Drake is officially taking legal action against Universal Music Group, Spotify, and iHeartRadio over Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us.” Or, as it appears to the rest of us in the schoolyard, Kendrick smacked Drake in the face during an argument and Drake ran to the principal’s office.
You don’t need us to recount what happened over the summer between Lamar and Drake (but in case you do, DijahSB kindly did that for us). Both MCs slung mud of various degrees of truthfulness, both went for the jugular, and both brought in their famous friends to help out. Now, months later, the specific disses matter much less than their reverberations. And those reverberations aren’t great for Drake.
Ask around about who “won” the beef, and I’ll bet a majority of folks will respond with, “Kendrick, duh.” Not only did he nab a No. 1 single with a song where he quite literally calls Drake a pedophile, but celebration lap after celebration lap from Lamar and his camp have driven the point home. The rapper, once famously reserved and known for taking years between releases, flooded 2024 with music (including the surprise release of the full album GNX), and a lot of that music was pretty mean to Mr. Aubrey Graham.
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The general consensus of Lamar’s victory isn’t just a result of his own strategic actions, though, as Drake has spent the rest of the year making like Sideshow Bob and stepping on every rake in sight.
For one, his final diss track of the proper feud, “The Heart Part 6,” fell flat for most listeners. It seemed to showcase that Drake was on his back foot, unable to muster up much more than denials and rehashes of his previous diss topics. (It fell so flat, in fact, that the best aspect of the track, the title, didn’t even fulfill its trollish duty, as Lamar still used the song name on GNX without flinching.) Let’s also not forget Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin ensuring “Not Like Us” wouldn’t play when Drake was in the vicinity. On the surface, Rubin’s desire to avoid an awkward situation is understandable, but it gave haters ammunition to claim that the song was getting to rapper (and thus, must hold some truth).
And now, Drake continues his streak of, well, acting like Drake (and, no, we’re not talking about his apparent new beef with Steve Lacy, of all people). The Toronto rapper has taken two separate legal actions in response to “Not Like Us:” one against UMG and Spotify, which claims the companies worked together to inflate the success of the song, and an another against UMG and iHeartRadio claiming defamation. Let’s all take a second to groan together…
