's people kind of milling around the stage before Drake comes on. I see Ti.

I see Usher. I see like Jermaine DePree. like all these kind of figures. And I'm like, this guy's like a mixtape rapper. Like I didn't know yet. And then I was like, oh shit, he's chosen. It wasn't hard to see or hear why he was chosen. Drake was a conduit.

He was very good at bridging hip hop and pop culture. There's always been some pop crossover in hip hop. But with Drake, it wasn't a novelty as much as Pitbull or Flowrider. His music pitched him. right down the middle class. That's what we listen to to, like, drink Malibu rum and Manxard Lemonade in someone's poolhouse.

There's something about Drake that felt so approachable, attainable. There's a contrast that emerges after a point. After Kendrick releases to Pimp a Butterfly and certainly Circa Mr. Moral. Drake is the bigger star by far. Commercially, Drake isn't competing with Kendrick Lamarmon.

or Jay Cole. Drake is competing with Taylor Swift. For three out of four years from 2015 to 2018, Drake is the number one artist on Spotify worldwide. Kendrick is popular, but Kendrick is unapproachable, inaccessible at times. Also, increasingly,

he's seen as maybe a little too introspective, a little too tortured. At least what I was seeing, around the release of like, Mr. Morrell and the big stepers is that sometimes that vulnerability in Kendrick and the real willingness to like live within the internal battle of his emotions is kind of off-putting to people. Off-putting, I'd say, by design.

Kendrick Lamar is nothing if not anguished. Tupac, Eminem, DMX. You hear all of those influences in him constantly. He's aggressive. He's confrontational. Kendrick is, well... I'm usually homeboys with the same niggins I'm rhyming with. But this is hip-popping them niggas should know what time it is.

And that goes for Jerminko, big crit-whalais. Pushing tea, meat, meals, A-Sep Rocky, Drake. That's Kendrick Lamar's verse on Control, which was released in 2013, still pretty early in his rise. It's a big Sean song technically, also featuring J. Electronica, but culturally, this was Kendrick's moment because he was sending shots at everybody. He was the only one of his mainstream peers who wasn't too comfortable or shook to really explicitly voice the competitive spirit of hip hop. Control put a lot of rappers in their feelings, including a bunch of rappers who weren't even mentioned on the song. This was Kendrick flipping the table. As competitive as hip-hop can be,

rappers can be super passive-aggressive, mostly sending subliminal disses at each other, throwing stones and hiding hands. These guys are too scared, too complacent, to want to rock the boat too hard. But on control, Kendrick just says it, with his chest. He names names.

He's screaming on these dudes. Jinks thinks Kendrick was looking at it like this. Y'all like these motherfuckers. Like, you like them. I don't. And like, if you like them for these reasons, let me defeat them. Like, you might not like me for the same as you like them, but I'll defeat them in front of you. And then will you still like them?

Kendrick wants to compete with these guys. He's saying, I got love for you all. But he's also saying, I will out class and destroy you lyrically. each and every one of you. With time, though, Kendrick started to develop a low-key rivalry with Drake specifically. Meek Mill famously exposed Drake

for using ghostwriters. Kendrick, meanwhile, writes his own shit. And Kendrick clearly doesn't respect Drake positioning himself as the greatest rapper of his generation and one of the best ever do it when really he's got a whole writer's room coming up with his raps.

There are rumors of bad blood between Drake and Kendrick behind the scenes. There was media gossip in 2014 about a popular rapper going on ESPN and talking a lot of shit about one of his rivals. Allegedly, that rapper's team then pressured ESPN not to air the taped interview. It was easy enough to connect the dots.

This was Drake, disin Kendrick. This rumor was widely reported at the time, and Marcellus Wiley, who was an ESPN host back then, has recently said that the rumor was indeed true. Drake has never commented. It seemed like neither of these guys respected the other. But at the time, it also seemed like Drake was untouchable, unimpeachable. Here's Hunter Harris.

There certainly were critics of Drake, but it was that Drake was simply so big. And that even if you really hated Drake, it's like, what are you going to do, hate Drake? What are you going to listen to? What's going to play in your car? In terms of commercial dominance, in terms of musical ubiquity, Kendrick Lamar wasn't an alternative to drink. But he was a perfect foyer. The culture would inevitably pit these two guys against each other.

The Toronto heartbraw who sings slick pop choruses and relies on so many ghostwriters. Versus KDAT, the solitary poet, the righteous bomb thrower from Compton, The rightful air to that long and legendary lineage of Compton rappers, California hitmakers with street sense and bad attitudes and fiery rhetoric. Who doesn't want to see that match up? To see a man take on the machine. The history lesson is over. It's March 2024, and it's been 11 years since control.

It's been a couple years since we last heard from Kendrick Lamar, whose most recent album, Mr. Morrell and the Big Steppers, was his most divisive album to date. Drake is still churning out hits, but he's somewhat similarly on a run of projects that aren't quite popping. Both these guys are at strange points in their respective careers. They're also at a strange point in their coexistence as hip-hop superstars. That these two guys don't quite like or respect each other.

is at this point obvious. These guys haven't been on a song together since Aesap Rocky's fucking problems more than a decade ago. And while the simmering feud that began with control never boiled over, there's all sorts of online hip-hop forensics suggesting veiled shots on various songs from both camps aimed at each other. Kendrick grumbling about a rapper with a ghostwriter on King Kunta, Drake addressing a fake woke, fake deep adversary who goes unnamed on At the Gates.

