Rap has long become ‘middle class’—having soared a great distance from its inner city roots. Even its feuds have turned into stunts for publicity and money. So when the war of lyrics between A-list rappers Kendrick Lamar and Drake turned seriously nasty—both the music establishment and fans were shocked. Finally, a rap beef that could hurt the bottomline—or not.
A brief history of rap feuds
Inner city roots: Rap emerged as a subversive street sound in the 70s—out of communities torn apart by poverty and violence. Many of the OG MCs were present or former gang members—as were their inner city patrons. Battle raps inevitably threatened to tip over into actual violence—but the art form itself is rooted in African American culture.
The game of ‘dozens’: is a form of verbal combat—where young men essentially trash talk each other. Some claim it originated in West Africa—and made its way into slave culture. Here’s how it goes:
[O]pponents spar more like a fencing match. Each player recites jokes that have a history of success. Each blow is either successfully deflected by producing laughter that matches or surpasses the preceding joke, or the match concludes.
Most of us recognise these as ‘Yo Mama’ routines—where the insults typically target a person’s mother, appearance, status etc.
Quote to note: While Battle rap—like ‘Dozens’—is essentially good-humoured—it requires the edge of hostility. C Brandon Ogbunu and Lupe Fiasco write in Wired:
Battle rap, whether it takes the form of in-person face-offs or is done via diss tracks, has always been one of hip-hop’s flagship sports, defined by banter between artists, often—but not necessarily—derogatory in tone. It has roots in “the dozens” and related relics in African American culture that thrive on spontaneity, humour, and wit (often at others’ expense). So while “battling” can be strictly done for the sake of competition, “beef” requires some degree of personal animus between the parties.
Going mainstream: Battle rap
Rap became fully mainstream in the 1980s—when it was discovered by music companies and producers. This was ‘New School Rap’—with the first generation of commercial artists. This is the era of Fat Boys (‘Jail House Rap’, 1984), Fresh Prince (‘Parents Just Don’t Understand’, 1988), Run-D.M.C. (‘Walk This Way’, 1986) and Salt-N-Pepa.
Going major league: Battle rap contests became a way to separate yourself from the crowd—and land a label. Many of the best known MCs came up as battle rappers. As they became famous, so did the their art form:
The rest of the ’80s and ’90s saw superstar rappers rise from the streets because of their superior battling skills. Jay-Z and Busta Rhymes infamously battled when they were in high school. There’s a famous video of Biggie battling in New York streets and Jay-Z and DMX battling on top of pool tables in NYC dives. Eventually, the battle rap scene spread across the country, and soon leagues formed pitting MCs against one another like lyrical versions of boxing matches.
Marshall Mathers was discovered at one such ‘boxing match’ in Cincinnati—by an LA radio show host. He ended up on the show—while Dr Dre was listening. The rest is Eminem history.
Quote to note: Rap beefs offered a form of ‘equal opportunity’ to excel in the battlefield:
In principle, a rap battle allows for an up-and-comer to take down a more established MC… Ultimately, beef in rap music is a longing for meritocracy. It’s a way to show that status or money doesn’t supersede skill. It’s an ideal – that once you put on the gloves and step in the ring, nobody (not your friends, not your family, not business associates, not God) can help.
From feuding to killing: Tupac Shakur
In the 1990s, as rap hit the big time, the ‘thug life’ became part of the appeal for nice, suburban middle class kids. The biggest label at the time called itself Death Row records. Stars like Notorious B.I.G wore their gangland roots on their sleeve:
Beef is when you need two gats to go to sleep / beef is when your moms ain’t safe up in the streets / beef is when I see you, guaranteed to be in ICU.
There was no cred—street or otherwise—in rap without the presence of violence.
The death of Tupac: The thin line between on-stage menace and off-stage danger began to blur—until it disappeared entirely in 1996—when Shakur was shot four times in the chest at a stoplight in Las Vegas. At the time, the chief suspect was Notorious B.I.G—with whom he had a highly publicised beef. Seven months later, B.I.G was shot dead in LA.
Something to note: Shakur named his crew T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E.—an acronym for The Hate U Give Little Infants F***s Everybody. It was an attempt to reclaim the word used to demonise Black men. But in the end, that life claimed both him and his nemesis. In the year before his death, Shakur was shot at, arrested thrice, and sent to prison on sexual assault charges.
As one writer put it at the time:
Being that rap is a street-orientated art form, there's gonna be a streetlike environment. A lot of rappers have a street life and a rap life. And when they get taken out, it's usually the street life that does it.
