I must preface this by saying that there are much bigger things in the world that require and deserve more attention than a Rap beef in 2024 involving people that I do not know, nor have a direct effect on my day-to-day life. It’s much like sports; it’s entertainment, and music serves as a temporary escape from all of the world’s atrocities on a day-to-day basis. But it also brings people together in ways that builds community. You take the good with the bad, and there’s a lot to take away from what’s transpired in recent events.

If you’re a fan of Hip Hop, and have had a relationship with the genre that’s been deeply personal in a way that only rivals your family, you are absolutely living for what we all witnessed in 2024 (so far, because you never know). This has been unaddressed beef for over a decade, and a lot of people (self included) have waited long enough to see it come to a boil, and needless to say, we weren’t disappointed (unless you had direct investment in your favourite artist, but more on that later).

From listening to podcast episodes, having spirited debates, and ingesting many albums looking to see what would be the straw the broke the camel’s back to set it off, who would’ve thought that it was a J. Cole verse on First Person Shooter that woke up the fire in Kendrick Lamar to hop on a Future track, on an album produced by Metro Boomin, entitled Like That, which would change the course Rap as we currently know it. It’s not hyperbole, it’s factual. We waited a long time to see the heavyweights come together. We never got to see Kobe (RIP) & LeBron face each other in the Finals; Steph vs LeBron for 4 straight Finals was a good supplement, but we were always left with the what if. In the arena of rap, there haven’t been many high profile battles in a while. I was too young to experience Biggie vs Pac in real time, but I definitely heard Who Shot Ya and Hit Em Up; Jay-Z vs Nas was the first one I fully remember as a kid. I owned The Blueprint at 12-years-old, and played Takeover until the wheels came off. But Ether transcended time to the point where it became a verb that was synonymous for destroying your opponent. 50 Cent came into the game swinging against any & everybody when he declared open warfare on How to Rob, then we witnessed the battle in full bloom with Ja Rule, Fat Joe, and a host of others, which was my high school experience. That boiled over from just two artist, and became G-Unit vs Murder Inc. Deep cut rap beefs like Beanie Sigel vs Jadakiss, 50 Cent vs Cam’Ron, The Game vs G-Unit, 50 Cent vs Kanye West (mainly for marketing), were a staple in Hip-Hop. I’m not the encyclopedia that knows all things Rap beef, but there is a great amount of information available to catch you up. The whole point is that it’s engrained within the fabric of Hip Hop – I’m better than you, and I challenge you to prove it. It’s what fuels competition, despite it’s negative undertone, but we often get great music out of it.

The 2010s gave us the Blog era. I haven’t posted on here as frequently since the inception of this blog in 2012, but the documentation is there. It was dedicated to finding the hidden gems and sharing dope shit to any and everyone who wanted to discover some great, and new music. Drake & Kendrick Lamar both made their impacts in this era. Being from Toronto, Drake was (and to this day is still for many people) the hometown hero. Being nicknamed ‘the Screwface Capital’ since the 90s & early 2000s, the crab-in-a-bucket mentality was the seen as the reason why a top artist from the city couldn’t really see their potential unfurl in a way that would have rivaled a top artist from the West, the South, or our neighbours in the Midwest & East Coast. Michie Mee, Maestro Fresh Wes, Kardinal Offishal, K-Os, Shad, Rich Kidd, the list goes on and on, and that’s just Toronto. There’s a rich Rap culture that existed before we ever heard Room For Improvement, Comeback Season, and So Far Gone. Kardinal wasn’t the first one to bring Toronto to the world, but he did it in the most impactful way at the time he did. Drake took it, ran with it, and became the biggest artist in the world. That was absolutely something to be proud of, coming from a city in a country that still struggles to stand firm on their identity, rooted in inferiority (being neighbours to the United States certainly doesn’t help).

Drake aka ‘The Boy’ (more on that later) has had a great run as an artist (I refuse to do the rapper/artist thing, because rappers are artists in their own right). From 2009 to 2024, his impact has been felt & reverberated in music & pop culture in general. His come up in the blog era, with the assistance of whom many people considered the best rapper alive, in Lil Wayne, is a story that Hollywood could probably make if they valued their writers as much as the CEOs value boosting their salaries at the expense of the people who they exploit. He didn’t go through it completely unscathed, but any battle that he encountered, he stepped up and slid right on through. Many people have expressed their grievances with Drake, and one could chalk it up to jealousy, but personally, it’s very possible that he rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, but A Tribe Called Quest told us about “Industry Rule 4080” on Check the Rhime, “record company people are shady,”  and you can believe that many of his peers banked their grievances against him to keep in tuck, simultaneously keeping him at arm’s reach. I’m just a spectator, not an insider, so I could very well be wrong, but as events unfold, more things start to make sense.

