certified hater summer™️
smoke em if you got 'em
wallah, never in my life have i seen a diss track begin with and uncle jesse moment for someone else’s child and end with a betterhelp ad for his father
i have to accept that i just think one entendre at a time and that’s okay
may 3rd will now be known as “real hater christmas”
y’all really thought kendrick really wasn’t hit all the ovo pressure points? man’s name is kung fu kenny
we gotta start a dialogue about entendres in rap, 12 is too many yet 2 ain’t enough
drake went from “we’re so back” to “it’s OVOver” mad quick
5 diss tracks in a week? and one is an actual banger — we’re witnessing real hate
kendrick the reverse lin-manuel: hate is hate is hate is hate
that ovo mole probably smoking a pack an hour rn
self-love? bye, sweetie. it’s time for "that person i specifically and surgically can’t STAND-hate”
drake looking at all his haters pop out of portals like thanos in endgame
“this is no ordinary darkness…this is advanced darkness” ass mood rn
what if the beef ends with security cam footage of chris hansen asking aubrey to take a seat
we're gonna have a brief interruption to our regular scheduled loosies therapy breakdown programming to have a word from our new sponsor: hate!
whether it's petty or potent, we all have a little hate in our hearts. pretending it’s “all love” is a racket sold to you by Big Civility (a subsidiary of YT Inc) to keep us “in line” or “in check” you out of justified conflict, beef, smoke, or other passive-aggressive chicanery, hullabaloo, or shenanigans of that nature
this summer, let the goon off the leash a little — have a little hate in your heart!
and remember, keeping it all inside will kill you!
(hate is not to be confused with hatred, please use hate responsibly, not for use against marginalized groups or in any -isms or -phobias)
look, today was going to be about dysfunction so I could continue the series but i had to take a pause and comment on the rap civil war for just a sec. hold on —
SHEESH. NIGGA WHAT?
i sounded like big sean adlibs all week: whoa, oh god, and swerve (i was biking while listening to euphoria) — this has been the title match we all been waiting for.
audience — check.
stage — headphones, cars, speakers, check.
fans and stans — check.
mess — checkaroo.
refs — where drake and kendrick have gone, there’s not a referee in the world who can get involved, right? who gonna call it?
j. prince can’t pull up and make kenny and aubrey sing ain’t no mountain high enough, jay-z ain’t popping up (past his bedtime and his tax bracket), diddy fighting the diddling allegations, pusha t has a conflict of interest (clearly).
whether it’s 1 v 20, 20 v 1, 1 v1, it’s a fight alright — no one’s lining up the points and calling a technical knockout. kendrick said it himself — this rap back and forth was supposed to be an exhibition but family got invoked and now it’s a death match.
i’m all about the self-love, the finding inner peace, balancing complex intergenerational dynamics, but i’m not gonna lie…i’m living for this beef. my homie nadine said i was “glowing” when i was describing the whole story — i’m locked in to all of it. this is my housewives fr. general hate is lazy and dangerous. specific hate? nothing like it.
this is masterful artful hate, unmitigated distaste, unparalleled disgust, advanced hostility. i genuinely don’t think i dislike anyone this much and i’m certain that i’ve never done anything to deserve hate of this caliber.
i had no idea shit was gonna get this nuclear but also this personal. it’s scorched earth so far at time of writing this but one thing is endlessly fascinating for me.
the quiet part out loud
the twitter fingers turning back to trigger fingers. the sneak disses turned into stomping on graves, kicking in doors, exhuming skeletons, and let me see here *checks notes* specific verses directed at specific family members. i said it before – subtext is dead it’s all about supertext now.
kendrick is calling out drake on several things: the culturing and the vulturing, the mounting allegations surrounding minors, being a deadbeat dad and horrible son, and for being a fake gangster (something that i got to say drake himself addressed on for all the dogs like it was a side quest he decided to do because he unlocked everything else).
drake is calling out kendrick for alleged spousal abuse, one of his kids not being his, also being a fake gangster with no affiliation, and being a fake activist/pillar in his community. drake is also tryna get his lick back with asap rocky (over rihanna), metro boomin, future, rick ross, and the weeknd too. while it looks like a pile-on, drake built this bed and now he gotta fight from it.
