What Are We to Do With All This Nastiness?

The long-standing cold war between Drake and Kendrick Lamar came to a head over the weekend in a gauntlet of diss tracks and rapid responses that challenged both rap heavyweights’ character in music and outside of it. The tone of the feud to this point had consisted mostly of jokes about shoe sizes and tier rankings of popular rappers. But Drake’s “Family Matters” and “The Heart Part 6” — and Lamar’s “Meet the Grahams” and “Not Like Us” — were each calculated acts of reputational damage and self-repair whose speed, density, and discursiveness bore a closer resemblance to a quick and rugged social-media dustup than rap beeves of the past, disagreements which cooked on a much lower simmer. It took three months for Nas to one-up Jay-Z’s “Takeover,” releasing “Ether” on his frenemy’s 2001 birthday. It took three days to paint Drake into the corner of releasing “The Heart Part 6” — a miserable tune which cuts into Kendrick’s series like Young Thug dropping Barter 6 before Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter V — to deny an attraction to teens while cracking wise about molestation, calamitously misreading Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers’s “Mother I Sober,” a song about Kendrick’s mother facing trauma. It almost felt like the five weeks of provocations since “Like That” were guiding Drake to this flameout, like the OVO Sound chief got cornered by the same methods he uses for his detractors: circling and striking faster than they could anticipate, forcing his disoriented opponents into embarrassing moves that are smugly brushed off.

It was a public-relations coup getting Drake to say any of this, to grace his signature sound — gooey vocal samples, understated drums, watery synths, enveloping reverb — with point-by-point rejections of grim accusations: “I’m your baby mama’s screen saver / Only fuckin’ with Whitneys, not Millie Bobby Browns, I’d never look twice at no teenager.” Detached cool is his cachet and he has had to deliver truly ghastly lines dismissing allegations of pedophilia in the usual icily domineering manner. To rebut, he offered volatile insinuations about the self-professed Mr. Morale not living up to the righteous ire of his own back catalogue: “ ‘The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice’ / We get that you like to put gin in your juice / We get that you think that you Bishop in Juice / When you put your hands on your girl, is it self-defense ’cause she bigger than you?” Blowing up a potential victim’s story on a track sent to streaming services for chart tallies didn’t scan as concern for a woman’s well-being, and jokes about childhood abuse in “The Heart” did nothing to soften the impression. “Meet the Grahams” attempted to re-create the scene of Pusha T’s “The Story of Adidon,” purporting to reveal a secret daughter Drake has been hiding while telling three generations of the family that Lamar thinks their relative deserves to die; “Matters” and “Heart” insisted that PgLang co-founder Dave Free is secretly the father of one of Kendrick’s children. Deep fact-checks are in order that we may never see, although fans’ minds are already made up: If you stan Drake, Kendrick rehashed ten years of Twitter banter; if you keep a ranking of “Heart” parts, you celebrated an indiscriminate trouncing.

In a season of asking Republicans in Congress whether they will certify the presidential-election results, we should entertain an outcome where both artists and their cults of personality assert victory forever, though the theater of the weekend did not point to this much uncertainty. Saturday clubgoers danced to Kendrick’s scathing “Not Like Us” — “Certified Lover Boy? Certified pedophiles!” — and Metro deputized a wave of DIY rappers to roast Drake, yielding colorful results in different languages and international musical traditions. The booming DJ Mustard beat of “Not Like Us” — Los Angeles’s revenge, you’d think, for the affront of the deleted “Taylor Made Freestyle,” whose AI 2Pac voice failed to account for a litigious Shakur estate — brought levity and relief to the dreary back-and-forth. “Not Like Us” was received like Beowulf delivering Grendel’s head to the Geats, standing in stark contrast to the conquering 2015 OVO Fest set where Drake shared Meek Mill memes after stopping him cold with the double-play of “Charged Up” and “Back to Back.” Embarrassing Meek created the titan who spent the next decade squabbling intermittently with his own rap OGs; the hate Drake shows for Joe Budden and Pusha T is the fermented admiration of a diehard. “Not Like Us” whittles the idea into a shiv — “He a fan, he a fan, he a fan” — and then, like a problematic celebrity thread, outlines deep lore inconsistencies, seeking your conclusions.

The success of Kendrick’s campaign is partly owed to exhaustion with Drake’s combativeness and cultural saturation. He’s nigh-inescapable, ever-present on charts. He picks fights he doesn’t need to. His music revels in spite, stalking through lavish, private, lonely vistas. Eighteen years into this career, you’re either locked in and loving it or varying degrees of checked out. Kendrick frames himself as a photo-negative of this solipsism and predictability and draws on a long backlog of concerns to craft a composite of a rival caught in constant, nervous transformation sparing no expense to take the form the crowd finds pleasing. Kendrick tying Drake to a history of exploitation of Black entrepreneurship in America in “Not Like Us” recasts the Toronto rapper’s all-star roster of Southern collaborators as sharecroppers enduring a white tycoon: “You run to Atlanta when you need a few dollars / No, you not a colleague, you a fuckin’ colonizer.”