Where his battles with Meek Mill & Pusha T caused damage to his armour, he was still able to thrive and have an abundant career. He’s had number 1 albums, and singles, but underneath the armour, the reputation started taking hits. Ghostwriting accusations turned proven facts, a Blackface photoshoot (!!), and a hidden child, were revelations that were exposed in battle. The latter was unearthed by Pusha T in the scorched Earth Story of Adidon, which still has tremors that are felt 6 years later. That was the first time that we saw Drake fall from grace, but briefly. The difference between a beef with them, and a beef with Kendrick, was that Kendrick had positioned himself in the music world as his only peer that could see eye to eye with him, if they were to enter the arena. The difference between them, outside of their respective musical strengths, has been the level of output with their material. Drake drops a project damn near every year, and Kendrick has been fine with taking time off, because being famous hasn’t been the objective of his career, whereas Drake was a regular on a television series in the 2000s. Its apples & oranges for who they are as artists and who they connect with, but when it comes down to the battle of the pen, which both are great at in their own ways, your bars are the only things that matter.

I’ve written about the Kendrick & Drake feud as it was happening. The Control & TDE Cypher verses, and Drake’s response with The Language on Nothing Was The Same all happened in 2013. Kendrick sent jabs all over Dr. Dre’s Compton album in 2015 while Drake had his own share the same year when he dropped If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late. To Pimp a Butterfly gave us more shots with King Kunta, on DAMN with Element, and the Black Panther Soundtrack in 2018. Both men achieved great success, but this is the only thing we cared about, and we finally got it.

As previously mentioned, First Person Shooter woke up a sleeping giant, and Like That was the declaration of war (someone on Twitter compared it to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which sparked World War 1, and that seems pretty accurate). 

These bars will be remembered for a long time, when the story is told of this generation of Rap, because in the 2010s, Drake, J. Cole & Kendrick Lamar, were oft regarded (rightfully so) as being The Big 3 of Hip Hop, because of how their careers skyrocketed in the Blog Era, and the fact that they’re in and around the same age (Kanye still had major albums in this decade, the momentum was favoring the 3). Who would’ve thought that Cole’s declaration (not the first time it happened) would have caused Kendrick to react like this, but it made sense because if you go back to Control, Kendrick called out his peers and challenged them to spirit rap combat, and really no one obliged. Some even collaborated with him since, because there was respect for how he presented the challenge to them. Drake was not one of those people. He took the approach of being passive aggressive, dismissing Kendrick’s jabs because he viewed himself as above him, and didn’t feel threatened about him taking any crown, because he was the main hitmaker of the 3, even though Kendrick amassed more critical acclaim and success outside of numbers (although 17 Grammy wins to 5 are pretty good numbers, even though people move the goal post for those numbers, because awards are subjective – fair fair). A Pulitzer Prize is nothing to sneeze at, but people don’t want to hear about that either. Can you rap? Can you make a hit? Can you call yourself King and come out victorious in a heavyweight battle? That’s where we are, and we’ll always have First Person Shooter as a reference to where everything changed.

Drake fired the response shot with Push Ups, which ‘leaked’ on a Saturday, and had a lot of people confused, because it was suspected that AI was being used. There had been a few fan-made songs that people were treating as responses, because they were thirsty for beef, and when it was confirmed that it was real (even though people still had their doubts about its validity until it was officially released on streaming services a few days later (6, to be exact). I loved that Drake was direct in his approach, and because Future & Metro’s We Don’t Trust You and We Still Don’t Trust You albums were partially diss projects directed to Drake, he had words for both of them (and Rick Ross), on top of Kendrick bearing the brunt of the diss with a catchy hook of “drop and gimmie 50.” Blood was drawn, and we were off to battle, but Drake made a mistake that I knew was gonna come back to haunt him.

