The hits keep coming for Kendrick
Kendrick is the indisputable winner of the spat with fellow rapper Drake.
The Kendrick and Drake beef, which I wrote about extensively, has changed everything. Up until a few weeks ago, it looked like things were settling down again, with the consensus that Kendrick had easily won.
Normal service was being resumed, Drake was going back to releasing novelty tunes, and Kendrick was gonna go back under the radar for a while. It all made a lot of sense. But there was another twist!
Not content with humiliating Drake with some of the biggest diss tracks of all time, Kendrick has spent the last couple of weeks consolidating his victory with some of the most iconic hip-hop moves in years.
First up, he hosted a pop-up event last weekend in Los Angeles that got everybody in hip-hop talking. This was more than just a gig. Kendrick was joined by a host of LA and US hip-hop legends for his Juneteenth celebration, and played his Drake ‘Not Like Us’ diss five times in a row to a jubilant crowd.
Among the guests were Dr Dre, ‘Not Like Us’ producer DJ Mustard, Steve Lacy, YG, Tyler the Creator, Roddy Ricch, TY Dolla $ign and Black Hippy members Ab-Soul, Schoolboy Q, and Jay Rock. The atmosphere was intense and celebratory and the crowd screamed back every word of every song, in what became a milestone in hip-hop history.
A region as iconic as the West Coast was always steeped in hip-hop history, since even before the days of Ice T and N.W.A., but this concert was reminiscent of those early days in the 90s when ‘Chronic’ and ‘DoggyStyle’ helped change the whole face of rap music in the USA.
Gang rivalries were put to one side as Crips and Bloods danced on stage together, and the evening was documented and analysed in great depth on social media, for those of us thousands of miles away. I’ve seen Kendrick a few times live, but this footage was something else, and it looked like an incredible gig.
One of the reasons that he kept performing ‘Not Like Us’, which is already one of the biggest rap tracks of all time, was because it was being filmed as part of a video shoot. Drake must have been relieved to hear that the concert was finally over, but the remainder of the video shoot took place in Compton over the weekend, and clips continued to go viral.
Again, it became a celebration of Compton and LA in general, and, again, nearly every rapper in the West wanted to become involved. The likes of The Game, who had posted a 17-minute video online explaining why he hadn’t been at the pop-up, must have felt even more isolated as he watched clips of this come in through Saturday. By the time you read this, the video may well have dropped.
It’s going to be explosive and memorable and iconic.
Kendrick has put his whole team and neighbourhood and coast back front and centre, and there’s no coming back from this for Drake.
Spare a thought for Camila Cabello. The pop star has got some Drake features coming on her new album, and she was hoping that they would help kickstart it as one of the year’s biggest releases.
It could well be, but the Drake association right now is fairly toxic, and his credibility has taken a battering.
In one of his back and forths with Kendrick, he made disparaging remarks about Kendrick’s long line of pop music features, which were pretty much earlier in his career.
His own comeback from this latest round of character assassinations looks set to be a feature on a pop starts track, so he will be ridiculed more.
He hasn’t helped by featuring on a typically corny update of the Plain White T’s ‘Hey There Delilah’ and by attempting to own another of the diss tracks aimed at him, ‘BBL Drizzy’, in a terrible feature on a Sexyy Red song.
He’s got a talented team of ghost writers and a big pop fanbase, so he will be back, but, for now, this battle has become the biggest slam dunk in hip-hop history for Kendrick Lamar!