i’ll be just as direct: drake been on top of the commercial rap game for almost 15 years now – but the gimmicks ain’t gimmicking the same, the culture and the audience has shifted, he’s 37 but his content hasn’t aged with him, and he’s running out of youthful runway. the 6 god was looking like a lick and kendrick was ready to remind him he’s a mortal man and what’s more – a mortal man with more substance abuse than substance.
kendrick went straight to rack and broke drake down as a person (that therapy pack is hitting, real ones can tell) – the other allegations have been swirling to death, i wanna focus on something specific: the character of drake and the character of aubrey.
to some, drake is icarus – a man who flew too close to the sun but for some reason still won’t come crashing back to earth. to others, drake is julius caesar, doing the mr. krabs meme in real life as all of his recent collaborators poke him up with diss after verse after album after meme. either way, who is drake? a question we will be asking for as long as kendrick is allowed in the studio to keep recording diss tracks.
kendrick’s gripes are fueled by perceived disrespect — his deep entrenchment in his roots in compton and his recent excursion into the self (or would that be an incursion? english is made up anyway) – he walks a walk and talks a talk that is undeniable. when it comes to drake…everything is deniable and his origin story is unreliable.
like, we all know drake’s from toronto, we’ve seen the bar mitzvah video, we remember the degrassi drake, we remember say something drake, bedrock drake best i ever had drake – but the drake of today ain’t pulling from those roots. he playing new street-level, mob tied games and kendrick’s saying he’s playing it in our faces.
while i’m all for breaking down walls in the black global diaspora, there is an understandable possessiveness of black identity in america; a shared history but with local specificity. compton dudes don’t sound like atlanta dudes who don’t sound like new yorker or texans or chicagoan – that cultural specificity and repping the set/block/city mentality runs deep and dot don’t see that in drake. don’t get it twisted – toronto has it’s own black culture. but kendrick knows drake wasn’t in the toronto streets with the blammy, cheesin the roadmen so he alleges that drake goes everywhere else for the culture.
[note: this itself is undeniable because we've had almost a decade of memes about drake going to a different country or city and adopting their lingo and swag, wearing every basketball team's jersey and sitting courtside, and even taking a little sojourn down to the caribbean to make us all whine pon a big body gyal. don’t lie, you wouldn’t say no to a one dance]
but where is he really from? where does drake’s really stay? who or what is drake’s allegiance to? who is drake?
kendrick reminds us drake got a white Jewish mom, sandy — something even drake brings up on tracks that he’s tired of being reminded of. i’m not talking out of pocket here when i say that there are different factions of biracial people and it’s common for the “white mom, ____ father” biracials to have a different level of unpacking to do when it comes to identity (not one size fits all but it works here). that coupled with an alleged absent father in dennis graham makes for a specific swirl and kendrick says drake is lost in that spin.
drake came up with a lot more privilege than most of his rap collaborators but has pivoted into chatting shit about gang life, knife talk, first-person shooters, having opps, and collecting hip-hop trinkets (akin to snatching chains by way of sotheby’s). for someone who wasn’t raised in that lifestyle or affiliated due to neighborhood/family ties, it all feels like a costume, a character, a cosplay — and kendrick can’t stand that.
“my culture is not your costume”
the core theme of kendrick’s wrath is that drake isn’t 6 accents and fake 6 pack under an ovo trench coat. it’s that he’s a canadian, socialized around white people up into his late teens, raised by a single white jewish mother out her false claiming, false flagging, and making a mockery of the game. same game, yeah but both men are playing for keeps with different goals on what to preserve.
this is why kendrick reminds drake where he’s from (toronto), why kendrick reminds him where he should stay (as a visitor in black american culture), that his allegiance is only to himself and money (not his family, not his kid(s?), maybe to some sex offenders), and that before there was drake™️ there was aubrey. not only that but aubrey didn’t struggle and get it out the mud like tha atlanta music factory drake reups his street credibility at.
kendrick ultimately alleges that drake must be white because he claims and profits off of all these cultural touchstones without ever engaging with the other parts of blackness; “everyone wanna be black but don’t nobody wanna be black.”
kendrick’s glove artwork, the 6/16 date being tied to oj simpson, and pusha t’s use of jay-z’s the story of oj beat on 2018’s the story of adidon, all point to to drake as the embodiment of that famous phrase “i’m not black, i’m oj” — drake taps into the cultural harvest of blackness but hasn’t done (or lived through) any of the hard labor to earn that respect.
