During last year's infamous rap feud, Drake and Kendrick Lamar kept searching for a smoking gun.
In "meet the grahams," Lamar alleged that Drake was hiding another child (false information that Drake later claimed to have planted); in "Family Matters," Drake accused Lamar of hiring a crisis PR to cover up alleged domestic assault. It was a tabloid journalist's approach to diss tracks — an attempt to dig up the most salacious gossip possible about a rival.
Drake and Lamar were taking cues from the former's 2018 feud with Pusha T, who goaded Drake into an exchange of diss tracks before dropping "The Story of Adidon" and its bombshell revelation that Drake had secretly fathered a child with an adult film star. That bit of water cooler gossip instantly ended the feud, leaving Drake to slouch away and do his best to continue with business as usual.
But the Drake/Kendrick feud wasn't won with facts — it was won with schoolyard taunts. It was won with a catchy banger in which Lamar taunted Drake for supposedly being a pedophile — presenting jokes rather than evidence, proving that he could rap circles around Drake without bothering to leave receipts.
The chart-topping "Not Like Us" doesn't make a particularly thorough case for Drake being a pedophile — he tells women to "hide your li'l sister from him," mocks the sketchy legal histories of some members of Drake's OVO crew, and suggests Drake's favourite chord is "A Minor." The only part I find truly reputation-damaging is a verse in which Lamar accuses Drake of musically colonizing Atlanta, a truly scathing rundown of Drake's clout-chasing connections to the city.
All of which leads us to this month, and Drake's persistent attempts to sue his own record label — Universal Music Group, also the label that released Lamar's "Not Like Us" — for its role in the feud, claiming defamation and harassment over the "specific, unmistakable, and false factual allegation that Drake is a criminal pedophile."
Drake claims that "Not Like Us" was "intended ... to suggest that the public should resort to vigilante justice in response." The track suggests nothing of the sort, although the shooting that subsequently took place at Drake's Toronto mansion — leaving a security guard hospitalized — was indeed disturbing.
But the lawsuit, which Drake recently refiled federally, shows that he is still missing the point — that this rap feud isn't about facts, and the truth about his sexual proclivities has nothing to do with why "Not Like Us" was the knockout blow in the feud. He and Lamar both accused each other of terrible things, and neither had proof.
But only one of them won the feud, and it was the guy rapping better bars over a catchier beat. It's like in "Hit 'Em Up," when 2Pac claimed to have slept with Biggie's wife. Did he actually? Don't know, don't care. Doesn't matter.
If Drake's going to recover from this one, he needs to do what he did in 2018 — take the L and get back to making hits of his own. Because right now, all he's doing is reminding everyone of how badly he lost in 2024.