BAM! Ad Astra
Or: It Was the Biggest Rap Beef of the Century, and (Mostly) Everyone Lost
What comes to mind when someone says the word beef? What images get conjured in your head? For some, maybe a burger, or a literal slab of red meat. For some, maybe they envision a cow mooing and grazing in a countryside field. For others, others that are like me, we begin to think of Hip-Hop. Rap Beef. Two rappers that share a particular dislike for one another and intend to and do vocalize and display that disdain on tracks (or on wax) for the entire hip hop community's spectation and judgment, if said community deems the feud enticing or entertaining or interesting enough to warrant such. It is one of the most negative, hateful, wrathful, rageful, and vindictive facets of life as a rapper or as a consumer of-slash-contributor to rap music; it is, in the same vein, possibly the single most sensationalized and highly frenzied, as well potentially the most entertaining, occurrence possible within the artform.
§1
People love conflict, and just like they like to disregard the road to stare at a car accident they pass by, they love to put their lives on pause for a week or two or six to give the bout one's undivided and unencumbered attention; I am particularly guilty of this. People especially love conflict that does not involve them.
Celebrities feud all the time, but as it pertains to Hip-Hop, contention and conflict--and battling, are nothing if not central to the art form. Popstars and actresses rarely decide to record and release tracks explicitly voicing their profanity-laced displeasures against one another, do they? But in Rap, it happens on a near-constant timetable, and given the modus operandi and disposition of the entire setup, it is not unusual that beefs take the sort of turns they do and end up where they often do. But none of that stops it from happening, and many feuds have come and gone, with small aftershocks and galloping tides here and there always threatening more: KRS-One and Marley Marl, two NYC rappers, had tension in the 1980s after disputing whether or not the birthplace of Hip-Hop was Queens or South Bronx, in what was known as The Bridge Wars; Ice Cube famously slandered all his former groupmates in the N.W.A.-centric diss track No Vaseline after them voicing their gripe with how Ice Cube decided to leave the group, and yes the title is referencing what you think it's referencing; Ja Rule and 50 Cent beefed for a while, while Ja Rule also beefed with Eminem, while Eminem also beefed with Benzino and the rest of Source Magazine, while 50 Cent seemed to beef arbitrarily with every rapper (and human being for that matter) on the planet. In Hip-Hop, beef is nothing if not ubiquitous.
Obviously, with Hip-Hop being a genre of music originating from Black Americans, Rap Beef has a very clear temporal and ideological lineage from which it stems, due to the reverberations of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Racism and Jim Crow, Intergenerational trauma, and Post-racial, Late-stage capitalistic wage slavery. There is something in most of us, in the core of our beings, that enjoys seeing two egotistical, wealthy musicians berate each other to the tune of breakbeats, sub-bass, and chopped-up Soul or Gospel samples; and it is not always just for sport, as often the people that engage in these beefs have real-life animosity with the person they find themselves up against. This rarely deters us though; in fact, it routinely energizes people's interest, often a beef is not interesting at all if the men involved don't want to see the other hurt, humiliated, or dead. It soothes the parts of us that are angry at the world, that are angry at Life, that want to bear witness to the Earth drowning in flames. Well, in the year 2024, many Hip-Hop fans got what they asked for. But they didn't just get a beef; they got The Beef, the biggest feud of the Century, Millennium, and of All Time:
Drake versus Kendrick Lamar.
Now not to completely dismiss Nicki Minaj and Lil Kim, but is there any reoccurring character detail that you may notice whenever going back through the many disses and rebuttals and spats and such? Men, yes. Most of the people involved are Men. Men go after men, for the enjoyment of men, to the displeasure of other men, with women occupying spaces either as mere cheerleaders or center-of-the-table ornaments, sliced and plated poultry on a dinner table or doubloons in a treasure chest waiting to be claimed (more on that later.) It is no secret that men have forcefully dominated much of the societal landscape we find ourselves in on this planet. They control a lot of politics, a lot of money, a lot of power, and a lot of us. For worse or for worse.