It's a cold war that doesn't seem like it'll ever be settled, but also doesn't seem like it'll ever have a real cause for either of these guys to really heat up and pop off. They're in a decade-long deadlock. But Kendrick Lamar is about to seize the upper hand. Everybody likes a fight. Don't sit up here and people tell me that you don't like watching a fight or that you won't, you can't get mesmerized by a fight. That's Joel Anderson, a senior staff writer here at The Ringer, and also a former host of Slow Burn, a podcast series at Slate. Joel reported and hosted a season of Slow Burn about Biggie and Tupac.

So Joel has spent a lot of time in his professional capacity as a journalist thinking about rap, about the motivations, about the skill, about the skill, about the same. stakes, which sometimes get to be tragically high, as in the case of Big and Pock. But Beef, at its purest, at its best, beef is a crucial part of the art form. Beef, ideally, isn't about wanton violence or random disrespect. Beef is about proving you are who you say you are. Beef is about backing up all those brags on all those records about you being the best. It's been that way since rappers were first rocking Adidas and Kangalls on Queens Boulevard. And when it's like people that seem like they're equally yoked,

when LL, CooJ and Cool MoD getting the beef, that seems like a big deal. Like both those dudes are cool. Who's going to lose? You know? We'll hear the answer to that question as it relates to Drake and Kendrick Lamar soon enough. On March 22nd, 2024, Future in Metro Boom and Drop a collab album. We don't trust you.

Kendrick is on here on a song called Like That. His verse is aggressive. His verse is shockingly direct. Okay, let's get it up. It's time for him to prove that he's a problem. Oh, is Kendrick Lamar about to start naming names again? Is this about to get dramatic? Fuck, sneakdistance shooter.

I hope they came with three switches. Well, well, well. Drake recently had Cole with him on a song called First Person Shooter on Drake's last album for all the dogs. Kendrick is going at Drake and Cole together. First person shooter. I hope they came with three switches. Hmm. Hmm. I get the feeling that this is really ultimately a kid with all these nines. He'll see Pet Cemetery, nipple. Hmm. I get the feeling that this is really ultimately a little.

about Drake, though. Kendrick Lamar wants to bury him, once and for all. Every generation of hip-hop gets the defining blockbuster rap beef it deserves. M.C. Shan versus KRS 1. J-Z versus Nas. Gucci versus Gizi. And now Kendrick versus Drake. Fucking finally.

Drake has been on top of the rap game for a very long time. an unprecedented stretch. He's outwitted, outplayed, outlasted. He isn't about to be overthrown by a hip-hop monk who releases 12 songs every three years, right? The hip-hop writer Jason Buford thinks Drake just fundamentally doesn't respect Kendrick's approach to rap stardom. Kendrick has that thing where he takes years off,

and you don't hear from him. And I think Drake finds that corny. and he doesn't understand why people like that. Jason Buford is something of a Drake defender. That's why I wanted to talk to him, because I do think it's important to consider both sides and grapple in good faith with his position in this beef and his legacy in hip-hop.

78 top 10 hits, 13 number ones, 13 chart-topping albums. Drake was the hip-hop soundtrack to so, many summers. He's not going out without a fight. Like that becomes the number one song in the country. Drake can't ignore it at this point. He can't let this shit slide, especially given the number of people who are suddenly publicly fouling him at this point. Future, Rick Ross, the weekend, ASAP Rocky, J. Morant. His one crucial ally at all of this, Jay Cole, fumbled his own response to Kendrake, and then quickly, wisely, backed out of this beef all together.

So now Drake is caught out. But he also lives for this sort of drama, this sort of opportunity to talk down to his lessors. It's a little less than a month after Like That Dropped that dropped, that Drake responds. He drops push-ups, dissing, well, everyone. The whole situation was, in his words, a 20v-1. But primarily Drake's setting the stage for a big showdown with Kendrick. When I heard push-ups, I was like, okay, okay.

I didn't think it was great, but I did think it was funny. And I did think he gets at a lot of things that I find a little bit irritating about Kendrick Kumar. He gets that in push-ups. I wouldn't say I was confident, but I was like, okay, we might have ourselves a little bit of a sparring match here. I didn't think it would end up being a football bra. but I was like, okay, we might have a little bit of a spart match.

Push-ups is jokes mostly. Stuff like, How the fuck you be stepping with a size seven men's on? How the fuck you big stepping with a size seven men's on? Because Kendrick is five foot five. The shoe size bit is the first of a dozen or so jokes that Drake will make about Kendrick's height throughout this beef, which, to be clear, I actually think we're mostly pretty good jokes. The thing is, Drake is funny.

In general, Drake is at his worst when he's on songs taking himself super seriously and trying to sell this moody mob boss persona that he's been retreating into for the past decade or so. He's at his best when he's self-aware and just straight up clever. Here's Hunter Harris. Push up as a fun song. What can I say?