A case is being made and bolstered by music-industry character witnesses, fairly or not, that Drake collects tokens of authenticity and takes more than he gives to culture. Neglecting to truly reckon with the gravity of that in his replies and laughing anything off as far-fetched in an era where a lie never dies is a catastrophic miscalculation on par with refusing to make a more concerted stink about his peers diminishing his Blackness. (Ross calling the guy “white boy” after letting him say “nigga” on 15 years of MMG releases could have come up. Instead, the Boy peddled Ozempic rumors.) He played scrappy defense while pushing a point worth unpacking — “They hired a crisis-management team to clean up the fact that you beat on your queen” — only to get boxed out by a nearly seven-minute lyrical barrage. This worked so well that you wondered whether Lamar kept the diabolical family-tree rumors of “Meet the Grahams” tucked away for the purpose of rinsing out unflattering press. Was this his political pundit play?

Like demagogues, both rappers and their admirers threatened to travel a step too far, to redefine what “too far” even meant, from the start of “Meet the Grahams” — “Dear Adonis, I’m sorry that that man is your father” — to the counting of everyone’s Black grandparents to the treatment of domestic and sexual abuse as gotchas. It was fun until it wasn’t. It was a race to design the most insulting sentence that succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Both rappers have made statements capable of inciting real-world violence; the lesson in the deaths of legends like 2Pac is never to let a war of words devolve into crashing out. News of a security guard being shot in a drive-by outside Drake’s Toronto home, the one broadcasted on the artwork of “Not Like Us,” says the rhetoric has tiptoed down the darkest corridors again. It’s all kayfabe until it isn’t.

It almost felt like the grisly subject matter and unwelcome pacing of this spectacle, a ruder song lurking around the corner after every promising drop, were meant to goad the Toronto star into the unrepentant messiness he displayed. He could say that we instigated this because we wouldn’t lay off him before the facial-hair and gangster parables. He learned to adapt roast by roast. Instead, he deflected hard, cracking gay jokes about the Weeknd while a consortium of former collaborators mourned the ghosts of kinder Drakes past. It’s tough to see a long-term impact for an artist who has been too big to fail since the Obama administration; it was just a shock to see his death grip on his own narrative loosen even a little and a disappointment to be reminded that pop commodities like Kendrick, Drake, and Metro will resort to homophobia to toughen up their image.

Kendrick, for his part, is losing something just as notable, though he seems eager to get rid of it: He can’t be a paragon of respectability anymore. (This was always an iffy choice; no matter how histrionic the love for his mind and music can be, his flaws are well-documented.) He put on too evil a show over the weekend to expect him to validate whatever politics of unity “Alright” got us to pin on him. He distanced himself from the trappings of wokeness while serving Drake up to white interloper and colorism discourse while the fight spotlighted his comedy chops, storytelling, and conspiratorial flights, mirroring  Mr. Morale’s thirst for controversy. It may not be wise to expect this artist whose entire body of work so far in the distressful 2024 has focused on getting under one guy’s skin to return to rapping about spirituality and togetherness.

The sense that these claustrophobic boom-bap and trap tunes cataloguing potential violence toward women and girls won’t put a dent in anyone’s business machine is depressing. And why wait till the seventh-inning stretch here to get into it? If K. Dot hated associating with men accused of sex crimes, why would he insist on featuring Kodak Black on Mr. Morale? It really sounds like a rapper’s deceptions, delusions, and misdoings are overlooked in the business until they become useful to someone as ammunition, like in the year of “Big Foot” and “No Diddy” every misfortune will eventually be fed screaming into the meme grinder. The press that barely pushed back on Mr. Morale’s glaring foibles — not deadnaming and gay slurs, not juxtaposing the tender “Mother I Sober” and Kodak, not boosting the self-help quack — is probably not holding anyone’s feet to the fire about this flurry of partner abuse and grooming allegations. Commentators jostling for the blessing of texts and DMs from “6 God” don’t seem anxious to lose the light of clout by asking obvious questions. (In a climate of misinformation, baiting your mortal enemy with bad intel about your family and/or sexual proclivities, letting people play disrespectful sax at your expense, was your master-manipulator play?)

What are we to do with all of this nastiness? The horrors this battle gestures to ought to make us rethink the urge to crow for no-holds-barred conflict in rap and erode the blind faith in the morality of the musicians in our playlists. “Not Like Us” suggests shrewder choices about consumption — not shooting anyone — but standing on business means cutting a lot of people off and ending the game of favorites that lets artists skate on all manner of misconduct as long as their music and message are accessible or uplifting enough. Will that happen, or do we all disperse to the four winds, sated by the catharsis of spectating a fight we’ve been waiting for since 2013, changing nothing?