The real point to note: This so-called East vs West feud was immensely profitable for the music industry. More violent and angry the feud, the higher the return—for labels, artists, and even music magazines.
Fast forward to drill rap: The form was born in Chicago in the 2000s—and spread quickly thanks to YouTube. The success of the genre is testimony to the enduring allure of rap violence:
Its lyrics feature lamentable celebrations of youth violence, and its songs and videos can include taunting and direct mentions of specific murders… A teenager is gunned down on a Monday. By Thursday, the alleged assailants (often members of a group in conflict with the victim) are boasting about their death on a drill song posted on YouTube. By the following Tuesday, affluent teenagers in Beverly Hills are TikTok-dancing to the track. Rinse, rap, repeat. And in this case, another homicide.
Beefing in the digital age: Lamar vs Drake
While there are no dead bodies, the feud is another example of the darker side of the made-for-sales rap beef.
How it began: Lamar, Drake, and J Cole started out as friends—and then turned frenemies:
But the three have also long considered rap a competitive sport, and have been vying for the G.O.A.T. title for years… In 2013, Lamar gave a similarly show-stealing verse… stating that “I got love for you all but I’m tryna murder you n—s” and asking “What is competition? I’m tryna raise the bar high.”
Everyone was trying to establish their ‘juice’—so to speak. It was great for fans—and for streaming sales alike. Social media gives stars power and their feuds great reach, as Wired notes:
No advertising campaign can generate the anticipation that rap beef creates, sometimes out of thin air. Whether we are enjoying it or not, we all wait for the next iteration… artists now control the timing and pace of the releases. Unlike years past, when popular DJs often folded diss songs into radio sets, artists today can curate the release of these tracks, going directly to listeners via platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and X.
Where it turned dark: The trigger was absurdly innocuous. In a collab with Drake, J Cole rapped:
Love when they argue the hardest MC / Is it K. Dot [Kendrick]? Is it Aubrey [Drake]? Or me? / We the big three, like we started a league.
It was kind of sweet—but Lamar seems to have taken it wrong. In March this year, he came back hard:
In a tightly wound, entendre-replete, machine gun verse, Lamar fired back by refuting the designation and setting himself apart from his peers and former collaborators… “Motherfuck the big three, n—a, it’s just big me.”
But then he went down an old and familiar route: “N—a, bum, ‘fore all your dogs get buried / That’s a K with all these nines, he gon’ see ‘Pet Sematary.’” The ‘dogs’ being Drake’s people—which gives whole another meaning to ‘cemetery’. And then all bets were off.
Weekend in hip hop hell: Lamar and Drake have released a total of nine diss tracks since March 2024—of which they dropped five this past weekend:
In quick succession, the feuding stars exchanged blows across five tracks with increasingly dark lyrics that had rap fans riveted, shocked and queasy. Then, around 2 a.m. on Tuesday, a shooting outside Drake’s $100 million mansion in Toronto left his security guard injured, local authorities say. The shooter was not identified at press time, and it is not clear if or how the incident is related to the beef.
The ‘diss’ tracks were filled with vile accusations of pedophilia (against Drake) and domestic violence (against Lamar). Every family member was dragged in—from wives to children. But a lot of it was also just plain petty and sad.
Who benefits? As Wall Street Journal notes, hip hop has made a big comeback in the charts since March—a rare event in the Swifties era. The weekend was especially rewarding. Five of Spotify’s top 10 songs are from the feud. And perhaps that was the intention:
Various potential female victims mentioned by Drake and Lamar in their war of words had been treated as mere pawns. “They’re just using these really serious things as power-ups in a video game for people to kind of fawn over,” [journalist Mano] Sundaresan says. “We are in a game-ified era of fandom, where you think of these things almost like sports.”
Though in this case, Sundaresan says the two men have gone too far—and done long-term damage to their brand: “Can you really listen to them again in the same way after this?”
The bottomline: We leave the final word to Nels Abbey in The Guardian, who notes: “In the long term the only person who really wins from ‘beef’ is the owner of the cow. So congratulations are due to the Universal Music Group”—which has contracts with both.
Reading list
NPR has the rare positive take on the Lamar-Drake feud—and a blow-by-blow analysis. BBC News offers a more concise timeline. Wall Street Journal (splainer gift link) talks to sceptics who think this is a PR fail. For the history of rap, we recommend Uproxx and Wired—which also looks at the future of the battle raps. Ringer has an interesting piece on the middle class rap star.
