Hosts
Justin Charity
Justin CharityAbout the episode
Ahead of Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime performance, Ringer senior staff writer Justin Charity explores some of the critical moments of Kendrick’s story: from a legendary come-up in the rap blog era of the late 2000s to his early stardom in the 2010s to his fiery resurgence in the past several months as he takes a never-ending victory lap after winning his war against Drake.
Host: Justin Charity
Producers: Vikram Patel, Justin Sayles, Chelsea Stark-Jones, and Bobby Wagner
Story Editing: Aric Jenkins
Sound Design, Mixing, and Mastering: Bobby Wagner
Summary
In the following excerpt, Justin Charity gives some historical context to the Kendrick-Drake beef, and begins to analyze Kendrick’s case against Drake.
For so long, Drake was the consummate collaborator and the ultimate gatekeeper. He was the last artist you wanted to cross if you were trying to build or advance a mainstream rap career in the 2010s.
Meek learned the hard way; Drake made an example of him, and everyone else—well, everyone but Pusha T, Kanye, and Sauce Walka—shut the fuck up. Held their tongue. Smiled through their teeth. Bided their time.
On “euphoria,” Kendrick is saying a lot of things that a lot of people already knew or had already been thinking about Drake for a very long time. This is a deliberate aspect of Kendrick’s campaign against Drake; a crucial aspect. Because ultimately Kendrick is dissing the most popular rapper of the past decade, and he needs his criticisms to resonate deeply and immediately.
Van Lathan, cohost of Higher Learning and Midnight Boys for the Ringer Podcast Network, compares it to the case that Jay-Z built against Nas on “Takeover” during their legendary feud in the 2000s. Jay’s insults resonated before he even put them on the record. Nas has been making some wack songs lately. He’s fallen so far from Illmatic. What’s with all this weird mafioso tough talk? It’s so fake. That’s not him. He’s having an identity crisis. Truthfully, we were already thinking it.
“But then Jay went, ‘Oh, wait a minute. You are not living up to what we thought you were going to be. You are in a rut and a funk,” Lathan says. “And when Jay said it, we were like, ‘Oh, shit. Somebody said it.’”
Hip-hop writer Jayson Buford draws a similar comparison about Jay-Z and Nas and the whole “saying the quiet part out loud” aspect of rap beef.
“People thought for years that Nas was this fake-woke cornball, and Hov exposed that,” Buford says. “People thought for years that Hov was this careerist who was jumping from mentor to mentor, and Nas exposed that.”
Drake, up to this point in his career, had experienced a different sort of rap beef.
When Pusha T got on a record and said to Drake, and announced to the world, “You are hiding a child,” blowing up his spot so dramatically, he maybe inadvertently popularized this sort of revisionist notion—that beefs are won or lost on revelations.
That was clearly Drake’s outlook on the beef with Kendrick—Drake was out to expose Kendrick, in some novel way. But Kendrick wasn’t strictly out to expose Drake. He chased a few rumors about Drake’s personal life—rumors about him getting cosmetic surgery on his abs, for instance—but Kendrick was mainly following the Jay-Nas example. Kendrick was out to reinforce every bit of existing criticism of Drake, every bit of skepticism, every bit of disgust that had at that point been festering for more than a decade.
This is a referendum. And people don’t always turn on you because of the facts, or because you did one specific thing. You can lose people over time for a variety of reasons—reasons that add up, until a critical mass of people are fed up.
