The biggest hip-hop beef of the decade continued to get bigger over the weekend, with Kendrick Lamar dropping two new vicious Drake diss songs, "Not Like Us" and "Meet the Grahams," within a 24-hour period on May 4. The latter arrived within hours of Drake's "Family Matters," itself a response to Lamar's "6:16 in L.A." Lamar didn't even wait for Drake to respond before unleashing "Not Like Us," which set the internet alight with some particularly disturbing allegations.
"Not Like Us" represents Lamar's fourth anti-Aubrey Graham broadside since March, when the long-simmering Cold War between the two hip-hop heavyweights exploded into life with his surprise verse on Future and Metro Boomin's "Like That." Drake has now released two counterattacks, not counting the AI-assisted "Taylor Made Freestyle," which was pulled from circulation after the estate of Tupac Shakur threatened legal action.
"Not Like Us," which Lamar released alongside artwork that appears to show Drake's Toronto home with sex-offender-map graphics, takes brutal aim at both Drake and his associates for unspecified sexual misdeeds, at one point explicitly calling the group "certified pedophiles" and taunting "ain't you tired? Trying to strike a chord and it's probably A-Minor." Those ugly accusations followed some similarly out-of-pocket personal jabs from Drake's "Family Matters," in which he claimed that one of Lamar's children was fathered by the rapper's longtime label associate Dave Free, and seemed to imply that Lamar had abused his wife by way of a joke about his height, rapping: "When you put your hands on your girl, is it self-defense 'cause she bigger than you?"
(Needless to say, neither Lamar nor Drake have ever been credibly accused of any of the serious crimes mentioned in either of these songs.)
Lamar's previous track, "Meet the Grahams," was equally personal, with Lamar addressing specific members of Drake's family, from his son to his father and his mother, before finally offering "advice" to Drake himself in the closing verse. He raps: "You got gambling problems, drinking problems, pill-popping and spending problems / Bad with money, whorehouse soliciting women problems, therapy's a lovely start."
Drake and Lamar continued to exchange increasingly ugly accusations over the weekend.
As hip-hop's only Pulitzer Prize winner continues to escalate his war with one of the best-selling pop stars of the current century, the beef has broken out of any containment to hip-hop circles. In her appearance of Saturday Night Live on May 4, guest host Dua Lipa portrayed a morning news correspondent attempting to explain the feud to confused viewers, providing such helpful insights as: “One clue is on the song ‘Euphoria,’ when Kendrick describes Drake as Canadian, that’s because Drake is from Toronto."
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For those who need a refresher, the two rappers have reportedly been less than fond of one another for years, but their beef finally exploded onto wax in late March when Lamar took some barely-veiled shots at both Drake and J. Cole on the song from Future and Metro Boomin's album We Don't Trust You. (The squabble has since grown to encompass a wide cross-section of hip-hop names, including Rick Ross and Kanye West.) Cole issued the first response, "7 Minute Drill," then tapped out of the feud and removed the song from his latest release, later calling it "the lamest s--t I ever did in my f--king life." Drake issued a belated response with the leaked track "Push Ups," then took the dispute into uncanny valley territory with "Taylor Made Freestyle," which taunted Lamar with AI-generated vocals in the style of Tupac and Snoop Dogg.
Lamar hit back again with the six-minute, scorched-earth "Euphoria," and the free-for-all has been ongoing ever since.
