Kendrick Got Me Listening to Rap

Anyone who knows me personally knows that music-wise, I am not in tune with any modern rap or hip hop or whatever. Not in a corny way, but I just don't really enjoy most of modern rap and I tend to prefer more niche silly stuff. However, it was impossible to ignore the current rap beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. And I mean that literally- on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, EVERYTHING is about the rap beef. With such an inescapable cultural presence (and the insistence of a few friends) I finally decided it was time for me to tap into rap and check out the Kdot and Drake beef.

I'm going to start off with some background info on the beef because if you're like me, you have absolutely NO idea what the hell is going on, and why these two artists hate each other. My understanding of the situation is informed by old men, Twitter, and Reddit.

Essentially, they were subtly dissing each other on rap songs for years before this, but the story really starts on J Cole and Drake's song "First Person Shooter", where J Cole says 'Love when they argue the hardest MC/ Is it K-Dot? Is it Aubrey? Or me?/ We the big three like we started a league’, essentially self-proclaiming the three artists as the best rappers right now. Later on, when Metro Boomin, Future, and Kendrick released "Like That", Kendrick rejects this claim from Cole, saying ‘fuck the big 3, n**** its just big me’.

After that, it seemed to really signal a hatred between Kendrick and Drake. I'm going to skip over J Cole's role in this, because he just dropped a quick diss track on Kendrick, then deleted it and apologized publicly a few days later. Drake dropped a few songs dissing Kendrick, "Push Ups" and "Taylor Made Freestyle". Side note, but that freestyle used AI voices of Tupac and Snoop Dogg, which resulted in the song being taken down because it used AI voices without permission. As an anti-AI guy myself, this did not really attract me to Drake.

However, everything changed when Kendrick attacked. He dropped a 7 minute diss track called "euphoria", where he solely focuses on tearing down Drake. This is around the point I started paying real attention to this beef. The sheer HATRED coming from this guy hooked me. I may not be into rap, but you know what I am into? HATING. And Kendrick might just be the hating GOAT.

What really got me into the beef was Kendrick's predictions that Drake would attack his family and lie about them on his response. And you know what? He was right! Drake dropped "Family Matters", alleging that Kendrick beats his wife and that his kid had a different baby daddy.

But then out of left field Kendrick drops a response to Drake WITHIN THE HOUR. This proved he has an informant on Drake's side, and the song, "Meet the Grahams" was straight up terrifying in its delivery. The format of writing letters to each of Drake's family members telling them how much of a horrible person (along with pedo accusations) was just insane. The big drop of the song was that Drake was allegedly hiding another daughter, shocking everyone on the internet.

And literally AS I WAS WRITING THIS Drake dropped his response to MTG- where he said that the dirt that a mole was feeding Kendrick about his daughter was made up. He implied that they were baiting Kdot with the fake info and he bit. Which is CRAZY.

This is a crazy rap beef. Crazy enough to get me to care about rap.