“money power respect — last one is better.” it’s what kenny has that drake craves and desires, apparently at any cost, in any costume.
aubrey evolved into drake who is evolving into…?
15 years ago feels like an eternity in hip-hop – further credence to drake being the 6 god for being here this long. we’ve watched the transformation of drake into an international superstar and the evolution of his sound, becoming a reflection of his audience’s money-making and clout-chasing aspiration, stan infatuation, and also exposing intricate masculine insecurities surrounding women, money, and desirability. this run over the last few years seems unrecognizable to the take care era (another thing drake himself has admitted on scary hours 2). he chose the streets, he chose prison culture, he chose hood adjacent affiliations — a choice a lot of his peers don’t get to make themselves (especially after 30, that’s so nuts to me).
dot said it: “i like drake with the melodies, i don’t like drake when he acts tough.” but drake has seemingly gone full method, wants to be hot boy, top shotta, a reeeeaal badman and his fans love it; it’s commercially beneficial. this begs the question to me: to anyone outside of black culture — what is the composition of commercialized blackness? is it struggle? is it disrespecting black women? is it only violence? is it sneak homophobia? if hollywood is to be believed, mostly yes. if marketability is to be believed, mostly yes.
so why is it struggle? who made it that way or is it a chicken and the egg situation? have material conditions changed to let us rap about something else?
without the newfound penchant for “demon” activities, who is drake? kendrick — who went on his own introspective healing and revealing journey detailed on mr. morale — seems to be trying to remind him and us of who he is.
my follow-up questions:
after kendrick’s exposure, will the culture or the industry care about the performance of drake? have they ever?
will we go back to simply drake let us dance, shaking our hands?
can we really not relate to his fancy life and his trials and tribulations? or can he not relate to us?
will we demand introspection from a man whose value is being a reflection of us?
who will drake be next? who can he be?
getting my own double entendre off, kendrick’s calling this a battle between character and character — we’ll see who comes forward when the dust settles.
drake and kendrick have weathered the storm of pop culture and hip-hop relevancy for 15 long years, giving stans and real hip-hop heads a hell of a week.
given the state of the music industry with a new “generational talent” coming out every 3-5 business days, i genuinely don’t think we’ll ever have a clash of the titans like this again.
rap fans are eating, but is it a messy all-you-can-eat buffet? or is it a messy repas for the death of someone’s career, character, and influence? only time will tell.
temperature check for hip-hop
last week put a lot on the front burner. i got a few burning questions for the culture:
pedo allegations — have we learned from r. kelly?
chomo allegations are a no-go (allegedly) however robert kelly’s illiterate ass cooked for 3 decades before getting put in federal timeout. as the diddler gets raided with a (heavily) rumored ovo raid on the way, are we gonna step up and investigate? or are we gonna keep stepping in the name of drake?
[note: drake responded to the pedo allegations with “the heart part 6” sunday night (by kinda admitting he might be really be a master manipulator and misunderstanding/weaponizing kendrick’s “mother i sober’s” story) but not the culture vulture bars]
what’s the power ranking now?
who are the big three? will it shift? where’s j. cole (aka the luckiest man in the game rn)?
what’s kendrick’s future looking like after this?
i’m always waiting for the next kendrick drop but ngl the way he is launching drone strikes from LA these days got me both excited and terrified. he really was marinating in peaceful, tranquil, potent hate and came out to ether this man. what’s the next kendrick era?
will we ever have beef like this ever again?
who else can push the button? tyler don’t got this type of hate for someone. keem? jid? earl? not as seismic but i feel like gambino could be this petty. he also got some of that “socialized with white people” energy that people use to delegitimize him tho. lmao what if it’s chance?
how deep does the ovo hole go? (ayoo)
who’s the mole bro. who is it? who can it be? 13 dots on the embassy — who getting cut off payroll and gotta introduce himself to the neighbors? if the mole is akademiks, will he finally get packed up?
