Kendrick Lamar will kill your favorite rapper for money

92Q played the whole thing 3 times in a row, WKYS played "ether" and then played kendrick's verse

(as i drove home from work)

narratives too, old djs talking abt the old days and how this guest verse is going to liek singlehandedly "bring hip hop back", it just sounds like nostalgia imo

as the wet blanket on many such occasions, i gotta say i see nothing wrong with people being excited about this. it's a fun verse! his delivery on "MUFUCKA I SELL IT!!!!" is absurdly entertaining.

what am i doing wrong where i'm only seeing people be grumpy about the hype and not the hype. i am clearly not following the right people.

it's just a bummer to be told to calm down about a verse before i even knew it existed

oh to be clear i really enjoyed my ride home tonight. i enjoyed old hip hop heads sounding so EXCITED. i don't think there's anything wrong with nostalgia.

sorta wish i could actually pay attention to jay elect's verse tho, maybe it's good

the silly thing is JE's verse probably would've sounded good in between Sean and Kendrick, there was really no reason to leave him out to dry at the end there

yeah k's verse obviously should've been last anyway?? it's weird.

they def hurt jay by positioning him that way

totally on board w/ Al on this one. Fun song, felt like it injected some life into the corny JUST FRIENDS vibe of current rap

although the return-fire disses better be a lot better than joell ortiz's. The main problem is that no one wants to ACTUALLY diss kendrick, no one wants to get under anyone's skin, they just want to rap in complicated ways about how they are the best.

i want to see people take the gloves off, imo

i said this in a piece i wrote about it but this is about to turn into a bunch of olympians diving for the judges rather than a bunch of wrestlers clamboring into the ring. i def prefer the latter situation when it comes to rap music

gunplay should go at him

kendrick literally says "i respect y'all" in his verse. the kiddie gloves aren't coming off

It's amazing that "competition" is such a foreign concept in rap right now that people are shocked a rapper suggested he wants to be better than his peers. I think that's where most of the backlash is coming from.

It's a great verse, though.

Kind of interesting how Kendrick makes the verse fit his persona. It's a battle verse in structure, delivered on his own non-confrontational, neutral-territory Sweden terms, so it doesn't feel like he's casting himself as something he's not

I also think he tapped a hunger for golden-era one-upsmanship that a lot of contemporary, "we don't need nostalgia" rap fans didn't realize they had. It's also fun watching people reconcile that.

thought the whole thing was terrible tbh

i don't particularly want this song to inspire any diss records, or more 'competitive' rap -- i dunno where you guys have been that you think rappers saying they are the best/want to be the best has been scarce. he basically says the same kind of thing that you could find in a dozen other songs by himself, kanye, cole, drake, all these other post-jay wannabe kings of rap, only difference really is he names names, although i don't think the naming names itself makes the song better or even more an act of aggression per se.

radio caller said that this would raise the WHOOOLE game, all those rappers he called out will suddenly... become better rappers cause they were called out, which, lol (can u imagine drake trying harder)

but kendrick does always sound to me like he wishes he was in the early/mid 90s and he's lonely no one else wants to play his game. should really stop calling it a diss track

idk i feel like in the buddy-buddy my-cosign-will-help-you-crack-my-demographic type shit it's nice to just have dudes competing rather than guesting for branding purposes

i don't get how this is that much different than Drake doing his little "watch me take it" shots and then having Jay photo ops and Kanye concert cameos to make sure people know it's not that serious. you know Kendrick is gonna be on new songs w/ damn near everybody he named in the next 6 months. like literally half of all rappers spitting constantly rap about being the hottest/greatest, it's only when they're really in contention for the title that people talk about who they're putting themselves above.

xp does kendrick really think of j cole and wale as his "competition" tho, like if he's really trying to place himself next to nas

well that's a semantic question, he's saying he's already on nas's level and has left the coles behind or at least is aspiring to that, just depends on whether you're taking him at face value or figure he knows he's kind of inflating things for fun.

i don't get how this is that much different than Drake doing his little "watch me take it" shots and then having Jay photo ops and Kanye concert cameos to make sure people know it's not that serious. you know Kendrick is gonna be on new songs w/ damn near everybody he named in the next 6 months. like literally half of all rappers spitting constantly rap about being the hottest/greatest, it's only when they're really in contention for the title that people talk about who they're putting themselves above.