Now, if we rewind a bit, back to 2018, Pusha T had dropped Daytona, and the final track on the 7-track project (Infrared) had direct (nameless) shots to Drake about ghostwriting (which was the easy jab), which prompted Drake to respond with Duppy. Nothing wrong with that, right? Well, he said the following:

The unfortunate thing about Hip Hop is that women & children are too far often the casualties of war, especially when the opportunity for uncomfortable information becomes unearthed for public consumption. People have been either seriously harmed or died over bars said on wax. Battle rap brings about violent imagery in the metaphors & similes, but that’s the spirit of the competition that is known by all, so it’s really about who hits the hardest, at the end of the day. Not everything is fact, but there is a lot of sensationalism. Well, Terrence Thorton aka Pusha-T, a student of the game, took the gloves off once his then fianceé, and now wife, was mentioned on wax. He proceeded to release The Story of Adidon (which I mentioned earlier). I liked Push Ups; I’ve revisited it since the beef subsided (for the time being), and it’s a Drake staple: Catchy hook, witty bars, dope flow. Checked all the boxes. But that one thing, word to Amerie, was something that I was keeping an eye & ear on, because that’s not a road that he wanted to take, considering that now every time we lay eyes on his son, Adonis, we’ll always think of Pusha-T being the MC who introduced him to the world. It wasn’t our business, but it went there, so he did what needed to be done.

On the night of the official release of Push Ups, Drake surprisingly released another diss, Taylor Made Freestyle. Releasing back-to-back tracks was a callback to what he did to Meek Mill, after dropping Charged Up & Back 2 Back while Meek had silence between his great reveal and his next declaration. He left the ball in Drake’s court, and he fumbled it badly. Drake had the biggest diss track playing everywhere and quotables that have followed everywhere since. It was the knockout blow, and given that Kendrick hadn’t said anything since the Like That​​ verse, patience was wearing thin, people were saying Drake was already killing him, and it was looking pretty bleak in the eyes of the casual fan who just wanted to see good sport. Taylor Swift had released her latest album, and obviously no one wants to get in the way of a massive numbers game that they wouldn’t win, especially since Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter was making the rounds as well. With the strange help of AI-voiced verses of Tupac & Snoop Dogg, which was wildly regarded as a strange move, given the controversy surrounding the use of AI & art already, Taylor Made Freestyle was a huge troll job from Drake that kept baiting Kendrick into battling.

A lot of trolling, but it’s not something out of the ordinary. It wasn’t without its consequences, because Tupac’s Family Estate threatened to sue Drake for the likeness of Tupac being used without permission, so that was a stain on the track itself, although the 3rd verse and monologue outro were good for constantly antagonizing Kendrick to dropping, although one would think that patience would be a virtue. The irony is that Push Ups dropped 3 weeks after Like That was released, but Kendrick was on the clock to respond a week later. Little things like that were discussed across Twitter (my primary online hangout) but it made it fun while we waited.

17 days later, we got a response. Kendrick tweeted out a YouTube link at 11:24 AM EST (8:24 AM PST), which sent everyone into a frenzy. For the first minute, Kendrick provided us with a gameplan for how he was going to approach this battle, and it was personal from the get go. Referring to Drake as a “master manipulator” and “habitual liar” set the tone for the message, but as the beat came in, it went to a level that I don’t think many people anticipated. It was aggressive, and packed full of punches that turned into instant quotables that Drake has been known for making a staple in his repertoire for his career. But what couldn’t be ignored was the hate that Kendrick really had/has for Drake. Up to this point, no one had come at Drake in this manner, and the wordsmith that Kendrick is, it was infectious instantly. He had a counter for everything that Drake threw with his first punches, and he had won the crowd over for the moment. It was a warning shot all the way through, and although he didn’t name drop anyone like Drake did with his wife, Whitney, there was the lasting message that Kendrick left, that maybe Drake should have taken more seriously.

Of course this came after he had mocked the Toronto accent for a few bars, which was as much cringeworthy but hilarious at the same time (“cheesed” not “cheesin” for future reference). The expectation was that these tracks would linger for a bit, and we’d be able to discuss Push Ups, Taylor Made, and Euphoria ad nauseum until we got an eventual response from Drake. But, earlier on the aforementioned Euphoria, we got a bit of foreshadowing that was also a play on Drake’s most memorable rap battle moment:

Fast forward to Friday morning. I’m walking back from Dark Horse Cafe with a Blueberry Scone, Raspberry Danish & Matcha Latte. It’s 9:18 when I looked at my phone to check the TL. I see an obscure image with the caption “new Kendrick,” and I think to myself, there’s no way this guy dropped again. And that’s how I discovered 6:16 in LA.

