Kendrick Lamar's Feud With Drake Is More Complicated Than You May Realize

The rap beef between Pulitzer-award-winning Compton rapper Kendrick Lamar and Toronto-born rapper Drake was one of the most talked about and engrossing cultural events of 2024. In 2023, Drake collaborated with fellow superstar J. Cole on the track "First Person Shooter," on which Cole described himself as one of hip-hop's "big three," alongside Drake and Lamar. But Lamar apparently didn't take kindly to being lumped in with Drake and Cole without his consent. In January 2024, he used an appearance on Future and Metro Boomin's No. 1 hit "Like That" to attack Drake and Cole, stating that "it's just big me." Lamar also punned on the name of Drake's recent album, "For All the Dogs," by threatening to take his rival to the "pet cemetery."

Drake has gained a reputation for firing jibes at public figures in his songs. Despite this, he had been trying to brush off apparent bait from Lamar, who had appeared to diss the Canadian artist on several tracks since they collaborated together back in 2011. However, this time he chose to respond, dropping the track "Push Ups" in April 2024. The track mocked Lamar's stature (the cover art features the barcode of a size seven shoebox), his commercial inferiority compared to Drake, and the comparative failure of his album "Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers." From there, the two would continue to exchange fire across several diss tracks, with Lamar widely accepted to have emerged victorious. But nothing about this battle was straightforward.

J. Cole was the first to respond to Kendrick Lamar's verse on "Like That," dissing the rapper on the song "7 Minute Drill." However, he soon backed out of the ballooning rap battle, withdrawing the track from streaming services less than a week later. Drake's "Push Ups" garnered plenty of press attention after a demo was leaked a nearly week before its official release, and the Canadian attempted to double-down with the release of another track, "Taylor Made Freestyle." The song employed AI versions of Compton rappers Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg to attack Lamar, but it had to be withdrawn from streaming after a legal challenge with the former's estate. 

In it, Drake claimed that Lamar had failed to respond to "Push Ups" as he was obligated to not affect the release of Taylor Swift's "The Tortured Poets Department." When Lamar finally did respond, he did so with two brutal back-to-back tracks, "Euphoria" and "6:16 in LA." Together, they accused Drake of being a bad parent and having had cosmetic surgery on his abs, among other things, and Lamar claimed to have spies in Drake's record label who confirmed he was reviled in his own camp.

Despite the increasingly personal nature of the shots being fired and speculation running wild in internet forums, few of the claims about the pair's behavior were proven by tangible evidence. But that didn't stop the assertions from becoming more outlandish and potentially damaging. Indeed, things only got uglier.

By this point, hip-hop fans across the globe were following the beef in minute detail, poring over hidden meanings in the lyrics and speculating what else was due to come. And if they were looking to be entertained by the growing brutality, they would not be disappointed. Drake responded to Kendrick Lamar's one-two punch of "Euphoria" and "6:16 in LA" within hours of their release with the epic eight-minute-long "Family Matters." 

The track begins with Drake criticizing Lamar for bringing his family into the beef and threatening that it was time to get personal. Among the accusations Drake made was that Lamar had been violent toward his fiancé and the mother of his children, Whitney, and that one of the rapper's kids had actually been fathered by his business partner, Dave Free. The claims seemed likely to turn the narrative against Lamar as those following the beef weighed up if they could be true.

But just minutes after Drake uploaded "Family Matters" to streaming platforms, Lamar responded with a brutal family-focused track of his own, "Meet the Grahams." Over an eerie beat, Lamar addresses several of Drake's family members directly, including his son, Adonis. He was at the center of another of Drake's rap beefs when his existence, which Drake had tried to keep secret, was revealed through a diss track by rapper Pusha T. Lamar's song excoriated Drake as a father, son, and made two claims which came to dominate the discourse around the beef. First, Lamar said that Drake had another secret child, an 11-year-old daughter. Second, he painted Drake as a "predator" of girls and young women, suggesting it was "only a matter of time" before his home got raided. And within hours, Lamar dropped again.

