Kendrick Lamar was clear on “euphoria”: “‘Back To Back,’ I like that record / I’ma get back to that, for the record”. A very meta punchline therefore, reference to un diss track angry Drake released during the battle between him and Meek Mill in 2015. And we want to believe that the Canadian will have needed this disagreement with the other greatest rapper on the planet to finally get out of his luxurious zone of comfort.
Until a few hours ago, in the feud between him and Kendrick Lamar, the Canadian struggled to rise to the stakes and the spiral in which he had slipped his finger. As a reminder, there was first an album by Future and Metro Boomin in which a good number of his former friends attacked him head-on. But it was Kendrick Lamar on “I Like That” who seemed the most pumped up than ever, and responding to J. Cole’s assertion that he, Drizzy and K Dot formed the Big Three of US rap: “motherfuck the big three, nigga, it’s just big me”.
This punchline was therefore at the origin of the weak “Push Ups” and “Taylor Made”, which Kendrick Lamar hastened to erase from the shelves by releasing an annihilating “euphoria”. All this in the space of a few days obviously. But it was apparently just a warm-up because that night, the climb was rapid. It all started with “6:16 in LA”, a track produced by Sounwave and Jack Antonoff which will have to wait until son sample d’Al Green be cleared before being on streaming platforms.
In the meantime, we go to Genius to understand that the song makes references to OVO Sound, Drake’s label, and to moles who are there and work for the Lamar camp. As for its title, it is as much a reference to old Drake project titles (“5AM in Toronto”, “4PM in Calabasas”, etc.) as it is a reference to Father’s Day, and therefore to Adonis, the son of Drake who played a central role in the Drake/Pusha T battle a few years ago, and who was targeted in “euphoria” when Kendrick Lamar questioned Drake’s fatherly skills – and it’s true that our Aubrey is not the father of the year.
And the family dimension of this affair, Drake must have digested it as well as the Greek you put on at the end of the night. It’s well known: we don’t touch the family and it only took him a few hours to release a “Family Matters” which begins with these words: “You mentioned my seed, now deal with his dad / I gotta go bad, I gotta go bad.” And that’s when we feel that everything is possible.
In any case, on 7 minutes more energetic than his last three albums combined, Drake fires live bullets and spares no one: from Metro Boomin to Rick Ross via Future, everyone takes their place, even if it is never very elegant. And then just to put a good big coin back into the machine, he ends by implying that, not content with having cheated on his current partner, Kendrick Lamar has been violent in the past (“They hired a crisis management team / To clean up the fact that you beat on your queen”).
And this is where we say to ourselves that on both camps, we must spend our time chasing away the disgusting rumor and crafting killer punchlines. Because less than an hour later (!), Kendrick Lamar already sent his response to Drake, in the form of a new track entitled “meet the grahams” – a phenomenal production from The Alchemist.
And if Kendrick Lamar keeps his calm, the attacks are more frontal than ever, and target Drake’s inner circle, Kendrick Lamar addressing Adonis directly (“Dear Adonis, I’m sorry that that man is your father, let me be honest / It takes a man to be a man, your dad is not responsive”) and to Drake’s mother (“Dear Sandra, your son got some habits, I hope you don’t undermine them / Especially with all the girls that’s hurt inside this climate). And then as if to make us understand that he has perhaps said everything about Drake and his toxicity, he ends with this sentence, elegant and impactful like its author: “Fuck a rap battle / This a lifelong battle with yourself”.
We told you “maybe”, and this morning, before Drake even had time to respond, we woke up to the sound of “Not Like Us”, new diss track by Kendrick Lamar, this time produced by DJ Mustard . A track that trades its menacing piano for a beat that bounces like a gleaming lowrider. And inside, a hell of an engine ridden by a Kendrick Lamar more revved up than ever since the start of the confrontation. “Not Like Us” opens with a “pssst I see dead people” which hurts a lot, and continues with a series of punchlines which target Drake of course (we really liked the “You run to Atlanta when you need a check balance”), but also his friends from OVO and all the shady or criminally reprehensible things they could have been guilty of (“Certified Lover Boy? Certified pedophiles”).
It’s still of rare violence and we hope for only one thing: that Drake, whatever we may think of him and his trajectory in recent years, rises to the level of a skirmish that has entered in the pantheon of the most legendary feuds of US rap in just one weekend.
