A battle between two major artists has been dominating the world of music. It’s a fight over one song — a song that may get its biggest stage ever at this weekend’s Super Bowl.Joe Coscarelli, a culture reporter for The New York Times, explains the feud between Kendrick Lamar and Drake, how Lamar’s “Not Like Us” ripped the music world apart, and why so many fell in love with a song about hate.Guest: Joe Coscarelli, a culture reporter for The New York Times, who focuses on popular music and co-hosts the podcast “Popcast (Deluxe).”Background reading: “Not Like Us” reinvented Kendrick Lamar. Is the Super Bowl ready for it?Listen to “Popcast (Deluxe)” breaking down the feud.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Monica Schipper/Getty Images for The Recording Academy; zz, via GOTPAP, via STAR MAX, via IPx, via Associated Press Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What is the battle between Kendrick Lamar and Drake about?
From The New York Times, this is The Daily. I'm Natalie Ketroa. Today, we're taking a break from the battles unfolding in Washington to talk about another battle that's been dominating the world of music. It's a fight between two major artists over one song. And that fight and that song may get their biggest stage ever at this weekend's Super Bowl.
My colleague, Joe Coscarelli, explains how a diss track ripped the music world apart and why so many of us fell in love with the song about hate. It's Friday, February 7th. Joe, hi. Welcome back to the show.
Hey, Natalie. Thanks so much for having me.
This weekend is obviously the Super Bowl. And while I very specifically will be watching to see my Philadelphia Eagles play Go Birds, a lot of people will be tuning in to watch Kendrick Lamar perform at halftime and not necessarily to hear him play his greatest hits, but to hear one song in particular. Let's talk about that song.
Chapter 2: Why is Kendrick Lamar performing at the Super Bowl?
So Kendrick Lamar is one of the biggest rappers in the world, both now and for the past decade. He's the first rapper to ever headline the Super Bowl solo. I think that's worth noting. But you're right, one big reason he's at the Super Bowl this year is because of the enormous popularity of one song that he put out last year called Not Like Us. Not Like Us was a number one hit.
It is quickly on its way to becoming Kendrick's most popular and maybe defining song. And that's pretty weird.
Why? Say more about that.
So this is a diss track, which is fairly normal in rap music. Two rappers, they square off and rap about how they're better than one another and who's richer and more popular.
But diss tracks don't typically become pop hits, and especially diss tracks as venomous as this one, in which Kendrick is calling Drake another rapper, a big fake, a total user of other people, and most specifically, a pedophile.
And not only is he saying these horrible things about another artist by name, but that other artist is Drake, probably the most popular rapper, if not pop star, of the last decade. And all of this has led to probably the most unusual lawsuit in the history of music.
OK, I'm going to ask you to just take us on a little daily style journey here to explain how the world fell in love with this song, which ends up both in court and at the halftime show of the Super Bowl.
Well, I think you have to start with these two artists, who they are, where they came from and what they've come to represent.
Let's do that. Tell me about them.
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Chapter 3: How did the feud between Kendrick and Drake begin?
Calls him a bum. Drake responds by releasing a song...
Basically daring Kendrick to come at him directly and have this big fight that's been bubbling up for so many years. Drake's track is about how Kendrick is really short, has a bad record deal.
And that Drake is richer and more successful than Kendrick could ever be.
It sounds like this starts as pretty typical rap beef stuff. Standard fare. I mean, I'm a better rapper than you. I make more money than you. Par for the course in some ways.
Yeah, and Drake's feeling so confident that this isn't really something Kendrick does. Kendrick doesn't come out to play in this way. That Drake is basically daring him to come back. And Drake goes so far as to release a song... in which he pretends to be Tupac and Snoop Dogg using AI. These are two West Coast rap legends. These are Kendrick's heroes. He's from Compton, California.
And Drake is rapping in their voices, daring Kendrick to come back at him.
Drake is basically trolling Kendrick, testing him even. Like, are you really going to step into the ring with me?
Yeah, and this is Drake's ring. Drake loves playing on the internet. He loves memes. He loves speaking the language of young people. Whereas Kendrick likes to float above it all. He's riding his bike by the beach with no cell phone, only popping in every five years with a concept album. And Drake basically doesn't think that Kendrick is ever going to take his bait.
And he's really high on that feeling that he's going to dominate his rival on his own home turf.
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Chapter 4: What are the key elements of Kendrick's diss track 'Not Like Us'?
And that chorus is partly what makes this the song of the summer, right? They not like us. played in clubs and parties around the world. People literally screaming these lines out loud. Screaming these accusations about Drake back to a DJ.
Yeah, this song hits the top of the Billboard charts. And because its chorus is so easily adoptable, this us versus them mentality, Not Like Us is immediately everywhere.
