Will Drake Kill the Diss Track?

It’s been a year since the Pop Out, and the reverberations from the Kendrick vs. Drake battle are still being felt like aftershocks. Like an earthquake, the tectonic plates connecting the culture and the industry have shifted — and hip-hop may never be the same. With Drake’s subsequent lawsuit over “Not Like Us,”  the battle has metastasized into something that could damage hip-hop long-term. If it sounds like I have a tone, it’s not because I’m biased. It’s because I’m upset. Drake could ruin everything.

This whole saga has a petty undercurrent, so it feels appropriate to explain it through the lens of classic Hollywood high school movies.

In this movie, the school is hip-hop culture. Our story begins before the battle. Kendrick is a senior and the coolest guy in school. He gets perfect grades because he’s brilliant, but he’s also beloved for his realness—he embodies what the school is about. He’s been here his whole life, and he’s so synonymous with the place that he is the school. Whatever this imaginary school’s colors are, if you cut him, he’d bleed them.

Drake, in this story, is popular and charismatic but he’s the foreign exchange student. He’s less gritty and real than Kendrick—more of a loverboy. He fits the classic Hollywood foreign exchange student archetype: someone who doesn’t quite understand the culture around them. Drake’s fatal flaw is that even though he’s part of the school of hip-hop he doesn’t truly understand it. He knows the written rules but not the unwritten ones.

That’s reflected with what started the feud in the first place. In 2013, Kendrick dropped a generationally important verse on Big Sean’s “Control,” where he dissed everyone in contemporary hip-hop by name. It wasn’t personal. He wasn’t attacking anyone, he was saying, “I’m the best of my generation,” and doing it in a very hip-hop way.

Most MCs Kendrick named understood the move. They took it in the spirit of the culture.  But not Drake. He complained in multiple interviews that he didn’t get what Kendrick was doing. He didn’t understand that in hip-hop, a diss record with your name on it isn’t necessarily an attack. But Drake isn’t deep enough in the culture to know that. As I said, he doesn’t know the unwritten rules.

That’s Lamar’s Thesis on “Not Like Us,” that Drake doesn’t understand hip-hop culture because he’s an outsider, or as he raps, a “colonizer.” Someone who mines the culture for usable parts, but he’s not really one of us.

Drake’s response proved Kendrick right. Months after “Not Like Us,” he filed a defamation lawsuit against Universal Music Group, the record company for both rappers. Drake claimed in the suit that the song was “intended to convey the specific, unmistakable and false factual allegation that Drake is a criminal pedophile, and to suggest that the public should resort to vigilante justice in response.”

He argued that the song’s success was fueled by UMG’s support with the intention of damaging his image. Given that Drake is also one of UMG’s biggest artists, to some, the lawsuit reads as: “They helped Kendrick’s diss track succeed using the same tools they’ve used to help my songs succeed, and now I’m mad.”

Suing was, without question, the most un-hip-hop move possible.

I believe this lawsuit has done more damage to Drake’s image and his career than losing the battle ever could. You can lose a battle with dignity and walk away with respect. He survived losing to Pusha T in 2018. But it’s much harder to survive being a sore loser. In the high school movie, the battle — the back-and-forth of diss records — was a fair fight in the parking lot. Kendrick won. Drake lost. Then he picked himself off the pavement and went to the principal. And once the principal gets involved, everything changes. Not always for the better. 

Drake’s suit is still moving through the courts, but the precedent it could set is worrisome. Corporate lawyers like to be ahead of potential problems. Labels could grow hesitant to back diss tracks that target individuals. If an artist could successfully sue over a diss, would that bring about the last of label-supported (and thus widely heard) diss records?

That would be a loss for the culture.

Battling is a core element of hip-hop. Some of the genre’s greatest moments came from one MC trying to lyrically destroy another: Tupac’s “Hit Em Up,” Nas’s “Ether,” Jay-Z’s “Takeover,” Ice Cube’s “No Vaseline.” These weren’t vague or subliminal. They named names. They scorched the earth. And they were beautiful. Hip-hop thrives on that kind of energy. We want rappers to go to war sometimes.

But it looks like Drake will be the last big rapper to get dissed in a major record. And maybe Drake’s legacy will be this: the guy who lost the biggest battle in rap history—and then ended battling altogether. The sore loser who kicked the ball away so no one else could play.

Thanks a lot, Drake.