Kendrick Lamar will kill your favorite rapper for money

streaming era so weird

idk Pierre’s point that the social media-fied fan-mob aspect to this is worrisome seems vindicated

after one incident of graffiti and a shooting that we have no details about yet?

I mean the optics of the timing isn't great but there have been similar incidents at his mansion before because he publicizes his address so out in the open. a security guard got stabbed in front of it three years ago

Drake's general behavior reminds me of this novelty tweet of yesteryear
https://x.com/ProBirdRights/status/368542088897372161

the shooting probably gives everyone an excuse to stop dropping songs.

the thing is now Kendrick isn't going to respond because it looks likely that he has possibly his biggest single since Alright (or ever) and you're not going to try to stop that momentum

props to Mustard that beat is just everything

― (•̪●) (carne asada), Tuesday, May 7, 2024 8:23 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is so OTM, the problem for Drake now is that that he can't respond to it anymore because it's just an infectious song, you can't rap people into not wanting to dance to a great beat, you can't do battle bars to counteract it because people love to say shit like "WOP WOP WOP WOP WOP Imma do my stuff" or "then steeep this way then steeeep this way" or "Sweet Chin Music and I won't pass the AUX!" those are crazy deep bars it's just infectious shit that's fun to say because of the way Kendrick says it, Not Like Us has appeal beyond being part of this whole soap opera

those AREN'T crazy deep bars

Not counting "Like That," "Humble" is actually his biggest single, a #1.

Would love if Drake released music solely to try to get people to stop dancing

Oh wait

that's the benefit of a classic mustard beat - the instrumental itself is catchy as fuck, the organ riff has been running through my brain non-stop.

can't help but thinking of "hit 'em up," which was obviously vicious, but only had one verse from pac at the top and got by on the strength of groove for the rest of the run time (when he says, "y'all not even on my level, i'm gonna let my little homies ride on you," he's admitting that the rest of the words don't matter).

the Hit Em Up beat was so good

Not Like Us feels like something future DJs are gonna throw on for people to freestyle over in studio

Undisclosed vague shooting and lame graffiti feels a bit “old white man graffitis WHITEY IS BAD, BLACKS ARE GREAT on his own driveway for clicks” vibes

I had forgotten that Drake's uncle was r&b session guitar royalty who's a co-writer on fucking 'Love and Happiness'.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenie_Hodges

Saw someone refer to this as their emotional support rap beef, accurate

Lukas, thank heaven I wasn’t drinking anything when I read that

xxp his other uncle is the one and only larry graham

Started from third base
Now we’re on third base

lol

feel like people were clowning him at the time, saying "started from degrassi now we're here"

Whoa! You'd think Drake could twist that into something given that Larry Graham's close association with Prince, lol.

always thought Started From the Bottom was about farts tbh

very embarrassing for rap music that it spent the last 15 years sucking up to a canadian child actor but better late than never i guess

it's been really gratifying over the last week to see increased YouTube & podcast representation for the "Drake peaked in 2009 and wore out his welcome by 2010" perspective, which I have always shared.

We contributors to The Singles Jukebox started calling him Fucking Drake about 13 years ago #vindicated

the evidence is in the Bedrock thread

A couple colleagues have shared this essay. I had problems with this:

I have never been a huge Kendrick Lamar fan. It's not like with Drake, who I think represents something broken and artificial about rap music in the 21st century, but Kendrick does represent something almost as annoying. He is the manifestation of the most navel-gazing, self-important aspects of hip-hop nostalgia. He is the prestige television of rap. He is the guy who lets people that don't read books feel like intellectuals. He is the guy for people that call rap music "poetry." I have always scoffed at this notion that Kendrick is some polar opposite to Drake; that he is hip-hop's purity to Drake's corruption. Really, they are two poles of how to be a pop star in rap in the 21st century: you can be a hit machine or the critical darling. On "Not Like Us," Kendrick aimed to prove that he could be the prolific hitmaker that Drake is, that he could keep the internet and the culture buzzing, only he simply chooses not to for the sake of whatever legacy he is striving for instead.

There's some truth to it: many Kendrick fans I know don't listen to much hip-hop. But the binary doesn't feel quite right. On the duller songs on his last two albums Kendrick slipped in to Drake-esque narcisso-babble. If listeners are responding to "Not Like Us" it's cuz it's got a nice fat vulgar hook and excellent Mustard beat, his best single since "All the Stars" or "Humble." It's a Drake pop moment. If the piece is meant to illustrate how they've got more in common than not, then, well, sure.

The Drake subreddit is coping well

https://www.reddit.com/r/Drizzy/comments/1ckr80h/dj_mustard_playing_not_like_us_in_the_club_not/

way more otm going on in this thread than any thinkpiece i've encountered tbh

lethal amounts of copium being smoked on the drake subreddit for sure lmao

the criticism of kendrick being some old fashioned very serious rappity rapper kinda makes sense until you listen to how good he rappity raps at which point you have no choice but to admit defeat

it's the mournful tone of those pieces that makes me think I'm too old or too young.