This of course permeates into the realm of which we are speaking now, as Rap has the same caustic competitive edge and fervor that you find in industries like Hollywood, Competitive Sport, Drug Dealing, the Stock Market, and Luxury Aviation Sales, industries foundationally built from the types of corrosive attitudes and personalities that give you the urge to tattoo the words toxic and prick letter by letter into a man's teeth. But given the connection to Black American culture that Hip-Hop is rooted in, as well as the increasing prevalence of the genre in the wider commercial landscape of the American Entertainment Industry as a whole, it has become the metaphorical snorkel through which men, and Black men especially, develop some of their harshest personal motifs. Many black men have learned about Life, Love, Sex, Murder, Economics, Brotherhood, Acceptance, Inclusivity, Authenticity, Maternal Love, Paternal Conflict, Poverty, Crime, Injustice, Sacrifice, Bravery, Misogyny, Homophobia, Hatred, Greed, Lust, Sloth, and Pride all from their favorite rappers. Rappers can posit themselves as teaching what it's like to be a man, a real nigga, etc. They can teach you how to make, take, and lose money all in the same 16-bar verse. They teach you how to dominate others, how to win: How to withstand being hated, how to hate: How to humiliate: How to succeed. For countless men, for countless Black men, Hip-Hop teaches you something about how to exist. For better or for worse, and dubious lessons long notwithstanding.
Hip-hop’s hand-in-hand connection to the Black Male experience is no accident. It's simple cause and effect. Disregarding the minutia-scale regional arguments, what borough Sugarhill Gang recorded what song in first, what club premiered it for the crowds first, what radio station first gave it a spin, etc., Hip Hop was created by Black Americans living on the East Coast of the United States of America, living in poverty in predominantly black neighborhoods, were in the midst of the real-world application of Urban Studies concepts like Urban Decay and soon enough full-on Gentrification. It was used for more or less the same thing as anything else a black person has created: making Life at least a tad more bearable. And, just like baked mac and cheese and jazz and malt liquor, it worked pretty well. Almost immediately the music became more than songs, more than drums and chords and such, but it became a tool for both expression and impression, straight from the lips of the black, with lingo he and his boys created, for he and his boys' purposes.
Here's a good way to explain what exactly I mean. There's this French philosopher, an existentialist who goes by the name of Jean-Paul Sartre. He has this one quote that he's pretty well known for. In French it is as follows: L'enfer, c'est les autres. It comes from a play entitled Huis Clos1 that premiered in the middle of the 20th century, 1944. The literal translation of the phrase, at least as far as my understanding goes, would be Hell, it is the others. That would be horrendous dialogue even for a play in the 1940s, and obviously, the commonly used translation Hell is other people has a much better ring to it, but the differences in translation highlight a certain semantic misconstrual, mostly amongst the faux-deep, quasi-philosophers, that applies to the topic at hand. I promise this has to do with Hip-Hop. It's not that the translation as it is used commonly is wrong or anything like that, but the semantic uses of the phrase... I dunno, it pisses me off. Many people use it as a catchphrase, expressing vapid contempt for others--but the type of contempt that has no basis. They say it about people they hate without any good reason to hate them. Usually, these types of people aren't liked very much by other people anyway. These are not beloved people, the ones who parade these sorts of phrases around like fresh tattoos. They also have incredibly pompous dispositions whenever they say it, and it's one of the laundry list of reasons that people almost instantaneously groan and roll their eyes when they hear even an utterance of the word existentialism now. They simply use the phrase wrong, and the worst part of that misconstrual, for me, is how close they are to being right. They use the phrase as a placeholder for the phrase People Annoy Me which would be easier to say from a syllabic perspective but doesn't sound as snazzy by a country mile. The actual quote, spoken by a character who is trapped in Hell for eternity with two others, by the way, refers to something called The Look.
Let's delve into that to open the door to the intoxication of Hip-Hop's most emphatically contentious moments, and the biggest one in recent or not-recent memory. For the Black person, the poor person, the victimized, humiliated person, Hell truly is other people. This can be understood by women also, most especially black women, the demographic that garners the most underserving of the baseless hatred they receive, while also being much more vulnerable having existed in the crosshairs of racism and sexism, as well as potentially homo-and-transphobia. The Look as it is posed in Sartre's play and some of his more... weighty material... refers to the awareness that awakens in a subjective person(ality) when being looked at by another (Other) subjective personality, and the squirmy un-comfortability that undoubtedly arises. It is already jarring enough for a subjective personality to process the immensity and baffling nature of his own subjective experience and sight and such2. To then have to account for an entire other person, with an entirely separate consciousness and subjectivity, who happens to be going through the same crises as you now that they see you, and who also has awareness just as you do of the shared crisis, and awareness of your awareness and so on. It's so confusing, so baffling, that part of the mystery, and the frustration, is in the reasoning for why it is so confusing and so baffling. Humans walk through Life and their brains are the equivalent of a foggy room full of funhouse mirrors, and everyone has a permanent squint as they walk. That's just a default; to see where Hip Hop is coming from, as well as their pioneers and biggest contributors/supporters, black men, we have to start getting into the real cruxes of the situation: The American situation, as it pertains to Black American Men, then we can investigate how the biggest rap beef in history took place, what it meant/means for us, and what we all could be in store for years from now.
