After a weekend that saw two of hip-hop’s biggest stars trade increasingly ugly accusations of domestic violence and child sexual abuse, it’s all but official: Kendrick Lamar has triumphed over Drake in what many have deemed the most significant rap beef of all time.
The verdict was handed down early Monday by the self-appointed internet scorekeepers whose investment in the battle — as witnessed across YouTube, TikTok and every other form of social media given to feverish take-making — did as much as that of the rappers themselves to fan its flames.
But if Lamar can be said to have won, where does his victory leave him at age 36, a decade and a half into a career about which he’s sometimes seemed ambivalent? How does Drake’s defeat at 37 reshape the perception of invincibility he’s been building since the late 2000s? And what does it all say about hip-hop at a moment when the genre’s commercial dominance appears to be slipping?
There’s no doubt that Kendrick versus Drake — a long-simmering rivalry that exploded in late March when Lamar dropped a surprise verse on Future and Metro Boomin’s song “Like That” — has been good for rap’s position in a crowded attention economy. Countless stakeholders in the form have expressed anxiety lately regarding hip-hop’s slowing growth: Last year, for instance, only four rap LPs — by Travis Scott, Metro Boomin, Drake and the duo of Drake and 21 Savage — finished 2023 among the year’s 25 most-consumed albums. (Throw in records by SZA and Bad Bunny and hip-hop was still far outweighed on the list by pop and country thanks to blockbusters by the likes of Morgan Wallen, Taylor Swift and Zach Bryan.)
Before “Like That” debuted atop Billboard’s Hot 100 and logged three straight weeks at No. 1, the last rap song to spend that long of an unbroken streak there was “Rockstar” by DaBaby featuring Roddy Ricch way back in the summer of 2020.
Now, songs by Drake and Lamar occupy half of Spotify’s U.S. Top 10 and are widely expected to turn up in the upper reaches of next week’s Hot 100; not only that, but the beef put hip-hop back at the center of the pop-cultural conversation — see the sketch from this past weekend’s “Saturday Night Live” in which Dua Lipa plays a woman attempting to explain the intricacies of the feud to a pair of smiley morning-television hosts.
In a mind-share sense, at least, Kendrick versus Drake has also been a boon for the two men individually, both of whom have watched in recent years as they’ve been slowly (and naturally) pushed from hip-hop’s center by the generation coming up behind them. To put it in rock terms, these guys are approaching the status of a U2 or Bruce Springsteen: popular and well-respected legacy acts long since past their most important music. Yet this fight made their work feel newly alive; it made you believe those legacies are still being written.
SOURCE: LA TIMES
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