where is pusha t? i hope he’s having a great day
that’s it (yeugh)
stand-out lyrics
not gonna hold you — euphoria gone platinum in my eardrums since it dropped. it really gives “THAT TEARS IT” energy. i’m not gonna get too deep into the follow-up responses on both drake and kendrick’s (wooof) part but in lieu of twitter, i gotta call out my stand out lyrics (mostly on euphoria because there’s 4 MORE FUCKING TRACKS
know you a master manipulator, a habitual liar too // but don't tell no lie 'bout me and i won't tell truths 'bout you
kendrick fr fr went to therapy and did the work for 5 years. you can tell from the way the way that he’s being specific about what he likes and doesn’t like and he about to go in on it for SIX MINUTES
can’t wait to use this line *oOoooOoooh*
yeah, i'm out the way, yeah, i'm low, okay // yeah, the island right here's remote, okay // i ain't thinkin' about no reaper // nigga, I'm reapin' what i sow, okay?
i appreciate that kendrick is an artist who doesn't always have to be visible in the same way that drake seems omnipresent on the charts. it solidified up top that these two dudes just live very different lives and both got the juice but one’s fresh-squeezed and one’s simply lyrical lemonade (i’ll let y’all decide who’s who)
honorable mention: the bells in the second act of the verse
them bells sounded like funeral bells at the end of each 4 count. that’s my more cowbell snl sketch
what is it? the braids?
objectively hilarious
it's always been about love and hate, now let me say i'm the biggest hater // i hate the way that you walk, the way that you talk, i hate the way that you dress // i hate the way you sneak diss, if i catch flight, it's gon' be direct
immaculate hate. no notes. clear, direct, no double entendres. kendrick just hates this man’s cellular makeup, his whole mf being.
yeah, my first one like my last one, it's a classic, you don't have one // let your core audience stomach that / then tell 'em where you get your abs from // v12, it's a fast one, bow-bow-bow, last one // headshot for the year, you better walk around like daft punk
the v12/fake abs double entendre aside for a second, that wordplay run with core, stomach, and abs from is too clever. kendrick never put out a real diss track (control was a heat check imo). i would hate it if he hated me fr because don’t entendre me like this bro, i’m a civilian
i even hate when you say the word "nigga", but that's just me, i guess // some shit just cringeworthy, it ain't even gotta be deep i guess
again, simple. “i just don’t like this about you — it’s not that serious but it really grinds my gears,” magnificent
matter of fact, i ain't even bleed him yet, can i bleed him? bet
mans had to ask himself before he violated fr fr and that’s on enthusiastic consent
why would i call around tryna get dirt on niggas? // y'all think all of my life is rap // that's ho shit, i got a son to raise, but i can see you don't know nothin' 'bout thaaaat
i dropped my phone. “nothing bout that” and “nothing bout dot” — both sending the message that drake don’t know shit
how many black features till you feel like you black enough?
features referencing the alleged nose job and also the rappers he carousels through…took me too long to realize this
honorable mention: *ooooooooh*
glazing crazy at this point but dot’s lil scooby-doo ass shudder at the end genuinely makes me laugh — like he’s even scaring himself with what he knows
🎶we don't wanna hear you say "nigga" no moooooorrre🎶
instant classic, why he sing it like that lmao
honorable mentions from the diss trackology
mhm, your son’s a sick man with sick thoughts // i think niggas like him should die (sheesh)
fuck a rap battle, this a long-life battle with yourself (damn, he read him crazy)
i'm finna pass on this body, i'm john stockton (drake can’t be jazzed about this)
tryna strike a chord and it’s probably a minorrrrr (quadruple platinum line)
they not like us x6 (goes nuts, can’t wait to play it in the club)
you run to atlanta when you need a few dollars // you not a colleague, you a fucking colonizer (i meannnnnn)
the audience not dumb // shape the stories how you want, hey drake, they not slow (i felt dumb slow unpacking every reference and detail but that’s the love of the game)
the family matter and the truth of the matter // here's god's plans to show you the liar (strategic use of drake’s songs and nicknames is so funny to me)
fuck a caption, want action (yoink — using this one)
leave the quiet person alone. protecting their peace might be protecting yours, too
stand in your truth — don’t try to be everyone, just yourself
don’t sneak diss kendrick lamar — he won’t defeat you, he will dismantle you
THE ERA OF KEEPING THAT SHIT INSIDE IS OVER
WE STEPPING OUT WITH SPECIFICS AND RECEIPTS