Sigh... This is the part of the essay where things get a little morbid. Sad pouty face emojis all around. I know. Trust, though, it's important for what you and I are discussing here. You see, there is a reason that The Look, existential wondering about one's self, the fractal mirrors-recursively-looking-in-on-oneself stuff, and terror of the ceiling of your brain caving in on you happens and is so terrifying, it's because of where you take all the wondering. It's about the logical conclusion that you end up at. Because, look, even if a human is making eye contact with you or speaking with you, or you're looking up at billowing tree leaves or stars or letting springtime zephyrs dance under your t-shirt, and you're reminded of the fact that you are a human on a planet in a solar system/galaxy/universe and you don't know and probably will never find out how you got here or why you're here or where you're headed: why does that frighten you or me? Simply because you know for a fact, that you will die. Some day, you and everyone will die. The earth will burn too hot for any mammals to function, and the stars will go to sleep eventually. Death is at the end of the coiled rope, for each and everyone, it is the thing that equalizes us all. It is also, undoubtedly, the most baffling and depressing phenomenon that anyone can know, if for no other reason than its certainty and its unbiased inclusion of all. It has a 1.000 batting average, it gets a hit on every pitcher eventually.
Death is an undercurrent that, even though people either don't know or devote the entirety of their attention to ignoring it, tinges all Life. With time and reflection and love, we can learn to cope with death, to accept its reality and its inevitability, and acquiesce to it in a way that still allows one to live and love with honesty and breadth and fervor, but one will never conquer it. And that is tough to accept. Historically, men have been supremely bad at accepting the fact they will die. These particular men have two main outlets, throughout history, that they use to deal with this existential issue: They fuck people and inflict violence on people. That's the 1A and 1B of gameplans, with 1C being a potentially macabre combination of the two. A type of violence committed: Prejudice. Unwarranted degradation. The denial of another's humanity or the conditional acceptance of it. I'm talking about, in this context, Racism.
(This essay is many things in my opinion. It is however not an argumentative essay about whether or not racism exists.) Racism has been here for thousands of years, and it became a global zeitgeist sort of situation once the global steeplechase of capitalism, a rat race for profit, started: when the Portuguese and British of old decided African Slave Labor would be perfect for them, but needed a legit reason why African Slaves exclusively should be used, and decided on claiming that African Men were not human, were not men, and did everything in one's power to dismiss the notion of the black person's dignity and humanity, as vehemently, heinously, and completely as possible. But this, if even by a slim margin, was unsuccessful, and it eventually became "unconstitutional" to hold a "free" man in bondage and force him to work with no pay and subordinate himself and his family to you forever. That, of course, by no means meant peace between men in this country, and with even still the denial of the entire thing ever happening to the extent it did being a hurdle right now before you even get to the argument of Slavery has never ended, it may never mean that. The seeds of hatred were planted long ago and in much too fertile soil, and we are bearing too much of the fruit to bear. Not only are people still racist toward black people, but there are still barriers put in front of black people unfairly. Before getting to mention we were already put at a disadvantage because of 4 centuries of an entire society and country being built on the literal backs of our families, but even as citizens of that country, we still need to pay rent, and bills, and pay for college, and pay for healthcare. We still, somehow, owe money to a country that’s stolen everything they could from us and continues to grab and snatch to this day.
All while some country bumpkin idiots call us lazy niggers. Any black person, and especially black men, would have to either be profoundly insane or a dolt to not be completely enraged for the vast majority of their lifetimes; in fact, black men often are so enraged and stressed from the very condition of this absurd and arbitrary world, that they often die early, if not from a gunshot from someone looking unkindly and unwieldy upon black skin, then from the odorous slow-cooking death from the toll of wage slavery, where businesses are still being built and maintained on top of our decrepit and decaying black bodies, on top of soil fertilized soggy with our families’ blood. You would have every right to be angry if this were to happen to you if it isn't already your reality. Not to mention having to watch your loved ones be bludgeoned by the same system. Who wouldn't be as jaded and enraged as can be?3
Sadly, when this fate betides the Black American psyche, when Hell is already other people, A new Hell emerges in the pit of one's stomach. A bleak, pale, limp hopelessness blossoms somewhere in the midsection, around age 11, and it grows. It is as lonely as a deserted island. It is a sinkhole in the middle of a ghost town, population you; if you peek down into it, you can see flame, you can see bubbles of magma, you can see the apocalypse.