Now, this is currently my favourite of all of the disses that have dropped, because it’s very aligned with the style of rap that he came up on. Very introspective, thought provoking & soulful that’s a call back to many tracks from his discography. A couple of things about this track. Kendrick foreshadowing this drop with his “back to back” line was a tactful & calculated move that no one could have expected from him, add given that the timestamp title has been a Drake staple for his career (9AM in Dallas, 5AM in Toronto, 4PM in Calabassas, 6PM in New York, 7AM on Bridal Path, 8PM in Charlotte), you have to admire the gamesmanship that was put on display here. The first half of the song (the shortest of all the releases, when it was all said and done) set up a peaceful moment before slight aggression comes into the fold, that was brought about from much agitation. More warning shots that came as an extension to Euphoria offered suggestions that Drake had tried to get information on Kendrick to use against him, which was the same play that he did against Pusha T during their beef, and nothing came back there either.

The animosity between Drake & The Weeknd has been well documented, and earlier in the year (but wasn’t the first time it happened) Abel hinted at there being leaks in OVO, which has also been an open secret, so when Kendrick rapped that he could have insiders working for him as well, that raised a lot of eyebrows, because like everyone else, we don’t know what to expect. All we know is that we got 2 Kendrick tracks in a span of 3 days, and it was looking like it was gonna carry over into the weekend, but little did we know what was about to occur.

Later on in the day, there were rumblings of Drake dropping his response to Euphoria. He teased it himself at the end of Push Ups when we heard “drop, drop, drop, drop” and “I was really tryna keep it PG,” which was a play on words for Kendrick’s label, pgLang. It was cheeky and appreciated. One thing about Drake, which he’s made a signature for his career, is that he’s incredibly petty, but this isn’t Meek Mill, and it sure isn’t Pusha T, so it was going to be interesting seeing how he would respond, and if he could keep this a 1-on-1, after stating that it’s a “20 v 1” and Kendrick immediately flipping it to say it’s a “1 v 20 if I gotta smack everyone that write witchu.” It’s truly been a battle of bars, and it’s lived up to the hype.

It’s about 11pm on a Friday night, and as I’m winding down, I check Twitter to see if there’s any motion happening. Along with texting one of my boys going through the whole day, I didn’t think that Drake was gonna drop anything, so I was gonna put the phone down, turn over and sleep. Well – that lasted about 20 minutes. The response finally happened, and we finally got our first video! Family Matters was a 7 minute tirade against Kendrick, with the 1st & 3rd verses dedicated to him, but featured a lot of bars for Metro Boomin, The Weeknd, A$AP Rocky & Rick Ross in the 2nd. It’s arguably the best rapping Drake has demonstrated in a while (although the flow on the 2nd verse reminded me of G Herbo & Lil Bibby’s Kill Shit, and I don’t know if that was deliberate, but it’s the first thing that came to mind – doesn’t take away from it, however). 

There he goes naming people’s wives again. And it’s funny that he brought up Kendrick cheating on Whitney, like he didn’t share that with us himself on Worldwide Steppers (track 3 on Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, in case you missed it). If you listened to Euphoria as many times as I did, you know that Kendrick said that there wasn’t a need to bring family into this, and even Drake reacting to Kendrick’s bars about raising his own son definitely struck a nerve that brought out the venom displayed here. Women & children are always the casualties in rap beef first and foremost, and it doesn’t have to go there until someone crosses a line (which almost always happens), but Drake crossed it twice by naming Whitney, and by throwing in speculations of an illegitimate child belong to Kendrick’s best friend & manager, Dave Free, more gloves came off. It was war for real, but it wasn’t without just one questionable bar.

*insert George Lopez head scratch GIF here*

Not quite the flex I think he wanted it to be, considering Kendrick also had a whole track about that on Savior. Remember when Kendrick prefaced that Drake was a master manipulator & was fabricating stories because he heard Mr. Morale? I think Drake heard it, but he definitely didn’t listen to it for real, but more on that later. But new revelations that came about were speculations of domestic violence, insinuating that Kendrick hit his wife, and moved out to New York because of the marital problems that they had. There were no specific details about what occurred in Kendrick’s household as he spilled out his demons on the therapy journey that is Mr. Morale, but that was definitely a strong blow that Drake landed, which brought about more questions, that hopefully Kendrick would respond to later on. 

