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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.
― Kate (rushomancy), Tuesday, 7 May 2024 20:49 (one month ago) link