I see, this is how it is now—you say to yourself.
Okay, that wasn't too bad. Are you feeling okay? Okay. Now let's talk about Hip Hop. Now that we've established the sociological context in which the beef occurs, now is as good a time as any to detail our bout's main participants and how they made their way to the Rap Game WW2. Now, as we look into the bios of the two most relevant figures in this beef, something will be of note: Both of these men have very different connections to the Black American Male experience, and the Black Male experience at large. But they both have connections nonetheless, and tragically strong connections at that. For both of these men, as will become obvious soon enough, Hell is both other people and themselves.
§2
Aubrey "Drake" Graham was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on 24 October 1986 to a Canadian Jewish woman named Sandra working as an English teacher, and a black man from Memphis, Tennessee named Dennis who met Sandra while performing as a drummer in a club in Toronto, where Drake grew up and would stay after his parents would break up when he was young. His father went back to Memphis, where he was unfortunately arrested and incarcerated for some time. The myriad setbacks, especially financial, that occur when a black man becomes a convict our extensive, and it's those types of setbacks that contributed to Dennis staying in the U.S. and all but disconnecting Sandra and Aubrey. The young man would grow up with his mom, where he played right winger for an amateur ice hockey team in West Toronto. He was good enough to get into this hockey camp at this prestigious boarding school, but Mom didn't like how rough and violent the sport was. Fun fact: around the age of 10 or 11, Drake was in a comedy sketch that aired as a part of the 1997 NHL awards, with a nod to goalies Martin Brodeur and Ron Hextail. (Being born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, home of the New Jersey Devils, Martin Brodeur was regarded with much kindness in my household. Very pro-Brodeur. Consummate professional, that man.)
Kendrick Lamar Duckworth was born on 17 June 1987. His parents were both from Chicago, and due to some gang-related dramas stemming from Kendrick's father's affiliations, they relocated to Compton, California three years before Kendrick was born. Kendrick was a bit of a loner as a young kid, and he was even an only child for the first seven years of his life before his mother gave him three younger siblings to look after. South Side of Chicago, Compton CA, NYC: all over the country around this time (80-90's) things were rough for brown folks. (Not to say that they are ever without rough times.) Enough rappers over the years have alluded to the government putting crack and guns on the streets for it to be obvious what was around Kendrick during this time, but his personal life inside the home was also tumultuous; the backbone of the American brand of anti-black racism is the placement of roadblocks to keep impoverished people disorganized and, well, impoverished. Kendrick grew up like many other black kids who are antagonized by this country: financial insecurity, housing insecurity, section 84, and food stamps. All that going on inside the home, and gang culture outside: shootings, drug dealing, death, imprisonment, with interstitials of fun and brotherly bliss mixed throughout. Many opportunities to feel alive, feel like a man, feel danger. Kendrick even saw someone get murdered in cold blood in front of his house, shot through the chest. Unfortunately, due to these barriers and countless others, this type of thing is not just an occurrence for many, but a ubiquitous reality. You come to see anguish at its worst before you ever hop off the porch. When Aubrey was a teenager, living in the basement of his mom's house in the somewhat affluent Forest Hill neighborhood, life got a bit tougher for him.
In high school, it seemed he was subject to a confusing and complex fashion of bullying. It seemed that he was rejected by some of his white classmates for being both black and Jewish, and by some of his Jewish classmates for being both black and Jewish. This regrettably is something kids have to grow up around in general, not just black kids. High School is another instance where Hell is other people, namely everyone in the building. It's a place where you can be barraged by diaristically personal and stereoscopically specific insults by about 8 kids who can reasonably still be called strangers, all before 8 AM. This is especially true in diverse areas, Toronto NYC, or Newark, where not everyone is a black kid like you. However, in predominantly black schools. I can say for sure we have a much more lighthearted but still equally abrasive version of bullying that goes by many names: Signifying, roasting, baking: We called it "hiking" where I was from. But that is not the same thing as what Aubrey went through, it is not the same as ganging up on the black Jewish kid for being black and Jewish, and it is beyond understandable that Aubrey may have developed deep-seated trauma stemming from the baffling social situation he found himself in during his high school days, as well as from his tumultuous family relations, being separated from Dad and whatnot, and although it is not the same type of trauma as the various types that Kendrick had experienced, it is trauma nonetheless, and much of it, as is with Kendrick, is unique to the plight of Black men in this western hemisphere. In this country.