And so the fact that he responds to Kendrick, and it's kind of like the most alive he sounded in the studio in some time, I think is very telling. Push-ups is a corrective. You think Drake sings too much? You think he's got to stick up his ass these days? But now he's going to rap. And he's got jokes. He's rapping for his life.

He's going to overwhelm Kendrick Lamar the same way he overwhelmed Meek Mill almost a decade earlier. and the rap beef that really cemented Drake's status as a sort of apex predator at the top of the rap game. Push-ups leaks initially. It takes a week for Drake to officially release the song. But then, on the Friday when it does drop, Drake then also drops the second disc, Taylor-made Freestyle. This was a more forgettable sort of gimmick track where he further taunts Kendrick with sarcastic and weirdly AI-assisted impersonations of Snoop and Tupac.

Joel and Jason both saw Taylor made freestyle as an unforced error on Drake's part. The Tupac thing was a misstep, though, right? You don't have enough stripes on the wall to do that. Okay, Drake, you're getting to be a little bit of a, you know, Snapchat cornball. Like, this is too much technology for hip-hop right now. It's at this point in the beef that DJ Head is acting as a sort of unofficial emissary for Kendrick's camp on Twitter, where this beef is quickly becoming an all-time social media spectacle. But also a one-sided one,

as everyone is waiting for Kendrick to respond to both push-ups and Taylor-Made freestyle at this point. When I got involved, it wasn't pretty over here because the homie wasn't saying anything. People love to forget that part, that everybody, everybody. Charlemagne texting me, I don't know, head, they on your ass. The homie whack, hey, man, I don't know. You don't know what I'm saying?

11 days after push-ups, Kendrick Lamar drops euphoria. This, too, is a corrective to an extent. You think Kendrick is this sort of cartoonishly intense firebrand? You think he's off-putting? Well, for the first minute of euphoria, Kendrick is chilling. Them superpowers get neutralized. I can only watch in silence. The famous actor we once knew it's looking paranoid and now spiraling.

You think Kendrick is elusive. Well, the rest of euphoria is him saying very plainly what his problems are with Drake. I hate the way that you walk, the way that you talk, I hate the way that you dress, I hate the way that you sneak this. If I just flight, it's going to be direct. We hate the bitch. His pettiness was something else. His bluntness was a bomb. It was so incredibly thrilling, liberating even, to hear someone's

so unencumbered by hip-hop's late tendency toward passive aggression. Hunter Harris felt that deeply. I listen to you for you a lot, and my boyfriend is like, whenever he hears me listen to it, he's like, this is so like energizing to you in a, like in a frightening way. Kendrick had pettiness and he had jokes, but he also had a more severe indictment of Drake, largely on racial grounds. I even hate when you say the word nigger, but that's just me, I guess. This is the sore spot.

This is the crux of Kendrick Lamar's resentment of Drake, the crux of the case that Kendrick builds against Drake. To Kendrick Lamar, Drake is an interlober, a cosplayer, a light-skinned, mixed-raced Canadian actor who's gotten a little too familiar with urban black American culture. Sure, back in 2009, Bun B. co-signed Drake, then Little Wayne co-signed Drake. Everyone gave him a pass. There was too much money to be made, working with Drake.

But now Kendrick is pulling Drake's card, poking at the sore spot repeatedly, and then stabbing at it, twisting the knife. Rick Ross also got at this idea on Instagram to more, comedic effect, and the hours and days after Drake leaked push-ups, when he mocked his one-time collaborator repeatedly. Tell your mama, you stayed out past your curfew, white boy. You wanted to hang at the park with the niggas. Smoke weed with the niggers while we watched our old school Chevys.

This is an unwelcome, uncomfortable, unfavorable discussion for Drake. whatever you make of the substance of the criticism, that Drake only acts black in a sort of cynical, exploitative way. Here's Joel again. For my white people who have never had to, you know, fight these charges, if somebody calls you white or alleges that you like something white or you're a goofy white boy or whatever, anything like that, like even if it's not true, the allegation itself is damning enough.

Drake has been ducking these charges for much of his career, and now Kendrick is determined to make them stick. Van thinks they hit at something crucial for Drake. When you listen to him talk about what's going on culturally with him and how it hasn't always been easy for him to be accepted by either world that he's been in, you wonder if there's a large portion of his identity that came from the fact that he was the biggest rapper in the game

and people had to accept him. had to accept him. There's a resentment that comes with having to accept someone who you don't respect. That's the subtext of the sort of cultural corruption case that both Kendrick and Ross are building against Drake. That he's a leech, that he's an imposter, that for as much as he raps about fake friends, Drake is the fakes guy you know. But when he actually got wind of the fact that a lot of these people, didn't fucking like him. That they didn't fuck with him, for real.

These are people he had been around a lot. This is Rick Ross. This is future. These are people that he had hung around. This is YG who's got it up with the other side. This is when it was time to make a decision about whether or not I was one of them, everybody was kind of like, no.

It's such a dark catharsis, more than a decade in the making at this point. For so long, Drake was the consummate collaborator and the ultimate gatekeeper. He was the last artist you wanted to cross if you were trying to build or advance a mainstream rap career in the 2010s. Meek learned the hard way. Drake made an example of him.

