BAD BLOOD BEEF

“For all your dogs gettin’ buried/ That’s a K with all these nines, he gon’ see Pet Sematary.” - Kendrick Lamar from Metro Boomin's "Like That".

Well, it looks like this generation's rap beef is over, at least for now. Compared to the good old days of drive-bys and shoot-em-ups between East Coast and West Coast this one seemed relatively tame (one injured security guard aside) and a little more handbags at dawn than pistols.

Nevertheless, while the beef was beefing there was some entertainment to be had as an outsider looking in on this weird dance of ego peacocking.

For those of you who don't know what I'm on about, imagine a poison pen letter contest but where each letter becomes increasingly more toxic and where one competitor in the back and forth is getting increasingly sicker (in the Biggie Smalls sense of the word) while the other is just getting sick (in the metaphorical sense).

There's no point me curating a history of the recent battle feud between rappers Drake (Toronto, Canada) and Kendrick Lamar (Compton, California) as it's too dense and murky to succinctly summarise and I can't truly pretend to be an expert on the subject either, but as I loosely understand it what we've just witnessed lately has been a multi-level battle between Drake, the slick, corporate golden goose of rap and the perceived to be more raw and authentic hip hop poet laureate of America, Kendrick Lamar (a Nobel Prize Winner no less).

It's been both a psychological game of chess between two rivals and possibly a battle for the soul and future of rap where the battle lines have been drawn on a myriad of fronts. As a sort of dissection of black consciousness in mainstream culture in 2024, it was impossible not to think back to comedian Katt Williams's instantly iconic interview on 'Club Shay Shay' where he said with great intent that 'all lies will be exposed in 2024', alluding mostly to scandals within the American entertainment industry. The most notably being that of P Diddy with multiple lawsuits alleging him to be guilty of sexual assault, sex trafficking and the procurement of illicit drugs.

Williams's prophesy about exposing lies has been at the heart of the current feud between Drake and Kendrick where there has been an obvious desire to see who can unearth more skeletons from each other's respective cupboards, perhaps in a bid to get each other ultimately cancelled. Of the two men, Drake has come off worse from the bitter feud as accusations of an alleged neglected daughter was brought to light (later disputed by Drake) while Lamar has been mocked for faux machismo and faux intellectual and moral superiority whilst being in a dysfunctional relationship with his fiancée, Whitney Alford where some vague rumours of domestic abuse had surfaced. A Le Carré-style mole had been reported to be set up by Drake to feed back fake information to Lamar's inner circle but no one knows for sure if this is merely a damage limitation exercise to deflect from painful truths. But ultimately, in this rapid gun battle of diss tracks, the real game in play has really been to see who has the most credibility as a cipher assassin and who can nudge the needle in their perceived status as the leading rapper of their day. Judging by the data analytics alone, Lamar outperformed Drake massively and it appears that a line has been drawn in the sand, at least for now.

These lines though can be easily forgotten and washed away in this ADD world of ours unlike in the past where figures such as Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur drew their lines in blood and paid for their feuds with their lives.