There are many common ways that black male youth tend to deal with the plethora of issues that betide them, growing up how many of them grow up, experiencing what they do, some of them good and some of them arguably not so good. When one is bombarded by feelings of confusion, grief, terror, trauma, anger, and hopelessness, it isn’t hard to understand why one might attempt to find solace within a life of trauma and pain and anguish, drowning in and out the tide of drugs and alcohol, or between the odorous thighs of a stranger. One of the more positive outlets a young black man can find in this absurd life is music. Very often the favorite genre is, you may have guessed, Hip-Hop. A lot of teenage black boys, whether in notebooks in their bedroom or the Notes app on their smartphone, write rap verses, rhymes, bars, poetry, songs. I did. I had friends that did. Some start even younger than that, but more do it than you think. Drake and Kendrick? No different.
§3
Both of these artists took the first small strides and big steps in their music careers around the same four-year period between '08 and '11 and reached stardom around the same time. The trajectory of their careers is startlingly similar. Drake, as has been reported ad nauseum, was originally a child actor on the Canadian drama series Degrassi, which he says he used checks from to support himself and his mother when she became ill. Even while on the show, he wanted music. It was said that even while working on the show, he would spend his free time working on songs, so much so that showrunners thought it best he stay like extremely close to production, figuring that he might as well just sleep in his trailer, rather than show up late to filming. Kendrick was somehow able to keep his head just above water; despite the influence of gangbanging from family and friends, he stay focused on his studies and his art, writing verse after verse while getting straight As, and deciding to pursue it full-time once he graduated. Drake had the same passion for music, but not the same for his studies. He decided that high school took too much of his time to finish, and decided to drop out. But now, there was nothing to do but make it.
Drake was the first to pop off. After a couple of mixtapes, an online link to Drake's music was found by the son of music mogul and apparent kingpin of Hip-Hop Jay Prince, and from there name began to bubble in the industry. After hearing an unofficial remix to a song of his that Drake made with his verse kept on, a flattered and impressed Lil Wayne invited Drake to see him in Houston, where he would then take Drake on his tour with him, and effectively open the door to get where he is now.
Kendrick’s road was a bit longer, starting in '03 when he was just on his way to graduating from high school. Without a television show to work on, Kendrick went the grassroots route, mixtapes and freestyling and battle rapping, trying to get his name around. It did in a sense, when another high schooler named Dave Free discovered him, impressed with him so much that he would travel to his performances. They would become friends, and Dave Free would become an ardent supporter of Kendrick's tracks, even becoming his hype man and getting his older brother to be Kendrick's manager/DJ. It was Dave Free who arguably got the man signed; while fixing some computer equipment during a house call at record label executive Anthony "Top Dawg" Tiffith, Free kinda slipped one of Kendrick's mixtapes onto the desk more or less, later prompting Tiffith to invite the young rapper to audition for his new record label namely monikered Top Dawg Ent. or TDE as it is colloquially shortened. Somewhere around this time, Kendrick would shed his stage name of "K-Dot" in favor of using his first and middle names of birth. Several more mixtapes and singles later, with increasing critical praise from music journalists and the common rap fan, Kendrick would eventually catch the attention of one West Coast rap legend Dr. Dre.
2024's events notwithstanding, the beef between these two artists began in earnest very early on in their mainstream careers, sometime after the two collaborated on each other's breakout studio albums. (Buried Alive Interlude on Drake's 2011 album Take Care and Poetic Justice from Kendrick's 2012 album Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City.)5
What occurred was simple: Another rapper by the name of Big Sean released a song online entitled Control, which was recorded while working on an album but was not to be included on it, featuring verses from rappers Jay Electronica and Kendrick. In this verse, which is long enough to be its own song, Kendrick unleashes a barrage of complex multisyllabic, braggadocio-laced, battle-rap spirited flows; at once centrally relevant part of his section, Kendrick makes a bold claim: He aims to make it clear that he sees the genre of Hip-Hop to be a competition to see what one rapper is the greatest of all time, and intends to do all that he can to achieve that status, even/especially if it means competing directly with the two handfuls of young rappers that happen to be his successful and bubbling contemporaries. A couple of the names mentioned were Big Sean and Jay Electronica, hilariously enough. One name stood out though, and it was Drake’s. Now when the verse hit the airwaves there was an immediate shift that occurred, Kendrick’s confident war cry rang out loudly throughout the Hip-hop ecosystem, both from those championing his competitive spirit and those dismissing his cockiness with their own puffed-up raps, many of which Kendrick would sardonically dismiss.