And everyone else, well, everyone but Pusha T and Kanye and Sauce Walker, shut the fuck up, held their tongue, smiled through their teeth, bided their time. Kendrick is saying a lot of things that a lot of people already knew or had already been. been thinking about Drake for a very long time. This is a deliberate aspect of Kendrick's campaign against Drake, a crucial aspect. Because ultimately, Kendrick is dissing the most popular rapper of the past decade. And he needs his criticisms to resonate deeply and immediately. Van compares it to the case that Jay-Z built against Nas on Takeover during their legendary feud in the 2000s.

Jay's insults resonated before even put them on the record. Naz has been making some wax songs lately. He's fallen so far from Illmatic. What's with all this weird mafioso tough talk? It's so fake. That's not him. He's having an identity crisis. Truthfully, we were already thinking it.

But then Jay said it. But then Jay went, oh, wait a minute. You are not living up to what we thought you were going to be. You are in a rut and a funk. And when Jay said it, we were like, oh, shit, somebody said it. Jason Buford draws a similar comparison in my conversation with him about Jay-Z and Nas and the whole saying the quiet part out loud aspect of rap beat. People thought for years that Nas was, you know, this fake, woke cornball and like,

Hove exposed that. People thought for years that Hove was this careerist who was, like, jumping from, like, mentor to mentor, and Nas exposed that. Drake, up to this point in his career, had experienced a different sort of rap beef. When Pusha T got on a record and said to Drake and announced to the world, you are hiding a child, blowing up his spot so dramatically. He may be inadvertently popularized this sort of revisionist notion, that beefs are won or lost on revelations. That was clearly Drake's outlook on the beef with Kendrick. Drake was out to expose Kendrick in some novel way.

But Kendrick wasn't strictly out to expose Drake. He chased a few rumors about Drake's personal life, rumors about him getting cosmetic surgery on his abs, for instance. But Kendrick was mainly following the Jay Na's example. Kendrick was out to reinforce every bit of existing criticism of Drake, every bit of skepticism, every bit of disgust that had at that point been festering for more than a decade. This is a referendum. And people don't always turn on you because of the facts,

or because you did one specific thing. You can lose people over time for a variety of reasons. Reasons that add up until a critical mass of people are fed up. Hunter Harris again. There were so many disparate, you know, reasons to hate Drake, but that someone said them all together at once in the same body of work. And the thesis was that I hate you, and the subhead was that I'm going to keep hating you,

and it's for a good reason. that I think is where it all comes together. By this stage of the beef, things have gotten rude, certainly, but Kendrick still maintains an air of cordiality, of sportsman-like conduct. On Euphoria, Kendrick says, this is a friendly fade, let's keep it that way. It's a warning, but a hopeless one.

We know that he knows, that Drake knows, that this is about to take a nasty turn. Here's DJ Head, explaining, Kendrick's initial restraint and engaging with Drake on Euphoria. A friendly means we get down, there's a victor, we shake hands, we go to lunch. That's a friendly. If it's up, you're getting maxed out. You getting packed out.

You're getting violated. We've all come so far up to this point in the story since like that dropped way back in March. On May 3rd, a Friday, three days after Euphoria, it's up. Drake posts a new song to YouTube. This is it. Drake's Red Button. Supposedly the last word of this whole conflict.

The song is called Family Matters. It's seven and a half minutes long with three parts, and it premieres with a big music video that shows a van, similar to the one pictured on the cover of Good Kid Mad City, getting crushed in a scrapyard. Always rapping like you by to get the slaves free. You just acting like an activist is make-believe. Drake is out to disfigure Kendrick's public image,

as a model of black self-esteem, as a righteous father, as a man of God. Drake goes on to make a series of disturbing allegations about Kendrick. He physically assaults his fiance. He cheats on her with white women. Also, his manager, Dave Free, is the true father of one of his kids. Family Matters is this wild barrage of bombshells meant to destroy Kendrick's reputation. To disgrace Kendrick Lamar, the same way that Push a T once disgraced Drake.

Kendrick never addresses any of these rumors of domestic violence or anything else raised on Family Matters. But in his responses to Drake, in so many words, he says Drake is chasing some bad leads, acting on some bad gossip. To this day, there's been no corroboration of any of the major claims that Drake makes about Kendrick on Family Matters. In the moment, though, no one knows what to believe. But this is the most confident, arrogant even, that Drake has sounded since he beat Meek-Mill with back-to-back. He thinks he's already won this thing. He and his family matters telling Kendrick, you did, you did. Drake clearly thinks he's thoroughly, totally disgraced Kendrick Lamar,

that Kendrick will never recover from these supposed revelations about him. And it's easy enough to see why Drake makes this assumption. Here's Hunter Harris. The lowest point in Drake's career was Pusha T revealing something about him, that he did not want reveal, that he was hiding a child, that he had this son and that. that, you know, he kind of finally got, like, caught up. I think when Drake makes family matters and says all this stuff about how Kendrick and his fiance have this, like, weird relationship,

is there abuse? Like, is his child really his own? All of this stuff. And I think Drake thinks that Kendrick is like him and that this will hit Kendrick the same way. Push a T, you're hiding a child, hit Drake. As Joel says, sees it, though, you can't just run the same playbook against every opponent. If any of this happens against anybody else, it works. You know, but this is Kendrick, man. Family Matters drops. It's late. It's a Friday. People are staying up to watch all of this play out to see if Kendrick responds to at least some of these allegations in some form or fashion. There's so much tension in the air at this point. So many.