Are you all ready to see the Vice President of the United States?
It's at Kamala Harris rallies. It's in the clubhouse when the Dodgers win the World Series.
That's a bar mitzvah though, they don't like drink.
I talked to a bar mitzvah DJ in Los Angeles, and he said there was no song last year that 13-year-olds wanted to sing and scream and mosh and dance to on the floor of their party than Not Like Us.
Unbelievable.
And that, to me, is just baffling when you think about the specifics of this song.
And you have to imagine that Kendrick Lamar never thought he was going to be such a star of the bar mitzvah circuit. Is it a little ironic that the thing that propelled the artist's artist, Kendrick Lamar, to new heights was making a kind of poppy hit? Maybe it'd be fair to say following Drake's playbook?
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Chapter 5: What accusations does Kendrick make against Drake?
We'll be right back. Joe, tell us about this lawsuit.
So just last month, Drake formally sues Universal Music Group, which is not only the biggest record label in the world, but it's the one that represents both Drake and Kendrick Lamar. And Drake sues the label for defamation.
Essentially, Drake saying, Kendrick called me a pedophile. I'm not one. That's defamatory.
Yes. They're saying that this rap battle went beyond some artistic spat and turned very real. In the days after Not Like Us was released, there was a shooting outside of Drake's house in Toronto. A security guard was seriously wounded, and the police haven't said who did that or why.
But then there was a break-in a couple of days later, and Drake says he had to pull his son out of school because of security concerns. And the lawsuit is drawing a straight line directly to the allegations of pedophilia in Not Like Us.
The suit is saying some of the listeners to this song really believed what was in it. They took the allegations literally and then took it upon themselves to react.
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Chapter 6: How does public perception play a role in this feud?
Right. The lawsuit calls it vigilante justice.
But why does Drake sue the record label and not Kendrick himself?
So I think this is a complex question, and part of it has to do with how the song was released and promoted. Drake is basically saying that the label had a huge hand in making this song not only popular, but received as fact. He's saying that they're the ones who... pushed it to the radio, who made sure it could stream heavily on YouTube and Spotify. They're selling it to television shows.
And the legal argument is that Universal, UMG, had the responsibility to know that these claims against Drake were not true. To prove defamation against a public figure, you not only have to prove that the information was false, but that they knew it was false.
And Drake is saying, UMG, this company that's given him hundreds of millions of dollars over the years, they should have known if one of their biggest, most valuable assets was a pedophile.
Right. The argument here by Drake's lawyers is that the label is liable because they wouldn't have invested in this artist, theoretically, if they knew he was a criminal.
Yes.
And is that the main issue here? The question of whether the label was promoting a song they knew to be a lie?
Yeah, I think that's what's at the heart of this lawsuit. And Drake is saying, look, the song is one thing, but hey, look at the cover art. The cover art is an aerial photo of my home, and it has markers on it meant to indicate the presence of sex offenders. The music video has Kendrick Lamar hopscotching, you know, alluding to children.
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Chapter 7: What makes 'Not Like Us' resonate with fans?
And what does that label, UMG, say to all this?
UMG says that not only is all of this untrue, but why would we want to hurt one of our most valuable artists? They call it illogical. They say, Drake has been in many rap battles and we've put out his songs and promoted them heavily. They're saying he does this all the time.
that UMG distributes his music in which he says outrageous things about other people and expresses his own feelings about other artists. They say he's now seeking to weaponize the legal process to silence an artist's creative expression.
Yeah, I've been thinking about this this whole time, Joe. The whole point of a rap battle is for people to be insulting each other. And obviously, sometimes that includes saying really horrible things. How beyond the pale is the pedophilia accusation, just relatively speaking?
Rat beefs in the past have gotten super nasty, but I think listeners have started to take them more literally. And Drake's lawyers are essentially saying that pedophilia is a red line, that it is a cultural dog whistle that means something very specific. And it's not part of the hyperbole that we usually get in rap songs.
They gave me this new statement and they say that UMG is hiding behind calling its actions entertainment, but that there's nothing entertaining about pedophilia or child abuse. They're saying that when people hear those words and those accusations, they take them seriously and they take them literally.
Do we know how likely it is that Drake will actually prevail in this suit?
I don't think this is a slam dunk for either side. There's a lot of leeway for Kendrick and UMG to say, hey, this is just rap. But I have talked to people in the industry who think this is a real case. And Drake is being represented here by a real heavyweight, the lawyer Michael Gottlieb behind this lawsuit. He's won some huge defamation cases against Rudy Giuliani, for instance.
He also repped the restaurant in Pizzagate that was shot up by somebody who believed there was pedophilia happening in the basement because of unfounded online rumors. He's won some enormous cases on this very subject. And if that winning streak continues, Drake could be seeing a huge financial payout.
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