Drake was one of the more popular acts named in the verse, so it was inevitable that he would be asked what he thought, and he would go on a media tour of sorts claiming that he was unbothered and unaffected by the verse and its claims while also throwing around more backhanded compliments than a reality TV show reunion. This was the start of tensions. A cold war would progress for nearly the next decade, with each rapper exchanging their own versions of subliminal jabs with the other. There is a slight difference between the methods used by these two rappers when engaging in the Cold War-style, pre-beef disses. Drake was always a bit more sly and underhanded, constructing his disses with an air of plausible deniability, in order to avoid providing a catalyst for all-out war while still getting his point across. Kendrick’s jabs were much more direct without causing a larger conflict themselves.
Things are confusing here, because Drake first takes issue with the verse and dismisses all notions of friendly competition within, taking it as harsh fighting words. But in this man, we see, as well as in Kendrick, a competitiveness that is near boundless, a desire to be unanimously regarded as #1 in the genre. This is characteristic of the capitalistic steeplechase. I was talking to my dad once, about why we have this stereotypical trajectory with black youth. The effects of capitalism ravage them and their families whether they understand the inner machinery or not. It is not their fault, though part of said machinery acts to convince these young people that it is and that it is their responsibility to be so driven to succeed in this horse race that they can rescue themselves from the existential insecurity that occurs when one just does not have/make enough money. Not only does this affect the bottom of the food chain, but everyone in that imaginary “middle” class as well, except they aren’t homeless yet so they think they’re safe. This existential vandalization of people’s lives and families is traumatic even when it is just a memory, and a part of the real evil of the situation is in the fact that: the race is never over; the race does not have a winner, but has many losers'; there is nowhere where the race is not being conducted, no pit stops or rest areas, and everyone has a stake on the bets; people are stealing while we watch the race; everyone is too busy with both spectating and participating in the race to do anything about anything. When young men, taught by a silent teacher to be hopeless, see people who look like them achieve wealth and status and adulation and some mangled form of agency through something like rapping, or basketball, or acting, they flock to it. The basketball side of things is sad for its own reasons. The commercial sports industries are cutthroat in their own way, and when brown brothers are inevitably rejected by “The League,” their dread is unique. The thing that is painful in terms of the arts, namely rap, is that it turns another artistic endeavor into, a lot of times, not much more than an economic endeavor, if by no other metric than by how much the very notion of competitiveness and war, the very things that have ravaged so many people’s potential arbitrarily, have become part of the integral ethos of hip-hop, the same way it has in sports. One of us has to go, and it ain’t gonna be me. I will be declared the winner, and you will accept falling by the wayside, Godspeed you as you try not to fall off the spiked hamster wheel that is this life, black brother6.
§4
In March of 2024, rapper Future collaborated with producer and composer Metro Boomin on an album entitled We Don’t Trust You, and it was littered with jabs at Drake, from multiple of Drake’s musical contemporaries and former collaborators, one of them being the other subject of this essay. Kendrick Lamar took offense in his verse to a song released by Drake the previous year, First Person Shooter featuring J Cole. In this song, sentiments were being put forth that these three rappers were the “Big Three” on top of the food chain of rap music. This had a veneer of friendliness and tongue-cheeked competitiveness, but one could hear the slightest bit of smarm in between the lines spat by the two rappers, especially seeing as there has already been tension between Kendrick and Drake that was less than good-natured. Backhandedness aside, if you were a child growing up as the oldest of your parents’ children, living in poverty until you were able to save everyone in your family from that hopeless, abject circumstance by not just participating in an industry but competing in it, in an industry where there are people actively trying to eliminate you, how would you react to such a sentiment?