I watched the video (which featured towing a van that resembled Kendrick’s Mom’s van that was featured on the deluxe cover of good kid, m.A.A.d city), and it was entertaining. I listened to the song a 2nd time, and after I got done, I get a notification from Kendrick Lamar’s twitter account – there’s no way, right? There’s no way that not even an hour into Drake dropping his response, that was supposed to be his killshot, do we get an instant rebuttal. 

That’s how we get to Meet the Grahams, which is the most menacing diss track that you’ll hear in a long time. Haunting piano keys being struck at the start of the track bring us into a nightmare lullaby that starts off with “Dear Adonis, I’m sorry that that man is your father, let me be honest.” 

HUH?!

That’s really the only response that was warranted throughout the 6 minute onslaught that not only dissected Drake’s character, but Kendrick writing letters to his son, mother, father, a mysterious daughter, and then Drake Aubrey himself. If The Story of Adidon was striking & uncomfortable to you, then this one might as well have been a horror movie soundtrack meant for one-time consumption only (although I definitely listened to this on repeat for the rest of the night). There’s so much to unpack here that just highlighting one section of bars wouldn’t even do it justice. It was just shock after shock after shock that kept happening, and the fact that he didn’t let Family Matters breathe for an hour, is the biggest move that we’ve ever seen in Rap beef, considering the scale of the opponents. The last verse directed to Drake was the biggest haymaker, because it was as though Kendrick knew the family mentions were coming (a predictable angle he called out in Euphoria) and had everything prepared for an instant rebuttal. The cover art was a zoomed out photo from the glimpse we got for 6:16 in LA. He literally and figuratively presented us with the bigger picture, and what a move it was. It sent shockwaves online, and immediately made Family Matters feel like an afterthought. That was the energy that had everyone in a frenzy. No one saw it coming, and I don’t even think Drake did, because at the end of FM essentially was signing out, seemingly declaring his victory and riding off into the sunset.

Kendrick literally said SIKE.

Dear Aubrey
I know you probably thinkin’ I wanted to crash your party
But truthfully, I don’t have a hatin’ bone in my body
This supposed to be a good exhibition within the game
But you fucked up the moment you called out my family’s name
Why you had to stoop so low to discredit some decent people?
Guess integrity is lost when the metaphors doesn’t reach you
And I like to understand ’cause your house was never a home
Thirty-seven, but you showin’ up as a seven-year-old

I went to sleep at 4AM. That was a night for the ages, and I had shit to do on Saturday. I was supposed to go to the gym, and had to run errands before hanging out with family and then going out to celebrate a friend’s birthday. All was calm(ish) on the timeline, as everyone was still recovering from last night’s events. People were listening to Family Matters more and appreciating the greatness that Drake presented with his raps. We haven’t seen excitement like this online as a whole, in a very long time. Typically it’s something very political that gets people moving like this. Everything pop culture related seemed to be at a standstill, because they were waiting for the next move.

The day goes by, hanging out with family happens, I go home, I shower, I change, I get ready to go back out. It’s 8PM in Toronto, I’m on the streetcar heading East, I open Twitter, and I get a notification. There’s no damn way….Kendrick dropped again. There were swirls that he was going to, but I figured we would have had a day (a day) to relax. No. No relaxation for you. Not Like Us was the track ended the beef, with all due respect. As of this writing, the song has been out for 5 days. There are quotables everywhere, there are dance videos, children singing it, DJs in the States have been playing it at clubs. It’s the Back2Back, but on steroids. It’s fun, it’s catchy, and completely destroyed the talk about Kendrick not being able to make a smash hit. He’s had number one hits, but the subject material of his music has always been less palatable than Drake’s, and he also has never been a hit chaser. I didn’t even get into the lyrical content, because you want to talk about wild? He went there for real.