unresolved threads, so many uncomfortable possibilities. It's hard to see Kendrick surviving some of these allegations if they're left to fester for too long. But Kendrick responds, almost immediately, with a song, a nuke that he clearly been sitting on, waiting for this very moment to drop. The trap is sprung. Less than an hour after Drake Drop's family matters, Kendrick releases a song that very quickly comes to be regarded as the most cursed, unnerving dish track in the history of rap be.

It's Twilight Zone level shit, right? Yeah. It's a song that begins so strikingly, so disrespectfully, with Kendrick addressing not Drake, but rather Drake's six-year-old son. I'm sorry that that man is your father, let me be honest. It takes a man to be a man, your dad is not responsive. I look at him and wish your grandpa with a wore a condom. Raptises get personal. Rapidses get ugly. And Family Matters was already pretty grim,

with its reams of innuendo about domestic abuse and cuckoldry. But Meet the Grams is bleaker than bleak. Meet the Grams, true to its title, is addressed to Drake's whole family. First verse. Kendrick addresses Drake's son. Second verse. He addresses Drake's parents.

Here's Joel again. He started addressing his dad in the song, man. You raised a terrible fucking person. Like, when have you ever heard that in a rap lot and it stings? Kendrick then addresses the third verse of Meet the Grams to a, quote, baby girl. Setting up the bombshell allegation. which Drake has denied, that Drake actually has a second kid whose paternity he's also denied

and who's also being hidden from the world like Athanas was. And finally, on the fourth verse, Kendrick addresses Drake. Here's jinks again, summarizing Kendrick's evisceration of Drake at this point meet the grams. Kendrick's like, yo, you're a bad person, nigga. Let me tell you why. And you come from a bad family. And you're building a bad family. and your friends are gross

and you're bad to the music industry and you don't really do this. And here's all these things that are about you and I'm still telling you I'm scratching the surface like, would you like more? Kendrick was cold and Kendrick was focused. And here Kendrick was on a record addressing his rival's family,

basically daring Drake to defend their honor. His honor. You're a deadbeat. Your dad is a deadbeat. Yeah, you heard me. What now? What are you going to do about it? Meet the Grams is scary.

And it's like people in my age group that were like, yo, I'm getting kind of good on this beef. Like, yo, he's saying, he's saying shit that I don't ever want to like hear about like me or anyone else. I'm with chinks. At the time on first listen, I actually imagine this song totally backfiring. I imagine people thinking,

okay, Kendrick is rapping at people's kids over creepy piano loops. He's pushing a sketchy, seemingly baseless theory that Drake is hiding another child. He's kind of taking this to a weird extreme. So why does Drake come out of that Friday night looking like the loser? Because Drake had been ducking so many fades and deflecting so many of these criticisms for so long. And now Kendrick has written him into a corner. People start looking at you like, well, yo, bro, like people had to embarrass you into admitting you had a son. Maybe you got another kid.

out there. Meet the Grams serves a couple different purposes against Drake. It's a scorched earth campaign against this public image, and it's psychological warfare against him. Some people are so empathetic and so situationally aware that they can think of the thing to hurt you better than anybody else, but the way that they think of it is like, I know the things that will hurt you the most, I know these things so that I don't hurt you,

so I don't trip on these wires, I don't trigger you. Clearly, these are sore spots for you. Kendrick has all that information, and he used it for evil, and I respect that. Meet the Grams diminishes Drake thoroughly. It totally trivializes family matters and all its wild innuendo, with a single bar in that last verse

when Kendrick is directly addressing drink. Why believe you, you never gave us nothing to If these guys had both stopped dropping this is then and there, after Meat the Grams, this beef might be judged a bit differently today. Meet the Grams was a masterful gambit, but Family Matters was still the best wrapping we'd heard from Drake in years. Euphoria and Family Matters were both hits. Euphoria peaking at number three on the Hot 100, Family Matters peaking at number seven.

Maybe Drake loses to Kendrick, but narrowly, respectively. and not nearly as badly as Drake lost to push a T six years earlier. But Kendrick isn't done. He scores his knockout on Drake the very next day with his fourth disc in just the past five days. I see, damn. The song is called Not Like Us, and it makes quite the entrance. That day, I was DJing a private party for Roddy Rich and his family.