If you were a black man in the same boat, how would you be programmed to react? Wouldn’t you have been taught to not allow yourself to be pigeonholed into this sort of stalemate, especially when you perceive other parties to be holding knives in the hands that aren’t holding the olive branches? Especially when at least one olive branch is being held in the hand of someone you despise? You may react similarly to Kendrick: vehement rejection, and formal declaration of war. Enough was enough: the beef had begun in earnest. What happened next conflicted me. I sort of knew how the beef would play out. I sort of knew how I might have reacted to it, and how I’d feel, but I was conflicted about that feeling specifically and what it said about me. It happened after Drake dropped two diss tracks toward Kendrick, entitled Push Ups and Taylor Made Freestyle. Generally, the diss tracks were not too heated, but an important detail is the fact that Drake mentioned by name Kendrick’s significant other, a woman who’s been in his life before any semblance of fame came to fruition. It’s painful that women so often are used as pawns and weapons of blunt force to be used in disputes between men, regardless of the woman’s thoughts on the issue or willingness to be involved in it. Kendrick also made disses that sort of flippantly insult femininity and dispositions that fall outside of heteronormativity—at least it would make sense to interpret certain lines from Euphoria, Kendrick’s response, that way. Around this point of the beef, early May with conflicts in full swing, my conflicted feelings grew more so, especially with what happened on 3 May heading into the 4th. Drake released his metaphorical red button with the song Family Matters, and it is something. Clocking in at 7 minutes long, it is the longest diss in the beef, and that is because there are several subjects for disses. There were parts within the song that, while listening, depressed me somewhat. This was a man burning bridges with people he shared an industry with, in ways that were bleak at best: insinuating that your girlfriend cheated on you with him, that he had sex with your baby’s momma before you had sex with his baby’s momma, you should be ashamed for not being a gangbanger, you’re a lame, you only get played in gay clubs, you’re all punks, sissies, and I always knew I was going to have to kill you off. Maybe this is soft of me to say, but that’s sad to hear, especially from a rapper like Drake who so clearly would prefer being friends with everyone and having everyone love him. But when you compete for something, and when that something happens to also be your very survival, it turns out that that sort of thing is quite hard to keep friendly. It’s a quite simple logic. If you wish to make it so that you are unequivocally numero uno and succeed in doing so, then you’re going to look around that mountaintop and see that it is just population you, that numero uno all by yourself. This was a man making a decision, and it seemed to be one of those unbreakable double bind sorts of situations, where you have only two options and both options come equipped with this inescapable yet unacceptable loss, like a claustrophobic agoraphobic trying to find an affordable apartment in NYC.
In Family Matters, Drake takes his bridge-burning to its fullest possible extent. Drake uses the tactic of attempting to expose secret information about Kendrick Lamar to try and humiliate him. He opts to spread rumors that Kendrick Lamar is physically abusive to his significant other, and that this significant other cheated on Kendrick with his manager and creative partner and had a child together that Kendrick is unknowingly raising as his own. Of course, Drake opted for puns when revealing these statements, which is only more disrespectful, and not in the way that I feel is very useful for diss tracks7. If you were dissing me for being violent toward my fiancée, would it make much sense to flippantly make light of that very same abuse that you try to vilify me for? Is it wrong or not? Is it true or performative? That question only mattered for an hour or so.
I knew what would happen. I knew Kendrick would go all out in the next response. What happened was Meet the Grahams, undeniably one of the single most sadistic and scathing diss tracks in Hip-Hop history. The part of me that loves the art form loves this song more than any other song this year—that same part that loves the beef-related tension. Then I start to think about the sorts of things being said on the track. Lines directly spoke to Drake’s son, berating him and wishing that Drake’s father would have worn a condom the night he was conceived, effectively deleting this six-year-old boy in the process. He addressed Drake’s father, accusing Drake of manipulating his tenuous-at-best connections to black American culture to sell records to more stereotypically Hip-hop audiences. He writes a verse to an alleged daughter that Drake has fathered a decade ago and never cared for or looked after. He alleges that Drake has sex offenders inside his entourage on payroll and that he assists them in running a sex trafficking ring, revealing all of this to Drake’s mother while wishing death on him multiple times. Truly devastating stuff that was made worse when Kendrick doubled down on everything—even the most outlandish of claims—the next day with the song Not Like Us, which just so happened to be such an eloquent final blow that in addition to ending the beef (at least the heaviest part of the conflict,) has become a legitimate hit single. A hit single in which one of the biggest pop stars on the planet is called a pedophile multiple times? I do not have to explain why that should give anyone pause. Especially since it could be true. Especially since I see kids and old people dancing and singing along to the song. And especially since Kendrick, as talented as he is, has used the information for diss tracks and not to, I dunno, arrest this apparent sexual deviant here8. Especially when I think about how one of Kendrick’s mentors, Dr. Dre, has his own heinous history of violence and abuse of women, stemming from decades ago, and not once did Kendrick wish death on him. Fans are berating and spewing hate at whoever isn’t on the same side of the fandom fence as them. Women are still punching bags in the middle, being used as punchlines and disses without respect to respect or courtesy. Meanwhile, there are white male music executives and streaming services heads who are both growing hard-ons in their pants and cartoon money signs out of their pupils while two multi-millionaires insult each other over soul samples and piano licks and drums. That isn’t even to mention the injustices that this whole brouhaha has distracted me and others from, like the crimes being committed in the Congo, Sudan, on burglarized land west of Jordan. Not to say that I was equipped internally to stand up for that either. No, for some reason, I’m better equipped to watch two men have a pissing contest to see who can put out a dumpster fire faster. And we can’t even have a good discussion on the battle, can’t even truly waste my time on the planet effectively, because social media isn’t much more than a frothy cesspool of half-baked and wholly unchecked opinions.