The point of diss tracks are to achieve the ultimate form of disrespect in battle form. I’ve watched a lot of battle rap since I was a teenager, and there are wildly egregious & violent bars that come into the forefront. It’s the nature of the sport that’s been stitched into the fabric of Rap, for better or for worse. Not only were the accusations out-of-this-world, the fact that the song is so entertaining at that, Kendrick out-Drake’d Drake. “Trigger fingers turn to Twitter fingers” and “is that a world tour or your girl’s tour” had Meek Mill in a frenzy for a long time. Meek & Drake made up down the line (sort of?), but this is on another level. People have already been, and will be turning up to lyrics about OVO members (Drake included) being involved in some wild bars. Not since Ether has a diss track been this hard hitting, and although Hit Em Up is a classic upbeat track, this is on some other shit, and it won’t be going away for a while, I feel. The fact that this track was an instant response to Family Matters led me to believe that it leaked around the time Drake shot the video for it (Tuesday/Wednesday), which led to 6:16 being dropped the Friday morning as the last warning, in order for Meet the Grahams to have been prepared for the immediate release afterwards. Sensational play, but also that means Not Like Us was also recorded the same week. Drake told the man to get in the booth, and he evidently, he was doing exactly that (and there’s a lot more according to TDE affiliates).

The third verse will be the one that stings the most, even if the PDF (hilarious abbreviation for pedofile) bars don’t stick longterm. 

Now this verse has been quite the topic of conversation, and has opened up a portal that has gone about trying to dissect and pick apart Drake for not having a signature sound, because he seemingly blended into different regions by collaborating with artists from their respective cities. It started with New Orleans & Houston, then migrated to Atlanta, vaulted over to LA, flew over to the UK, while still being his Toronto self. Drake has had falling outs with many artists for a plethora of reasons (sometimes the common denominator is women), but a dissertation like the one Kendrick presented, is scathing, and that’s the true body blow on this song. Calling him a colonizer is one thing, but the truth of the matter is that everyone benefited from Drake being part of their musical careers. He utilized his position to leverage not only himself, but others around him into a different pool of fandom, because of his crossover ability. ‘The Boy’ had the midas touch (people call it the Drake Stimulus for a reason), so we can’t sit here and act like he didn’t have impact on a lot of people’s careers, although that I’ll always disagree that he put people on. A lot of the artists that he worked with (specifically Atlanta, since Kendrick based the whole verse on just that city) they had their own buzz. The Migos, 2 Chainz (previously known as Tity Boy of Playaz Circle), Future, Lil Baby, Young Thug, and 21 Savage all had their own buzz that started regionally and then worked its way around the country. Toronto has always been a testing ground for Hip Hop, but for one of the biggest artists out to be from here, there were opportunities to bring them (and others) along to venture into new spaces. Business moves. Favours. Whatever you want to call them, that’s the crux of what was happening. Everything was fine when everyone was eating good, but behind the scenes, relationships got fragmented, and although we may never know the full details as to why the relationships fell, we have many verses across 4 songs in the span of 5 days (at that point) that peer into the depths of Drake’s character, as dissected by Kendrick. 

Drake released The Heart Pt. 6 (titled after Kendrick’s series of songs), and it was the least amount of energy that was presented on any track that Drake released during this span. Family Matters was supposed to be the end of it, and getting hit with a second helping of back-to-back releases from Kendrick, it proved to be a lot. An important note though, Kendrick didn’t address any of the accusations of domestic violence in either of his responses. That will always be something on the forefront of people’s minds until Kendrick puts it on wax that the story isn’t true. The Heart Pt. 6 was essentially a PR statement that served as a way for Drake to not only clear up his name, but to also put out there that OVO had ‘planted’ the story of the mystery child, which Kendrick ran with, which would serve as a blow to what was the major play. But he didn’t shoot down claims from his camp about other allegations. Meet the Grahams & Not Like Us delivered blows to his image, and this was a necessary clean up. 

This was a last ditch effort to double down on the allegations he presented on Family Matters, but it was clear that it was the only move he had, because if he had more, he would have went about it in a way that was more direct & aggressive, with proof that he planted the stories to detract Kendrick’s claims. On Taylor Made, Drake did ‘predict’ that Kendrick would mention liking young girls, but I don’t think he anticipated that Kendrick was willing to go to hell, because he had no strategy to counter it before it happened. It was one of the few missteps that he made, and ultimately it came down to Drake not taking Kendrick seriously enough as an opponent to lend valuable battle time too.