"Meet the Grahams" had already seen Kendrick Lamar pull a reversal on Drake, taking away the headlines that "Family Matters" might have generated if Lamar had not dropped just minutes later. But its follow up, "Not Like Us," was a different beast. An upbeat West Coast club track, it doubles down on the accusations of sexual abuse Lamar leveled against Drake in previous disses, making further allegations against the Canadian rapper's whole OVO crew. More than this, the song climaxed with a verse describing Drake as an intruder in hip-hop culture — a "colonizer." The phrase "Not Like Us," repeated in the hook, reiterated Drake's difference further. The infectious track debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and it remained No. 1 on the Hot Rap Songs chart for an amazing 21 weeks.

While undoubtedly catchy, what made "Not Like Us" so sticky on the charts was the fact that Drake had little in terms of an adequate response to it. The day after it dropped, Drake released "The Heart Pt. 6," its title stolen from a series of songs in Lamar's discography. In it, Drake attempts to defend himself, but it falls flat, with the Canadian stating only that he would have been arrested if he were a sexual predator, that he was too famous to get away with it, and that "I only f*** with Whitneys, not Millie Bobby Browns." The line was self-damaging, causing commentators to recall that Drake had in fact spent time with the actress when she was a minor. The song concludes with the rapper describing the battle as an "exercise," suggesting that he had bowed out. That Lamar felt no need to respond to the disastrous track spoke volumes.

The failure of "The Heart Pt. 6" to defuse the effectiveness of "Not Like Us" left Kendrick Lamar free to claim triumph over Drake, resulting in several victory laps that put the result of the battle beyond doubt. There was the "Not Like Us" music video, which featured Lamar dancing with his fiancé, Whitney, footage that undermined Drake's accusations of domestic violence without addressing them directly. The video climaxes with a huge Compton crowd singing and dancing to the track, reiterating its popularity and the size of Lamar's support base.

Lamar also doubled down on his victory with a "Pop Out" concert at LA's Kia Forum for the city's Juneteenth celebrations. Featuring a bevy of high profile affiliates including Ty Dolla $ign, Jay Rock, and Tyler the Creator, the sold-out show saw Lamar perform diss tracks from the beef in front of an ecstatic audience, including "Euphoria" and "Not Like Us," which he played a total of five times. One performance saw Lamar bring members of LA gangs including the Bloods and Crips on stage in a show of city-wide peace, suggesting that the destruction of Drake had had a healing effect on the culture at large.

In September 2024, it was announced that Kendrick Lamar would be the featured performer at the following year's Super Bowl halftime show — an historic second appearance — cementing his place as the most prominent rapper of his generation and reiterating his dominance of rap music as a result of the beef. In November, Lamar surprise released "GNX," a raw studio album which hit the top of the Billboard 200 and garnered considerable critical praise.

Drake has seemingly been left isolated and defeated by his beef with Kendrick Lamar, but the groundwork for his current predicament arguably came long before the "Like That" heralded the start of the battle itself. He has also tangled with other high-profile names including Pharrell Williams, who refused to be drawn into the battle proper but may have commented on Drake in a new song, "Double Life." Rick Ross, Kanye West, and Metro Boomin — who made a beat titled "BBL Drizzy" to add fuel to rumor that Drake had cosmetic surgery — also all fired additional shots at the rapper in 2024. 

The Canadian star remains in a tailspin artistically. In January 2025, he released the "Fighting Irish Freestyle" in which a tired-sounding Drake appears to criticize former allies including basketball star LeBron James, who appeared at Lamar's "Pop Out" concert. Commentators have stressed it will be difficult for Drake to reclaim his "Certified Lover Boy" image after the damage to his reputation.

Rather than face down his opponents through more diss tracks, Drake has taken the unprecedented step of legal action, suing Universal Music Group and Spotify for inflating the reach of "Not Like Us" at his expense. The suit was later withdrawn, though he then decided to sue UMG for defamation and harassment for the claims of criminal pedophilia made against him in "Not Like Us." Some have suggested the action is intended to prevent Lamar from performing the hit during his upcoming Super Bowl halftime show performance. Whatever the result, it is unlikely that Drake can sue his way to rehabilitation in the hip-hop community.