What can I say, people love conflict. In this steeplechase, everything is an industry, even conflict, even anger, even blood. If a Black American Man sees that he may feed his loved ones, and provide them with all off the strength of his anger and his capacity to shed blood, how can I truly judge? Sure, I can’t be fully happy. Or really all that happy at all. But I can’t judge. B.A.M.! Ad Astra.
English titles including Vicious Circle, Behind Closed Doors,(the title which most closely resembles the literal French translation of Huis Clos into Closed Door,) No Way Out, Dead End, In Camera (the title referencing the Latin legalese equivalent to Huis Clos) and No Exit, the name by which all insufferable undergrad philosophy students know it.
That's when you get the real metaphysical moments, like when you've just read Nausea for the first time and get a tummy ache the next time you look at tree bark or the verdant leaves on trees that billow along the back of breezy springtime zephyrs. Life becomes so immensely beautiful and so immensely horrifying simultaneously that sometimes the only solution is to lose one's mind a little because you inevitably begin to step back and look around, and wonder...and question. Who knew falling could be so exhausting? It becomes tiring business falling down the rabbit hole of wondering about your existence, how you formed and how you came to be and how you got here and where you go/what happens after you die and all that, and that is something you never reach a satisfying or non-painful conclusion for--I suspect--as long as one lives. It is the reason so many phenomenologists and philosophers are either balding or fully bald, I presume.
Still, somehow I don't remember ever seeing headlines of elementary schools or Walmarts being shot up by black teenagers. Go figure. Maybe I don’t watch/read enough news?
I remember when I was younger, at one point things got so bad for us that we were too broke for Section 8. Life, sometimes, is so bleak for a black male that it can easily debilitate him. The situation is dire, indeed. But, what do you do?
Within these two albums, and these two collaborations, a clear divide between the dispositions of the two artists takes shape. The two show how different they really are as people and as artists, while still relating in odd ways as black men in a capitalistic American rap industry. Firstly they relate in terms of their competitiveness. They both have aspirations to be regarded as the most important figure in the world of rap music. Their difference(s) begin to take shape when considering how the two gentlemen go about achieving their goal. One has decided to attempt to dominate commercially, with inoffensive beats and simplified lyrics that have earworms for melodies, sell as many records and incur as many streams as physically possible, and braggadociously flaunt his absurd material wealth and opulence pre, post, and during. The other attempts to bridge the gap, attracting fans and respect through authentic and infectious songwriting, conceptual virtuosity, and densely complex lyricism. One attempts to provide the soundtrack to your summer and inspire you to attack the steeplechase with a smile on your face, and the other to connect to something universal in the human spirit and affect a unique connection…while attacking the steeplechase with a pensive glare in the eye. Both are trying their hardest to win unwinnable races, no?
There’s this quote from Seneca: "non est ad astra mollis e terris via" ('there is no easy way from the earth to the stars').
My feelings toward the whole thing are janky at this point. On one hand, I see what is happening. The tensions and the words said that can’t be taken back and the bridges whose charred rubble cannot be glued back in place. I look at all of it and I lament for the idealized versions of the world I had in my head when I was a lot younger. On the other hand, I am a man. A black man. I feel anger, all around and fully within me. At times the rage can be cataclysmic, sitting in the pit of the stomach, burning so hot that the flames are gone and there is nothing there but tar. I know what it is like to hate, to hate someone else or even yourself, to the point where all you can do is conjure up unique ways to express that hate. I remember when I was a kid, I would zone out sometimes, losing myself in homicidal visions: I would imagine beating my school bullies to death on a loop. One time, I imagined doing that to a very close family member, a sibling. I know how volatile emotion can be when it is at its most raw and honest. But, none of that means I have to like it, does it?
Just to make things clear, I understand what snitching is and how that informs these sorts of situations. Politics and conventions notwithstanding, the truth of the matter is the truth of the matter.