Ultimately, as fans of Hip Hop, we got what we were waiting for. This is arguably the biggest Rap beef in Hip Hop’s history, or at least since Pac & Biggie. These are two of the top artists in the genre, with beef having been brewed for over 10 years. It came to an explosion, and they both delivered. This was an example of lyrical & musical domination, and as much as I approached the tone of this article from a Rap fan’s perspective, I’m not about to sit here and act like Kendrick didn’t win this beef, and handily. I honestly don’t even think it was close. Push Ups was a fun song, and there were witty lines (Size 7, drop & give me 50, so many splits your pants might rip), and Family Matters was a body blow that many artists wouldn’t have otherwise survived in a battle, but where Drake lost, was when he went to wage war against a man that was willing to go to hell for the sake of Rap, if pushed. He used the same tactics that got him through Meek, but also got his ass whooped by Pusha. He wasn’t solely focused on Kendrick, because he really thought Kendrick was just part of the crowd to verbally jump him, as he constantly expressed that he was in a “20 v 1,” but what he failed to see in front of his eyes was that, this was always meant to be a 1-on-1 battle, and he didn’t have enough material to go stride for stride for the long run. He was ill-prepared, and the trolling didn’t save him. 

The first minute of Euphoria will go down in history as being one of the most potent setups in Rap beef history. He set the table for the audience to question any & everything that Drake was going to say, because he had his information brought to him from Mr. Morale, and knew that he was going to get into calling out family, because he did it previously. It was strategic, and it served as a valuable lesson that you always have to be care what you ask (and troll) for. Rap beef is ugly; words get said, people get hurt in a variety of ways, and it’s reminiscent of watching gladiators fighting to the death (hold the death though). In the spirit of competition, we got competitive rap. There are consequences to the words being said, and that will be next to see what plays out (OVO & XO crews have already had their recent taste of violence, which I’m hoping won’t greatly escalate). If this is the only time these guys come to a head, it was one for the ages, and it will be documented for weeks, months, and years to come. There will be endless debates, new fans, and hopefully new music that inspires a genre that has been having a weird relationship with its audience for some time now. This was a necessary fight, and I didn’t even mention Metro Boomin’s BBL Drizzy diss beat that ignited everyone to participate. 

Drake has been in the game since I started college. I remember leaving my job, on my work break, to buy a copy of Thank Me Later at HMV (yes, I’m old, shut up). I remember where I was at when Take Care leaked, when I heard From TIme on Nothing Was The Same, and lived with the music that was the soundtrack of Toronto for a good decade. There will always be gratitude for that, but it’s not his dominance didn’t come at a price. He eventually alienated a lot of his fan base as his music became repetitive and no growth seemed to be shown. OVO’s inner-city politics that left many aspiring independent artists stifled from truly seeing their potential, left a bad taste in people’s mouths, because Toronto has always been more than just Drake, but very few had the opportunity to blow up and have their shine. It evolved into more of a curse than a blessing to shoot for the top in Toronto, because that would mean you’d have to go up against the machine that is the Owl, and no one really survives that, which is why The Weeknd’s story is one that people champion a lot. There are a lot of artists who had to take their talents elsewhere to develop their names, because at home, it felt impossible to break through unless you had that co-sign, which didn’t stop many artists from striving towards anyways. It got ugly, it got violent, and there is resentment because of that. As much as I love Toronto, as well as many other people do, you’re not going to find many people feeling sorry for Drake taking an L like this. Hearing Euphoria & Not Like Us in the city, on vacation on an island, or in any big tourist city, is certainly gonna sting him for a while. He can bounce back from it, which is why no one’s really worried about his career, but this was a blow, and maybe he’ll take the advice that many people (including myself on this very blog) have given him – that he’ll go away for a while, dig deep, and re-discover himself. Kendrick talked about stripping the ego with Ayahuasca, so it may not be a bad idea. He really does have to look inward & around to change some shit up. It may do him some good.

These are absolutely more words than I anticipated writing, and if you made it this far, thank you for reading. I created this blog in 2012 off the strength of my love for music, and Rap music has been the main genre that kept me going (although I haven’t posted in a while). I had to come back and document this historic event. One of my first posts was an Artist Profile of Kendrick Lamar. I just wanted contribute to people knowing who he was. I didn’t think it would have come to this beef actually happening, but I’m glad it did. As always, this is my opinion, this is my review,

That’s My Word & It STiXX