Kendrick Lamar Proves World Peace Is Possible Through Mutual Hatred of Drake

By Jacob Weindling  |  June 20, 2024 | 3:05pm
Photo by Timothy Norris/Getty Images for pgLang, Amazon Music, & Free Lunch
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Kendrick Lamar Proves World Peace Is Possible Through Mutual Hatred of Drake

Unless you live under a rock, you have likely seen at least a snippet of the historic rap beef unfolding between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. A quick summary for the uninitiated living under said rock: Kendrick is called King for a reason, as his music and writing is generally accepted to be unparalleled in the modern rap industry (“fuck the big three it’s just big me” as Kendrick has said), while Drake is the avatar for the pop-ification of rap. Add in the fact that Drake grew up in Toronto under a white Jewish mother and spent summers with his black father in Memphis, and there are myriad uncomfortable dynamics raised by a rapper who has been accused of being a “culture vulture.”

Kendrick is a hothead who styles himself as Tupac’s successor as the voice of west coast hip-hop, and this soft boil of hatred reached a crescendo when something happened between Drake and Future to drive a wedge in their amiable business partnership. This launched a three-way rap beef that included J. Cole reenacting the Grandpa Simpson walk in/walk out meme as soon as he realized what he had gotten himself into, and Kendrick unleashed a decade-plus of frustration at Drake.

This culminated in Kendrick Lamar dropping Meet the Grahams twenty minutes after Drake’s best punch in the fight, Family Matters, where Kendrick wrote shocking lines directed at Drake’s parents like “And we gotta raise our daughters knowin’ there’s predators like him lurkin’, Fuck a rap battle, he should die so all of these women can live with a purpose.”

This is not some made-up cheap shot, as Drake is known to do weird stuff with underage girls on stage at concerts, and this 30-something man has a long history of texting and contacting teenagers. That Kendrick says he has proof of what Drake has implicated himself in is not exactly Earth-shattering news.

A couple days later, Kendrick Lamar would end the beef by releasing the seminal hit of the summer…year…decade…century?

Not Like Us is the national anthem of Los Angeles now, and it is an all-time banger whose catchiest lines revolve around calling Drake a pedophile. This is a surreal moment in music history. No one alive has ever lost a rap beef as badly as Drake has.

Kendrick’s bars are so good he negotiated a détente over them to bring crips and bloods together last night at his “Ken & Friends” Juneteenth concert in LA, when he performed Not Like Us live for the first time ever with Dr. Dre.

Just to be clear what lyrics the entire crowd is rapping in the second half of the video:

Say, Drake, I hear you like ’em young

You better not ever go to cell block one

To any bitch that talk to him and they in love

Just make sure you hide your lil’ sister from him

They tell me Chubbs the only one that get your hand-me-downs

And Party at the party playin’ with his nose now

And Baka got a weird case, why is he around?

Certified Lover Boy? Certified pedophiles

Wop, wop, wop, wop, wop, Dot, fuck ’em up

Wop, wop, wop, wop, wop, I’ma do my stuff

Why you trollin’ like a bitch? Ain’t you tired?

Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A minorrrrrrrrrrr

This is why you shouldn’t have pressed that button, Aubrey. This man is not fucking around. He has discovered levels of hatred previously thought unattainable by the human brain that are so powerful it brought peace to the west coast. Look at how happy everyone is here. All fueled by hatred.

In case anyone was still wondering if Kendrick truly hated Drake or if this was all an act, here’s how the concert ended.

After burying Drake and bringing Los Angeles on stage to dance on his grave, which included former Toronto Raptor DeMar Derozan who Drake has called a friend, everyone posed for this photo that included both crips and bloods from Compton.

 

 

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This is remarkable. We are witnessing history in haterdom. Kendrick Lamar created a hate vortex so powerful he turned a decades-long shooting war into a dance party. We need to send all of mankind’s greatest scientists to Compton to study the effects this level of hate has on the human brain. Is it possible that intense levels of mutual disdain can actually temper the rage centers in our minds? We must find out immediately, for the good of the world.

What if Vladimir Putin’s energy is just misdirected? If we could interrupt his 19th century Russian history studies to introduce him to the grossness of Aubrey Graham, maybe we could get him and Zelenskyy up on stage to dance away their beef. We actually have the perfect laboratory to test the impacts of Drake-style hatred next week in the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Both cranky old men have Drake vs. Kendrick-levels of mutual disdain for one another. What if we opened next week’s debate with everyone vibing to Euphoria before dancing to Not Like Us?

It’s worth a try, the globe needs to find some way to bring the rising temperature on our myriad crises down, and looking across a world bereft of good answers, hating Drake’s guts seems to be our best bet for salvation.

 
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