DJ head again. I was there. Teres Martin was there. In Walks Mustard. The song drops. 4.50 p.m. Pacific. No warning, no teaser, no music video. Just a song uploaded to YouTube with some utterly diabolical cover art. An aerial photo of Drake's $100 million mansion on the bridle path in Toronto, riddled with 13 pins. The sort used to mark the home. addresses of people on sex offender registries. Now, this family function was Faradis, like,

whole family, his real family, his grandmother's there, like all old people. We plan not like us. This is a record so immediately catchy, so inevitably viral, so unbeatable. And we just sitting there like, oh my God, because none of us knew it was coming. It's such a perfect follow-up to the scattershot of songs of the previous night. If Meet the Grams,

was super dark and dingy and depressing. Not like us was sunny, energetic. Not like us was fucking fun. Trying to strike a chord and it's probably A minor. This is the sound of a masterful prosecutor wrapping up his closing argument against Drake. This isn't just a knockout. This is a number one record,

which surprises some people. Not Like Us is produced by the legendary L.A. producer DJ Mustard, the man behind hits in the 2010s like Rack City and I'm different. But those songs charted years ago. And not like us is almost too flamboyantly West Coast. Jinks admits he wasn't sure at first whether it was going to connect with a broader audience. He introduces sonic elements that I'm always a little afraid of at first. You know, like I heard the horns and Not Like Us and I was like, people ain't going to fuck with this.

But people do, in fact, fuck with it. To date. More than a billion streams on Spotify alone. Not like us is the song of the summer. It goes on to win five Grammys, Grammys, including record of the year. I think back to what Hunter Harris told me about Drake thinking he could beat Kendrick Lamar

in a rap battle by revealing something about him, by exposing him in some crazy unexpected way. The truth is, both these guys were playing that game to an extent. They were both slinging mud. But Drake was slinging it randomly, chaotically, just throwing everything at the wall. He was sloppy. There was very little cohesion to what he was saying about Kendrick. And on top of that, he spent half of both push-ups and Family Matters,

letting himself get bogged down in secondary arguments with the weekend and ASAP Rocky and Metro Boomin. He was all over the place. Kendrick, on the other hand, painted a very clear target. I said it before. He was building a case, establishing a very specific and deeply unflattering characterization of Drake. He's a creep. He's got Peter Pan syndrome. He's a fucking loser.

He can't rock with us. Not in this culture. Not anymore. The most startling bit of Not Like Us is Kendrick calling Drake and his crew quote, certified pedophiles. And Baca got a weird case, why I see around, certified lover boy, certified pedophiles. Wap, Wap, Wap, Wap, Wap, Wap.

That fuck him up. He's pulling out a few different threads here. Most explicitly, Kendrick is referring to Drake's long-time associate, Travis Savory, aka Baca, who, in 2014, faced charges of human trafficking, procurement of prostitution, and assault. This was after a domestic dispute

with an adult sex worker with whom Baca had a, quote, on-again, off-again relationship, according to prosecutors. The trafficking and procurement charges were ultimately dropped after the woman at the center of the case declined to testify against Baca, though he did plead guilty to assault. He's never actually accused of pedophilia. But then, Kendrick also meant for the certified pedophiles bit of not-like-us to describe Drake himself. Kendrick is gesturing, for one, at the famous friendship that Drake struck up with

Stranger Thing star Millie Bobby Brown when she was only 14 years old, a relationship that's long been the subject of some speculation. Brown is in the past gushed about our, quote, lovely friendship with Drake, and she shot down the suggestion that there was ever any sexual or romantic overtones to their interactions. Drake is also denied as much. Then, on Not Like Us, Kendrick is also alluding to an old clip of Drake,

kissing and hugging on a 17-year-old fan whom he brought up on stage at one of his concerts. Ultimately, Kendrick Lamar is making Drake and his crew out to be sexual predators and a devastating hit to Drake's historically high approval rating with women. Of course, Drake disputes all of these characterizations are not like us. In fact, he's currently suing Universal Music Group, which is his own record label, but also Kendrick's, for defamation, harassment, and deceptive business practices in the label's promotion of the song.

in any case, not like us is the closing argument. Not like us is the knife hitting bone. Because even beyond the cover art and the digs at Baca, Kendrick is othering drink. Telling him he's a vulture, circling other more creative rappers, telling him simply that he's not like Kendrick,

not like us. Van Lathen again. And if you can find the right button to press, there's no such thing as a human being you can't bother. And for some reason with Drake, the right button to press is cultural belonging, is whether or not he is inside of this thing. That button scrambles him, and he just starts making wrong moves. The rest of that weekend is almost too pathetic to want to recount.

Late Sunday afternoon, Drake drops a song called The Heart Part 6, sort of hastily recapitulating a lot of what he said on Family Matters and saying he's done addressing Kendrick, but not before spitting some of the most awkward bars of his career. If I was fucking young girls, I promise I'd have been arrested. I'm way too famous for the shit you just suggested, but that's not the lesson. The Hart Part 6 at least goes to show just how badly Drake had lost the plot during this whole ordeal. he goes out of his way to bring up Jeffrey Epstein just to insist that he's no Jeffrey Epstein. He says he's, quote,

way too famous to be getting away with the stuff that Kendrick is accusing him of. Drake is digging his own grave at this point, thinking he was fighting a tabloid war and not a battle for the soul and essence of hip-hop, thinking he was going to win with gossip, accusations, insults, and innuendo when what he really needed,

what he'd produce so reliably for so long, up until this point when he needed it most, was the bigger hit. Drake misread the room, and he lost track of the score. Here's Hunter Harris. God forbid I open up genius.com and need to, like, get a ledger out and say, like,

okay, side one, we have everything, all of the Drake allocations. Side two, we have all the kind of allocations. That's not what, like, a beef is supposed to be. So what was this beef supposed to be? A friendly fade? An assassination of Julius Caesar?

