The ongoing feud between two of rap's biggest stars escalated over the weekend as they traded diss tracks with increasingly severe personal attacks and allegations.
This past week, there's been a five-song volley between Kendrick Lamar and Drake, extending a long-running beef that dates back more than a decade but was reignited earlier this year.
Now, the music has taken a decidedly dark turn, featuring allegations of domestic violence, secret children, paedophilia, addiction and more.
Canadian rapper and commercial powerhouse Drake has fired the latest salvo, a new track titled The Heart Part 6, on which he responds to accusations of paedophilia made by Pulitzer-prize-winning Compton rapper Lamar.
"Drake is not a name that you gonna see on no sex offender list," he raps.
"If I was f***ing young girls, I promise I'd have been arrested/I'm way too famous for this shit you just suggested."
To fully appreciate the weight and context of who said what, let's walk through the recent time line of this explosive war of words that has set social media ablaze.
Kendrick Lamar goes after Drake in back-to-back songs
On April 30, Kendrick Lamar released Euphoria, a scathing 6-minute, multi-part attack on Drake made in retaliation to the latter's diss tracks Push Ups, and Taylor Made Freestyle.
The song addressed multiple talking points that have surfaced since Lamar first went after Drake on the US chart-topping song Like That by Future and Metro Boomin.
Lamar followed up Euphoria on Friday with 6:16 In LA, a woozy track in which he tauntingly suggested that insiders at Drake's record label OVO Sound were providing Lamar with leaked information.
"Have you ever thought that OVO was working for me? … / Everyone inside your team's whispering that you deserve it," Lamar raps over a lush sample of Al Green's What A Wonderful Thing Love Is — a strategic diss towards the fact that Drake's uncle, Mabon 'Teenie' Hodges, played on the track.
Drake fires back with Family Matters
On Friday night, Drake responded to the back-to-back diss tracks with Family Matters. In the 7-minute song, with multiple beat switches, he shot back at Lamar as well as other A-lister enemies, including The Weeknd and rappers A$AP Rocky and Rick Ross.
Most of the track's vitriol is focused on Lamar. "Kendrick just opened his mouth/Someone go hand him a Grammy right now," Drake mockingly spits.
Drake also replies to Lamar's attack on his qualities as a father ("You mentioned my seed, now deal with his dad/ I gotta go bad") and taunts Lamar by insinuating his cousin and collaborator Baby Keem ghostwrites for him ("K.Dot shit is only hitting hard when Baby Keem put his pen to it").
He also claims Kendrick contacted the estate of the late Tupac "2Pac" Shakur and begged them to get Drake's track Taylor Made Freestyle taken off the internet. (The track used an AI-generated fake of Shakur's voice, prompting 2Pac's estate to threaten legal action, and Drake to subsequently remove the track from the internet.)
Drake concludes Family Matters with his nastiest bombshell, alleging Lamar physically abuses his fiancee Whitney Alford and that one of their children was fathered by Kendrick's business partner, Dave Free.
"[You] hired a crisis management team to clean up the fact that you beat on your queen," he raps, and questions why Lamar and Alford aren't married when they've been engaged since 2015.
"I'm guessin' this wedding ain't happenin', right? / 'Cause we know the girls that you actually like / Your darkest secrets are comin' to light."
Family Matters was accompanied by a music video with symbolic footage of a black panel van being crushed — the same make and model seen on the cover of Lamar's breakout 2012 album good kid, M.A.A.D City.
Drake is also seen sporting a similar ring to one worn by Lamar's wife and dining with friends at New Ho King — a Toronto restaurant that's seen its business booming since it was namechecked in Kendrick Lamar's Euphoria.
Lamar takes the gloves off on Meet The Grahams
Before some fans had even finished listening to Family Matters, Lamar released a third diss track, titled Meet The Grahams, undercutting the attention on Drake's release less than an hour after it dropped.
Over a murky, fragmented soul beat, Lamar addresses each verse of the track to a member of Drake's family, beginning with his six-year-old son, Adonis Graham.
"Dear Adonis, I'm sorry that that man is your father," he raps in the opening bars.
"Let me be honest, it takes a man to be a man, your dad is not responsive / I look at him and wish your grandpa woulda wore a condom."
He then addresses Drake's parents, Sandi and Dennis Graham, labelling their son a "master manipulator" and a "sick man" with a "nympho fetish". Lamar also alleges Drake grooms young women, alluding to accusations that have swirled around the rapper for years.
The biggest revelation? Lamar alleges Drake has secretly fathered and is neglecting a young daughter, echoing the 2018 diss track from Pusha T that publicly revealed that Drake was "hiding" his son, Adonis.
The closing verse is directed at Drake himself, with Lamar concluding:
"You lied about your son, you lied about your daughter, huh
You lied about them other kids that's out there hopin' that you come
You lied about the only artist that can offer you some help
F*** a rap battle, this a long life battle with yourself"
Lamar unleashes third diss track in 36 hours
Not giving Drake a chance to respond, the following morning (Sunday, May 5) Lamar unleashed yet another payload, a diss track titled Not Like Us.
Far lighter in tone and featuring a West Coast beat from producer Mustard, the track sees Lamar doubling down on accusations Drake is an alleged sexual predator and "paedophile".
The artwork for the single also depicts Drake's Toronto mansion, known colloquially as "The Embassy", plastered with sexual offender map markers.
The track also fires shots at some of Drake's OVO affiliates, including head of security Nessel "Chubbs" Beezer ("… the only one that get your hand-me-downs") and songwriter PartyNextDoor ("Party at the party playin' wit' his nose").
There's also a couplet referencing Drake's 2021 album Certified Lover Boy that targets Baka Not Nice, an OVO signee who was convicted of assault and accused of human trafficking charges:
"Baka got a weird case/Why is he around?/Certified Lover Boys, certified paedophiles".
Drake denies Lamar's claims in The Heart Part 6
Capping a very busy weekend, Drake released The Heart Part 6 — pinching its title from a long-running series of tracks Lamar started in 2010.
The Toronto rapper denies Lamar's allegations of paedophilia and sex offending.
"This [Jeffrey] Epstein angle was the shit I expected," raps Drake, referencing Lamar's 2022 song Mother I Sober.
"Ahh, wait a second, that's that one record where you say you got molested/ Aw, f*** me, I just made the whole connection," he continues.
"That's why these paedophile raps is s*** you so obsessed with, it's so excessive … I never been with no-one underage but now I understand why this is the angle you really mess with."
Regarding secretly fathering other children, Drake claims he intentionally planted false information in the hopes Lamar would use it as ammunition in his tracks ("We plotted for a week and then we fed you the information").
In a spoken-word outro, Drake notes: "I'm not gonna lie, this shit was some good exercise. It's good to get out, get the pen working." But he mocks Lamar for "triplin' down on some whole other bullshit …".
He concludes: "Everything in my shit is facts. I'm waitin' on you to return the favour."
Given how intense the back and forth has gotten, and the increasing speed at which the two are releasing new music to discredit the other, you can be sure there'll be a new chapter in the ongoing Kendrick and Drake saga soon enough.
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2024-05-06 06:29:13Z
CBMibWh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDI0LTA1LTA2L2RyYWtlLWtlbmRyaWNrLWxhbWFyLWRpc3MtdHJhY2tzLXBhZWRvcGhpbGUtYWxsZWdhdGlvbnMtZmV1ZC8xMDM4MTA2NjTSAShodHRwczovL2FtcC5hYmMubmV0LmF1L2FydGljbGUvMTAzODEwNjY0
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