Drake vs. Kendrick or How Black Artists allow White Corporations to Exploit their Egos for Profit

There’s a brilliant comedic moment (of many) in Ricky Gervais’ Netflix mockumentary comedy Derek (2013-2014). Caught stealing runners at a mall, a young, handsome, black British man named Deon (Ben Bailey Smith) is sent to Broad Hill Nursing Home with its band of kookie characters (the special brew swilling, do-nothing Kevin played by David Earl takes the cake) as a form of punishment and rehabilitation aka community service (season 1, episode 6). Once there, Deon is befriended by Gervais’ main character Derek, the lovable, awkward, autistic, fifty-year old employee with a heart of gold. At the end of his time, Deon explains earnestly speaking into the camera that if he were to roll back into his hood with his newfound elderly friends he’d be ridiculed by his peers who would question why he was hangin’ with “roadkill”. His astute and humorous hypothetical response to his ignorant friends is that he’d explain that while they were fond of talking about their experiences by appropriating the violent symbolism of “taking a scar” or “taking a bullet,” his newfound mates had been in “an actual war” where they’d “fought for man’s freedom” as opposed to a “rap lyric war” or writing a “couplet about some shit you went through outside of Chicken George”.

Well sadly, the popular world (or at least the part preoccupied with Hip Hop) seems to be galvanized by the brewing “rap lyric war” between Aubrey Drake Graham and Kendrick Lamar Duckworth. In case you don’t recognize their names, Drake is not just a Hip Hop star, he’s a Pop Star whose acting chops (he played Jimmy Brooks on CTV’s Canadian teen show Degrassi: The Next Generation from 2001- 2008) has also made him a beloved host (2014 and 2016) of NBC’s SNL. In 2020, he became Spotify’s most streamed artist of the decade, surpassing 28 billion streams, with hits like Started from the Bottom (2013),  Hotline Bling (2016), God’s Plan (2018), One Dance (2016), and Rich Flex (2022) not to mention his chart-topping Dancehall duet with Rihanna, Work (2016). Meanwhile, hailing from Compton, California, the African American Kendrick Lamar who is known for his politically-engaged and incisive lyrics scored his first hit with Swimming Pools (Drank) [2012] and his first #1 when he teamed up with Taylor Swift on Bad Blood (2014). But since then, Lamar has had multiple hit albums and been honoured as the first musician outside of the genres of jazz and classical music to win the coveted Pulitzer Prize for Music.

We mention all this to make it clear that these are two uber-talented and ultra-successful black male global music superstars who are now embroiled in an escalating feud through which they deliver once nasty and now potentially illegal slights through their “rap lyric war”.

UGH! Really? In the age of Trump 2.0 when the US president is busily renaming geographies at will (Gulf of America anyone?), attempting to fire hundreds of thousands of federal workers and dismantle lifesaving international programs, pull out of climate change agreements, increase ecologically disastrous extractive energy practices, dismantle DEI anything, and turn Gaza into the Riviera of the Middle East by expelling some 2 million Palestinians, is this really the best use of our time and energy?

While rap battles are a fundamental part of the architecture of the genre and since the territoriality of Rap (East Coast vs. West Coast etc.) has long made claims of regional prowess essential to what rappers spit about, we are not surprised at some of the backlash against Drake who has long been dismissed as an outsider by some due to his biracial identity, Canadian nationality, and Toronto fealty (remember Drake courtside at the Toronto Raptor’s games, especially in their winning 2019 season?), none of which fits within a narrow US-centric, bi-coastal framing of Hip Hop.

Case in point, Drake’s Started from the Bottom (2013) video opens with a diverse group of tween boys dressed in the Canadian red and white running across a soccer field emblazoned with the City of Toronto Parks, Forestry, and Recreation logo which includes a stylized rendering of the iconic City Hall building on Queen Street. We then see Drake, dressed in head to toe white, leaping from a luxury, white convertible onto a wintery, white urban street. Next, we see him working at what Canadians will recognize as a Shopper’s Drug Mart-type pharmacy with his two friends, neither one black.

So, we shouldn’t be surprised if some folks are team Lamar. But a larger question is how did the typical beef landscape of clothing, shoes, watches, booze, women, and flexing, turn into accusations of domestic abuse as in Family Matters (2024) [Drake against Lamar] and pedophilia as in Not Like Us (2024) [Lamar against Drake]? Going even further, the cover art of Lamar’s track features a photo of Drake’s Toronto home covered in the red symbols used to indicate registered sex offenders!

We’d like to suggest that some of the problems may stem from: (1) record labels (and other white-dominated industries) that like to pit black people against each other for sport and profit, (2) the ways that money and fame make people of any background lose perspective [recall the line of billionaire tech moguls seated on the dais at the US inauguration in January 2025], (3) black folks forgetting (or perhaps never having been taught) how important it is to support and love one another, and (4) unthinking consumers who care more about being cool and “singing along” in the moment – like the celebrities at the 2025 Grammy awards for example – rather than thinking critically, or at all, about what they are singing along to! What’s worse, The Recording Academy just awarded Lamar five Grammy Awards for his allegedly defamatory diss track including: Record of the Year, Best Rap Performance, Best Rap Song, Best Music Video, and Song of the Year.

But things have now gone from the streets to the courthouse because Drake has filed a lawsuit against Spotify and Universal Music Group. Ironically, the latter is both his and Lamar’s label and the world’s largest music company. Drake is accusing them of defamation and artificially inflating the streams of Lamar’s hit song. Furthermore, Drake’s case alleges a direct connection between a shooting incident and two other attempted break-ins at his Toronto home on May 7, 8, and 9, 2024, and the release of Lamar’s hit song on May 4, 2024, which accuses Drake of being a “certified pedophile” and “predator”.

While some legal experts point to US laws which treat songs as protected speech and the high bar to prove defamation against public figures as reasons why Drake might lose, his lawyer Michael J. Gottlieb successfully represented the African American Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss in a recent defamation case winning them an award $148,169,000 USD against former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani. Sadly, Drake’s case will be one to watch as the year unfolds, and disastrously, the increasingly degraded and malicious behaviour of both men has resulted in a situation where more than reputations may be lost. Meanwhile, people will be keenly watching the Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show on February 9th to see if Lamar dares perform the track live in front of a global audience of some 186 million people.

Our advice, if you can’t summon dignity on your own behalf, when in doubt, remember that our children are watching!