A botched opportunity for Drake to redeem himself after how badly he'd lost his beef with push-a-tee secures earlier. It could have gone any number of ways, really, if any number of things had gone just slightly differently. For Kendrick, ultimately, this beef was poetic justice. A week or so after, not like us drops.

We see a clip circulating, LeBron James. Drake's BFF, LeBron, dancing to the song, dancing on Drake's grave. Now it's as clear as it's ever going to be that this thing is over. Kendrick Lamar got his shot at Drake, and against all odds, he won. The machine collapsed. The man prevailed. Throughout our conversation, ask DJ Head. to help me understand why the West Coast always seems to be the underdog in mainstream hip-hop.

Even after decades of producing so many superstars and so many hits, even now that New York isn't so dominant and so many regional rap scenes are flourishing. That same question I've asked literally almost everyone. I ask Snoop. I ask Q. I ask Warren G. I ask Dot. I've asked E40. The sentiment is always the same. They don't fuck with us. That can't be right, right? People love Dre.

People love Snoop. People love Kendra. But the more I listen to Head, and the more I think about it, I get where he's coming from. California is a strange place. L.A. is a very strange city. Head notes the demographics. It's the rare U.S. Metro that doesn't actually have that many black people,

less than 9% of the population. A lot of people like the idea of L.A., the women, the weed, the weather, but they can't fully connect with it. People want West Coast culture. They just don't want it from us. Kendrick said as much on Euphoria. What I learned is, Niggas don't like the West Coast, and I'm fine with you. I'll push the line with me. This has always been the argument. We go back to Biggie Park, where it was like you had the whole East Coast, West Coast rivalry where, you know, who's the more. dominant coast who's really dictating the terms of rap and hip-hop. Jason Parham is from L.A.

I know I'm going back a decade or so when we were both living in New York and both mostly writing about hip-hop. Going back further, though, Jason recalls a time when he was in grad school at UCLA and otherwise freelancing for Vibe, profiling up-and-coming rappers in L.A., including a bunch of artists who came out of the same scene as Kendrick. Head and Parham both talk to me about the dark days before Kendrick when L.A. Radio was playing a lot of hip-bull, a lot of L.MFAO, and not a lot of L.A. hip-hop or a lot of hip-hop in general. It's hard enough for West Coast rappers to break through on the West Coast,

but nationally? I do think Kendrick is right. It's like a lot of people haven't really respected the sound of the West Coast, the rappers that have come out of the West Coast. it has a little bit more of a boogie to it. The rhythms of it are a little looser and different. Granted, a lot of cities that aren't New York can seem to have a bit of a chip on their shoulder

in terms of hip-hop dominance. Houston, Memphis, Atlanta, New Orleans, Miami, Chicago. These scenes have always had to fight a little harder for legitimacy to some listeners, especially older listeners who maybe prefer more traditional styles of hip-hop. But L.A. as far as far as, this fight 10 times over for half a century.

Kendrick is just the latest in a very long series of victors from this side. You can never take this away from us, right? Like, this is just, this is ours. Jason is back in L.A. these days, and he had the rather enviable opportunity to attend Kendrick's big victorious pop-out concert on Juneteenth, 2024. There were 25 acts, including DJ Head, performing for 6,000. 16,000 fans at the forum.

This is an all-L-A. show. Roddy Rich, YG., Steve Lacey, Tydala sign. You know, Tyler the creator got the biggest reaction. This thing was announced with just a couple weeks' notice. Amazon streamed the concert live on Prime Video and Twitch for millions of viewers.

But obviously, nothing beats being at something so momentous in person. I'm somebody when I go to concerts I typically don't like to take a lot of footage. I just like to experience it now. But I probably have over like 100 videos in my phone from that night because I was like, I want to remember this. I have to capture this.

The pop-out was the grand epilogue to Kendrick's victory over Drake, or at least its biggest stage before this Sunday Super Bowl halftime show. But it was also a larger statement about the West Coast, about Al-A. You can't imitate this. It really does mean something special to see all these artists come on stage, who are part of this early vanguard of L.A., you know, rap during the 2010s with Kendrick, and then to now sort of, you know, 14, 15 years later, come together again when you all have grown and become, you know, maturity in your careers

and done all these, you know, amazing things. I think it really, you know, hit me in my heart in a way that I'll be talking about for a long time. Beef is often selfish and petty. Rappers don't always have the most honorable reasons for dissing each other. Drake beat Meek Mill for Drake. Push beat Drake for push, and for Kanye and Farrell, of course, but mostly for push. And while Kendrick mostly beat Drake for Kendrick, it really can feel like he did it for every last person in that auditorium.

