Recommendations of the Editorial team
Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” turned two years old this week. At that time, Joe Biden was still president, “Brat Summer” had not yet captured the zeitgeist, and “AI slop” was not yet a fixed term for what the internet spewed out every day. And yet the song still has an impact today – it recalibrated the entire architecture of the rap world. Even if you ignore Drake’s now-dismissed lawsuit against Universal Music Group — in which his lawyers argued that the label knowingly released and promoted “Not Like Us” despite the allegations it made were allegedly false and defamatory, a lawsuit he is currently trying to reactivate — the song’s afterlife is unusually long-lived. Most people admit that Drake lost out in the court of public opinion. But neither of them has said a final word yet.
Well, with the impending release of Iceman – Drake’s first solo album since the conflict – it feels like we’re back to square one as fans renegotiate the dispute on social media. In a way, this is a testament to how thoroughly “Not Like Us” accomplished its mission. But something remains unclear. Consider the genre’s last major exchange: Jay-Z and Nas. The two only officially made peace in 2005, around four years after the peak of their feud. But within two years of the conflict erupting, it had begun to morph into mythology – Jay used “The Black Album” to shift the subject from his beef with Nas to his own legacy.
Unlike the songs that flowed back and forth between Jay and Nas – who were lucky enough to emerge in a time before stan culture, Brain Rot, disinformation, smartphone addiction and AI that turns every public argument into content – “Not Like Us” seems constructed in such a way that any kind of resolution becomes impossible. The song doesn’t just publicly slam Drake; he aims to permanently destroy him as a popular figure, to frame the real Aubrey Drake Graham not as a rival who must be defeated, but as a man who should be condemned. The fact that so many former allies and companions seemed ready to stand against him only reinforced this effect. The audience could only assume the worst.
No resolution in sight
That’s why two years later the whole thing still doesn’t feel like history. What exactly did everyone have against Drake? The majority of people who were closest to the spark chose ambiguity. Even Metro Boomin, who lit the fuse with “We Don’t Trust You,” has since sounded less like an instigator and more like someone slightly disturbed by what the Internet has done with the match. At the Forbes Under 30 Summit, Metro compared the Drake-Kendrick conflict to the Jay-Z-Nas duel, but argued the conditions have changed. “Jay-Z and Nas used to attack each other, but I was a fan of both,” he said. “Most people do too.” And then: “The Internet just makes things a little too wild these days.” In a print-only GQ interview, Future pretended the beef never happened. “There was a beef?” he asked, according to reports of the interview. “I didn’t even know there was a beef.”
Kendrick also did little to explain things. Even after performing “Not Like Us” at the Super Bowl, he largely refused to explain why he thought Drake should “die” on “Meet the Grahams.” In fact, much of the enduring weight of the Drake-Kendrick beef lies in how it has so effectively morphed into a moral reckoning — rather than remaining in a rap battle. In the end, when Kendrick warned various NBA players to keep their children away from Drake, the public perception of the conflict entered significantly darker territory.
In a Harper’s Bazaar interview with SZA, Kendrick’s answer to the question of what “Not Like Us” meant to him was less a clarification than a reinterpretation. “Not like us is the energy of who I am, the kind of man I embody,” he said, describing this man as someone with “morals,” “values,” and a willingness to acknowledge his own mistakes. “When I think of ‘Not Like Us,’ I think of myself and everyone who identifies with it.” To a die-hard Kendrick fan, that might sound like spiritual discipline. For everyone else, it was frustratingly evasive.
Who speaks, who remains silent
After all, J. Cole and A$AP Rocky, who could be described as peripheral figures in the whole thing, are among the few who have spoken openly about the feud – without any mystery. Cole, who famously quit early, later told Cam’ron that the beef had turned rap fandom into politics: “Either you’re Kendrick or you’re Drake, and you have to show your colors.” Rocky hasn’t been afraid to speak his mind either, telling DJ Akademiks before the release of his album Don’t Be Dumb that his issue with Drake stems from swipes Drake made against Rihanna, the mother of his children.
With “Iceman,” everything now points to an album with which Drake wants to put things right. The extensive rollout so far has given fans a giant ice cube, a few mysterious livestreams, and a handful of solid snippets and loosies. (Ironically, the last rap single in the top 10 of the charts was Drake’s “What Did I Miss?”) His lawsuit doesn’t help either. In the most charitable case, one could argue that the whole thing is the equivalent of corporate damage control – how should one react when the word “pedophile” is so intuitively linked to one’s own name? – but that still doesn’t protect Drake from embarrassment. The impression remains that he lost so badly that he had to go to court to clear his name.
What “Iceman” has to do
So “Iceman” has a lot to shoulder. The album needs to shed light on what the hell happened between Drake and pretty much everyone – while also making the public forget not only “Not Like Us” but also the fact that he sued UMG over it. Two years later, that may be the real legacy of Kendrick’s song. More than just winning the battle, he changed the atmosphere around rap itself.
