Last Sunday marked the 67th annual Grammy Awards, and surely other musicians must have won some awards. I couldn’t tell you — I was too busy basking in the glory of a decade-in-the-making character assassination of Aubrey Drake Graham at the hands of Kendrick Lamar, i.e. the God M.C. Or, in other words, Kendrick’s single “Not Like Us” took home five total Grammy awards, winning every category it entered.
For those unfamiliar, let’s rewind. Just a little bit though, because the full history of modern hip-hop’s Cold War-turned-Hot is simply too much to document and discuss in a few paragraphs of your college’s newspaper.
Essentially, coming into Fall of 2023, the game had three kings: J. Cole, Drake, and Kendrick Lamar, by far the most commercially and critically successful rappers of their generation. Since approximately 2013, when Kendrick Lamar released the song “Control,” all three of them have made variously convincing claims to the “crown” of greatest rapper alive, never fully swaying fans to agree on declaring one winner. Fans of Drake and fans of Kendrick in particular, however, seem to fundamentally disagree on what’s being measured.
To Drake fans, the conversation is silly. Drake makes the most money. He gets the most streams, he has the most fans globally — he’s the coolest guy in school. Drake is the prom king.
To fans of Kendrick, art cannot and should not be quantified. He raps about a deeper message than cars, chains, sex, money, and power. He speaks on history, sobriety, racism, morality, spiritual growth; things Drake apparently knows nothing about, or at the very least doesn’t rap about. It isn’t good music to get wasted to, or hook up with strangers at the club to, and it’s often presented alongside jazz instrumentals instead of trap drums and tight beats. Kendrick’s music was at one point awarded the Pulitzer Prize. It’s poetry in a way that Drake and his core fan base are frankly unable to resonate with.
And for years, the two have traded subliminal barbs at one another, using coded language meant to be breadcrumbs for close observers, but for the most part steering clear of directly confronting one another. Then, in October of 2023, Drake released the song “First Person Shooter” with J. Cole, essentially asserting that the two of them were the two greatest rappers alive (“Big as the Superbowl!”), and only J. Cole mentioning Kendrick as part of a “Big 3.” That’s when things got personal.
Kendrick showed up as feature on Future’s “Like That” and, besides saying there was no “Big 3, it’s just big me,” threatened to shoot Drake. Drake came back with “Push Ups” clowning on Kendrick for being 5’5”, among other things. The beef we’d all been waiting for was here. No more sneak disses, no reading between the lines, it became straight up f*** you and f*** your family (literally. See: “Meet the Grahams,” a song written as a letter to Drake’s children and parents). “Taylor Made Freestyle.” “Euphoria.” “Family Matters.” And then finally, the song that shut the summer down: “Not Like Us,” with the music video to match.
The rest of the summer became a victory lap for Kendrick, as the prevailing consensus everywhere besides r/Drizzy was that the people had finally agreed on a winner. If streaming numbers and radio plays were votes, it was a landslide victory for Kendrick, and it wasn’t all that close.
Then in September, it was announced that Kendrick would be the first solo rap artist to headline the biggest gig a musical artist can land: the Superbowl. “Big, as the what?” Drake asks the audience on “First Person Shooter,” the song that fittingly started this whole beef. The idea that a Canadian child star turned singer/sort-of-songwriter (Drake’s career has been plagued by constant accusations of employing ghost writers) could be the greatest rapper of all time was finally pulled apart and revealed for the absurdity it was.
It got so bad, in fact, that Drake ended up making the very gangster decision to sue his own label, and Spotify, for distributing and “falsely inflating” a song that he claims to make slanderous claims about him. When LeBron James was recently shown singing along to one of the hit singles from Kendrick’s most recent album “GNX” (which was too late to qualify for this year’s awards), Drake released a diss track aimed at LeBron, who was a long-time friend of his.
And then finally, as Kendrick took the stage in his “Canadian Tuxedo” (a denim jean jacket with denim pants) at the Grammys to accept his fith victory in five nominations for “Record of the Year,” two things happened. Taylor Swift, who was nominated for the same award for her song “Fortnight,” raised her glass high in a standing ovation, the photo of which shortly went viral (ironically depicting the admirable quality of someone who can lose a competition gracefully).
But what must have been the truly maddening thing for Drake and his fans was the fact that, as they played “Not Like Us” for the fifth time that night, they got to the point in the song where in the music video, Kendrick executes a flawless crip walk over a chalk drawn hopscotch board, and the lyrics go “Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A-MINORRRRRRR.” To hear what sounded like every person in that auditorium, from T-Swift to Beyonce and Jay-Z to Billie Eilish to Dr. Dre to Diana Ross singing along to that line? Man, I know Drake is still going to make music after this, but it really felt like a moment in music history which we may one day look back on and say, “Nothing Was the Same.”