Seeing him perform not like us five times in a row back to back to back to back. As much as I would have loved being on the internet during that moment, I was so happy just to be there to see it as well. Euphoria, not like us. These songs pose a lot of tough, contentious, interesting questions about hip-hop and black culture and belonging. Who is us? Who belongs in this subculture that might have once been limited to the streets,

but as early as L.L. Cool J., NWA, started to open itself to the suburbs, and then ultimately became the most popular music genre in the United States. How do you patrol the borders of something so popular and porous? What does it even mean to expel someone from the culture, to pull their car, to rip it up and tell them, you don't really live this and you don't really love this the way you should. That is really from Compton. Topemper Butterfly, those are his real home. I know those dudes are really from over there.

Heads referring to the cover art for To Pimp a Butterfly, an unruly grouped photo of a couple dozen shirtless dudes from around the way, including Kendrick, cast against an image of the White House. Those are real competent reps. You know what I'm saying? The homie, shot to the homie G. Weeder. The homie little L. Like, them is really my homies.

Like, they really from over there. That's not no Photoshop. Like, we got, we paid extras to pull. That ain't none of that. Rappers have been scrapping over credibility and authenticity for most of hip-hop's 51-year history. Those ideals are fraught. Authenticity can mean a lot of things.

I think Drake and his most hardcore fans interpreted it one way as a race thing. Are you black enough to be doing what you're doing? And yeah, I think Kendrick was playing the race card to an extent in a kind of cruel way. But I also think Kendrick meant it in a different way, in a way of asking, are you comfortable in your own skin? Do you know yourself? Do you understand what you're doing? to the culture and the heritage and the legacies that I care about, that produced me, that produced

you. And frankly, ultimately, I don't think Drake had good answers to any of these questions. So he choked. That's my interpretation, at least. Drake is an important figure in the history and advancement of hip-hop, and Drake is unquestionably black. His dad is Dennis Graham, a drummer and singer out of Memphis. and his uncle is Larry Graham, the legendary bass player for Sly and the Family Stone. I'm sorry, but you don't get any culturally blacker than Sly and the Family Stone. Aubrey Graham is a legitimate descendant of the black musical tradition in North America. Drake, whether you like him or not, is a big part of the culture undeniable.

But Drake thought, or at least acted like, he was bigger than the culture, that he could boss the culture around. that the culture owed him something. And that's how you lose her. Kendrick Lamar was massively successful, even before his beef with Drake. He's got hits, he's got billions of views on YouTube. He's got 22 Grammys.

He's got a Pulitzer. Hip-hop has made him rich and better yet respected. He's found so much success, and yet he's still rapping, as Drake so obnoxiously put it, like he about to get the slaves free, which, as Van Ruther passionately tells me, just phrasing it that way,

shows how disconnected Drake was from the culture. Yeah, we're doing everything like we're trying to free the slaves. We go into Starbucks like we're trying to free the slaves. We shooting basketball like we're trying to free the slaves. We watching Pornhub like we're trying to free the slaves. We are black, nigger. We black. Drake was once a genuinely admirable upstart who rapped against the grain,

who marketed a refreshing sort of vulnerability and emotional intelligence. But over the course of a decade, Drake came to embody all the wrong things, a vapid permissiveness, a wicked sense of entitlement, a corrupt bargain, a tyranny of the machine, an anti-hero who lost his way and became the villain, a rapper who'd eventually be reduced to suing his label for defamation for promoting Not Like Us, a rapper trying to sue his way out of losing a rap beef. It's still hard for me to wrap my head around the thought of Kendrick Lamar,

half-time headliner for the Super Bowl. But after Not Like Us, after the pop-out, and now only a week after he swept the Grammys, you can underestimate Kendrick only so many times, his ability to move a couple of crowd, his ability to shift the culture, his ability to make it all come together in the end. It's been nearly a year since Kendrick Lamar vanquished Drake, and then Kendrick stepped into the void. He inserted so much more than just himself. A mustard drop, a banging chorus, a funky breakdown, a crip walk on a tightrope, a gang truce on stage, a proud city, a proud coast, a proud lineage.

Not saying that the other side don't have real people, I don't think it's the same. I don't think it's a one-to-one. Not discounting, you know, Toronto culture at all. I've never been to Toronto. I plan to go one day, hopefully, you know, and have a good experience. But I don't think that it's the same thing.

I'm not saying that they, that they're soft or anything like that. I'm just saying I don't think it's a one-to-one. They're not like us. They not like us. They're not like us. they play it all the time everywhere. You've been sick of hearing it for a while. And you're about to hear him probably perform it three times in a row for the halftime show.

Back to back to back. But then I think back to that night when a lot of us really should have called it, logged off, gone to bed, caught up on this bullshit in the morning. this beef was, is exhausting. Those horns, though, they really wake you the fuck up, don't they? They not like us. They not like us.

They're not like us. The narrative audio feature was reported, written, and hosted by me, Justin Charity. The executive producers are Juliet Litman and Sean Finnessy. Story editing by Eric Jenkins. This feature was produced by Bobby Wagner, Chelsea Stark Jones, Justin Sales, and Vikram Patel.

Fact-checking by Julianna R.S. Copy editing by Craig Gaines. Sound design, mixing and mastering by Bobby Wagner. The music you heard in this feature is from Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Special thanks to Nora Prunciati and Steve Allman. Thanks for listening.