It’s some “both sides” posturing, or feels like it.

life in 2024

*thing we enjoy, have enjoyed for years, and isn't a thing with an unexamined troubling history*

"HERE'S WHY THIS THING IS BAD AND SHOULD STOP AND REMEMBER WHO SAID IT FIRST"

Any piece that takes Drake seriously in any way is pretty suspect to me

NYT: here’s how the Drake/Kendrick beef could be bad news for Hunter Biden

Hunter and Drake both have leaked dick pics

it's like societal VAR, you can find anything if you stare at it long enough....MAGIC EYE PICTURES

xxxxpost

i wasn't necessarily on board with the piece but i do want to stand up for alphonse pierre and say that he digs as deep into new underground rap than anyone on the internet and i think his pitchfork column and jeff weiss's passion of the weiss site are pretty much indispensable if you want to follow rap in 2024

Weiss's article a few years abck about Drakeo the Ruler's murder was one of the most shattering things I'd read in recent memory.

idk why some writers are reacting like it's heinous slander to call drake a paedo as if that hasn't that been common knowledge for at least a decade

kendrick comes off as kind of a dick sometimes and there's definitely an element of "white dudes talking about the wire in 2007" within his fandom although it's far from the dominant element except maybe in some critical discourse

most of his accusations against drake are credible and have been around for a long time so the faux outrage in some thinkpieces is a little tiresome

A couple colleagues have shared this essay. I had problems with this:

There's some truth to it: many Kendrick fans I know don't listen to much hip-hop. But the binary doesn't feel quite right. On the duller songs on his last two albums Kendrick slipped in to Drake-esque narcisso-babble. If listeners are responding to "Not Like Us" it's cuz it's got a nice fat vulgar hook and excellent Mustard beat, his best single since "All the Stars" or "Humble." It's a Drake pop moment. If the piece is meant to illustrate how they've got more in common than not, then, well, sure.

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

the "both sides" equivocation is the only bit that i think is really bad. are kendrick and drake polar opposites? i don't listen to much hip-hop, but i don't know that they are. it's this robert wyatt lyric that i keep coming back to:

It's hard to talk to enemies – and we are enemies
What we had in common makes it even worse

sometimes i get in a fight with another trans person, i make enemies of another trans person, and it frustrates me, because we shouldn't be fighting, we should be on the same side, we should be working together for a common cause. it doesn't mean that there's no reason for it. the reason is that identity isn't everything, how someone behaves, at some point...

like, you can have experiences in common, because of a common identity. good and bad experiences. some things a person doesn't have a choice in. what people do have a choice in, an individual choice in, is how they react to those things. a lot of the stuff kendrick and drake have in common, those aren't things i'll ever have in common with them. i think where kendrick is successful, how he has an audience of people who don't really listen to hip-hop, i don't think it's because he's "intellectual" or whatever. i think it's because he's got a talent for talking about things on a broader level, explaining things in a way that people who wouldn't otherwise understand can maybe sorta understand a little.

coming into this i didn't know or care a lot about drake. i knew a lot of people hated him. ok, well, when you're famous like drake, people are gonna hate you. for me, as someone who's not knowledgeable about hip-hop, what this beef has done is shed a lot of light on _why_ so many people hate drake, that it's more than just hating on someone because they're rich and famous and successful. i don't know whether that's right or wrong, but i don't think there's any room for equivocation, i don't think it's just two guys slinging dirt at each other.

and yeah, i did have a bias towards kendrick coming in, but i wouldn't say it was a _strong_ bias. i've heard a couple of kendrick's records, i thought they were pretty good, but i don't listen to them a lot, not to the extent that i listen to pink floyd or whatever. if people say kendrick is the goat, i mean, i wouldn't know, i don't listen to enough rap to make those kind of blanket statements. i do think the tracks he's put out in this beef have been pretty exceptional, have been orders of magnitude better than what drake's done.

idk, maybe i'm not taking it serious enough because it's _not_ my community, like yeah, it is an emotional support rap beef for me, i can look at it and think and talk about something other than my problems for a bit, i can get caught up in it. me and my QPP, us talking about this rap beef, god, they're the best conversations we've had in months. i don't think it's schadenfreude. i don't think either of us are taking joy in someone else's misfortune. for me it's like... if anything it's learning, learning about this stuff that i don't know about because, again, not my community. i don't take it as negative, just, you know, sometimes fucked up shit happens and you deal with it the best you can. like if drake is a terrible person, he's the only responsible for that. i don't take it as being a knock on the community, like it's not anyone's fault for "letting" him get so big. that's not how that works, the shit drake did is on drake. so no, if drake is getting called out for his bullshit, i can see that being a hard thing to watch, but i don't think it's a bad thing.

it's like societal VAR, you can find anything if you stare at it long enough....MAGIC EYE PICTURES

― RICH BRIAN (Neanderthal)

magic dick pictures

it's like societal VAR, you can find anything if you stare at it long enough....MAGIC EYE PICTURES

― RICH BRIAN (Neanderthal)

loving this post

idk why some writers are reacting like it's heinous slander to call drake a paedo as if that hasn't that been common knowledge for at least a decade

An important distinction: many people mourning Kendrick's allegations don't distinguish an artistic response from a journalistic one.

I.e. as a journalist you might be repulsed by unproven allegations of pedophilia

once stuff like this is happening it's over all the accusations and shit don't even matter anymore, not like us is just going to be musical shorthand like ether

They Not Like Us https://t.co/QxCGOkmM9n pic.twitter.com/50LCfMxMOB

— Wolves Talk (@twolvestalk32) May 7, 2024

The way I see it, Drake has two options. Post a lot of troubling Instagram stories seeming to imply he intends to commit suicide or become a first deckhand on the next season of Below Deck Down Under, where he just goes by Aubrey and says he’s from Canada but needed a change.

— Christin (@hexprax) May 5, 2024