― some dude, Tuesday, August 13, 2013 7:18 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fwiw i like when drake does it too although i wish he'd name names

and there is something backhanded about the exclusions in kendrick's lists fwiw ...

i mean, also, kendrick raps circles around drake

there's this part of it that just strikes me as standard backpacker vs pop rap ranting that people aren't really latching onto. could've called out every indie crit rapper he used to get lumped in with, instead he chose the most successful recent freshman listees and drake. if he's treating these guys like he's the head of the A-list but they're not even on that list, not a lot of people are going with that. also he's like buddies with half of them lolol

he's trying to find a cross between 'skillful, craft-oriented rappers' and 'actually popular.' i think that's a fair goal for a rapper of his particular tradition. i don't think its 'backpacker vs. pop'. its basically him vs. all the other current successful rappers who aspire to the same vague approach to hip hop

i kinda just assume kendrick just wrote what he felt like writing and put in the first names that popped into his head without doing some special checklist -- guys like kanye or wayne that aren't on that jay/em/nas lyrical pedestal but aren't in his immediate circle of newer peers just didn't fit into the 2 categories he talked about, doesn't mean he needed to be more thorough or think about their feelings, shit doesn't matter.

yeah i mean thats the other thing hes not a damn rap historian, hes a rapper, who basically just mentioned his friends

i mean why else would he mention (fellow LA resident) tyler the creator but not someone like idk danny brown

OH SHIT KENDRICK BEEFING WITH DANNY BROWN

i realize SD might also be responding to my implication that the exclusions are backhanded but i do think that implicit in the diss is the idea that if you weren't mentioned you don't matter but that's more for his peers, IMO, than legends like Tip or Wayne. Although I still think it's kind of odd he wouldn't consider them

yeah i suppose it's meaningful in a inkblot kind of way. but it also makes sense to me how Kendrick would see himself in the lineage of Eminem and Jay but not T.I.

i always thought T.I. was a dude who saw himself in that lineage ... i mean for awhile ppl were calling him the jay of the south or whatever

yeah...i think a lot of the status afforded to Jay or Em (or even Wayne) is that they kept making blockbusters even after the fell off, and T.I. ended up without that kid of longevity at that level. obviously doesn't mean much about music, but it has let him gradually slide out of those conversations.

all i typed was "k" in youtube search box and it suggested this

i guess ill listen to it

did Paul McCartney really tell him he was a black Beatle?

im trying to imagine being a music writer having to generate a thousand or something words on this

its pretty easily done tbh

i mean it's a hot button topic for ppl ... kendrick was trending worldwide & claimed to be the king of another city. thats a big deal in rap, so its easy to talk about the state of the genre or whatever

no, i get it i guess. im just personally bored to death by kendrick more often than not. also i just realized i think ive been walking around w my fly unzipped for the past few hrs so prob dont deserve 2 haev an opinion abt anything much at all

bitch, don't kill our vibe

looking forward to response tracks that are all adverbs, prepositions, articles, quantifiers, and adjectives.

(can u imagine drake trying harder)

hahahahah

i mean why else would he mention (fellow LA resident) tyler the creator but not someone like idk danny brown

― rap steve gadd (D-40), Tuesday, August 13, 2013 8:49 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

everyone mentioned in this song is someone he is personally friends with, which he says explicitly before he starts listing names

which, i think that's basically the long and short of it

He still didn't mention anyone in his own crew though. I guess that was polite of him but it also implicitly places them below the people he did mention.

in some ways this "healthy, mutually respectful competition" model exposes how silly the traditional beef model is...not that beef driven by real personal animus isn't compelling, but surely in most rap beefs, fans of one artist will also be fans of the other...there's a sort of, who exactly is being pitted against who pointlessness to a lot of them. nicki vs kim, for example. (would looooove to see kendrick vs nicki tbh.) fanbase beefs seem much more common in pop now (and it makes sense that the most personally aggressive rapper out there is prob az banks).

anyway the thrill of kendrick's verse isn't necessarily that he's calling anyone out or naming names - for me it's purely his delivery.

Tangentially, re: beefs, I love how Angel Haze has become the anti-Azealia Banks and befriended everybody: Haim, Grimes, Iggy Azalea. She's probably just nice but I like to think she's doing it to wind up Banks.

oh i'm 100% sure Haze and Azalea bonded over that, iirc AZB actually tweeted something like "WHY ARE MY ENEMIES ALL TEAMING UP" when that happened

though tbh if anyone wanted to wind up AZ Banks, I'm not sure they'd need to go out of their way to do anything. Merely existing seems to do the trick most of the time.