Seven years ago, Jake Paul—yes, bear with me here—released “It’s Everyday Bro,” a rap diss track about his ex-girlfriend, the Vine star Alissa Violet. The song was the product of a bad breakup and the all-consuming drive of everyone involved to turn every aspect of their lives into content; Alissa Violet and the YouTuber RiceGum would eventually respond to “It’s Everyday Bro” with “It’s Every Night Sis.” “It’s Everyday Bro” was an exceedingly cringeworthy song with a painfully generic trap beat, an amateur flow, and goofy lyrics. But the song, as a meme, was unquestionably effective in boosting the hate-him-or-love-him social media stardom of Paul. He wasn’t even a rapper; “It’s Everyday Bro” was a novelty song. At the time, before his pursuit of professional boxing, Paul was a comedy vlogger mostly known for posting stunts, pranks, and flexes. YouTubers sell drama, and no one else in the mid-2010s sold drama better than Jake Paul and his brother, Logan. The success of the gimmick was concrete: As of this writing, the music video for “It’s Everyday Bro” has more than 300 million views.
The underanalyzed cultural shift in the wave of diss tracks that flooded YouTube after “It’s Everyday Bro,” from 2017 through 2019, is the very fact of rap beef becoming the default framing for a bunch of suburban brats to work out their differences. Dissing was once a relatively niche aspect of an ascendant subculture. Obviously musicians in other genres have feuded, but dissing via song was a particular craft and really made sense only in the context of hip-hop. This was a musical style that, from its formative decade, was all about combative postures and the competitive exchange of lyrics. Beefs might be deeply personal or largely philosophical. Beefs were often esoteric and occasionally violent. But then hip-hop became the biggest musical genre in the world in the 2010s, and so it was perhaps inevitable that dissing would become big business.
“It’s Everyday Bro” and “It’s Every Night Sis” came only a couple of years after Drake released “Back to Back,” the second of two diss tracks that he released in his spectacular humiliation of Meek Mill. That feud was its own watershed moment, culminating as it did with a weirdly devastating meme slideshow on the main stage at OVO Fest 2015—an echo of Jay-Z’s clowning of Prodigy on the 2001 Summer Jam screen but escalated to new heights. Drake outrapped Meek on “Back to Back,” yes, but crucially he also made a point to fight Meek on the terms of the modern internet, at the pace of Twitter, releasing “Charged Up” and “Back to Back” just a couple of days apart. 50 Cent pioneered this unrelenting, extremely online style of rap beef in his ancient feud with Rick Ross, but Drake perfected the craft and set the standard for diss tracks in the age of social media. Nearly a year after he eviscerated Meek, Drake hosted Saturday Night Live and starred in a sketch, “Drake’s Beef,” spoofing “Back to Back.” This was a sign of how big Drake had become by the second half of the 2010s, how badly he’d beaten Meek, and how thoroughly mainstream the whole notion of rap beef had become at this point.
But rap disses themselves weren’t chart toppers until very recently. In February, Megan Thee Stallion went no. 1 with “Hiss,” a diss track about Nicki Minaj; Nicki scored a modest hit of her own, at no. 23, with her response, “Big Foot.” Then, Drake vs. Kendrick Lamar became something much bigger than any rap beef before it—a flurry of legitimate hits that are still reverberating on the song charts. Last month, at the height of their feud, Drake (“Push Ups,” “Family Matters”) and Kendrick (“Like That,” “Euphoria,” “Meet the Grahams,” “Not Like Us”) both launched a handful of disses into the Top 20, with two of Kendrick’s disses, “Like That” and “Not Like Us,” each becoming the biggest song in the country at different points. “Not Like Us” in particular has achieved an unprecedented ubiquity for a rap diss. “Like That” was a no. 1 hit but also a relatively low-key trap record full of explicit but measured aggression; “Not Like Us” is a comparatively wild record that features Kendrick shouting, “Certified Lover Boy? Certified pedophiles!” Commercially, “Not Like Us” is the biggest rap diss since “Back to Back,” except “Back to Back,” as much of a meme as it was, never broke into Top 20; the song peaked just shy, at no. 21, in its 20 weeks on the Hot 100. And make no mistake—Drake outdid himself, too. He clearly lost the war with Kendrick, and “Push Ups” is currently kicking rocks at the bottom of the chart, at no. 91, but even that song, with the weakest commercial performance in this whole series of diss tracks, debuted at no. 19 and outperformed “Back to Back.” “BBL Drizzy” is an instrumental track (!) that didn’t even chart (!!) and yet spawned a megaviral remix craze, a.k.a., #bbldrizzybeatgiveaway, as Metro Boomin’s novel contribution—as a producer who doesn’t even rap—to the war on Drake. (“BBL Drizzy” did eventually sneak onto the chart via Sexyy Red’s “U My Everything,” which featured Drake himself briefly rapping over a flip and peaked at no. 44.)
A month after the most surreal weekend in hip-hop history, “Like That” and “Not Like Us” remain in the Top 15, and while Post Malone and Morgan Wallen have overtaken the former in the no. 1 spot with “I Had Some Help,” “Not Like Us” has held firm for the past few weeks in the Top 5. Drake’s songs have tumbled down the charts, though Kendrick’s “Meet the Grahams” suffered the sharpest fall, from no. 12 to out of the Hot 100 altogether. Drake and Kendrick both appear to have moved on at this point; Drake’s too busy wearing enormous trousers to his son’s soccer game, and last week he resurfaced as a guest on Toronto comedian Snowd4y’s peculiar parody of “Hey There Delilah.” The conflict is largely settled but the aftermath is still something to behold. “Like That” had a three-week run at no. 1 and is still going strong, months after its release. “Not Like Us” is an early contender for the song of the summer.
That’s a level of success that has long eluded even the most legendary diss tracks in the most high-profile feuds. “No Vaseline,” “Hit ’Em Up,” “Ether,” “Takeover”—none of these songs charted as high as you might imagine. The only bona fide hits in our recent ranking of greatest diss tracks that (1) name names and (2) don’t feature Drake or Kendrick Lamar are Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg dissing Eazy-E on “Dre Day,” peaking at no. 8 in June 1993; there’s also Eazy dissing Dre and Snoop on “Real Muthaphuckkin G’s,” peaking at no. 42 in December 1993. There areplenty of low-key disses that have fared better, of course. 50 Cent’s “Wanksta” was a veiled dig at Ja Rule. Lauryn Hill won a Grammy for the album that included “Lost Ones,” a veiled dig at Wyclef. But there’s nothing quite like “Euphoria,” “Family Matters,” and “Not Like Us”—intensely combative and personally scathing records that somehow became the biggest songs in the country.
It’s been seven years since Jake Paul launched an insufferable wave of cheesy diss tracks among clout-chasing YouTubers; nearly a decade since “Back to Back” effectively transformed rap beef into mega-viral warfare. Drake outhustled Meek, and then Kendrick outhustled Drake—surely this is only the beginning of rappers, and others, dissing their way to no. 1.
