Feuds
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André 3000 has weighed in on the Drake and Kendrick Lamar feud. Three Stacks shared he was disheartened when looking back at the aftermath of the battle’s carnage.
“I got a little sad, at a certain point,” he told Crack Magazine in a new interview. “In early rap battles, you had kids in the park rapping against each other. But it’s not just people rapping now. You got people with 100 employees. You have livelihoods, empires, companies, deals — all of it can be jeopardized.”
With rappers serving as brands — and in Drake and Kendrick’s case, worth hundreds of millions of dollars — the Outkast legend questions whether the juice is worth the squeeze with that much at stake in battle. “If you don’t have anything to lose, sure, go for it,” he said. “But if I already made it, I’m not sure it’s even worth it any more”
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Drake expressed a similar sentiment on “4PM in Calabasas,” which arrived in 2016 and saw Drizzy sniping at Joe Budden, Diddy and more. “I got a lot to lose ’cause in every situation I’m the bigger artist/ Always gotta play it smarter,” he shrewdly raps about being militant in battle.
Elsewhere in the Crack profile, André 3000 gave his reaction to receiving a shout-out from Kendrick Lamar on the explosive “Like That” with Future and Metro Boomin. “If he walk around with that stick, it ain’t André 3K,” K. Dot rhymes.
“As a 49-year-old rapper, you’re just happy to get a shout-out,” the Atlanta artist responded. “But as a rapper, I’ve noticed myself walking around with this stick. So it was a line for me, too, and I was trying to find a way to use it. But Kendrick used it, so I had to say ‘Yeah, he got it.’”
A trio of records Lamar was involved with that were integral parts of the battle with Drake are still holding strong on the Billboard Hot 100. K. Dot’s “Not Like Us” sits at No. 3, while “Like That” is in the top 20 at No. 18. Even the unnerving “Euphoria” is still on the chart at No. 78.
As for Three Stacks, he’ll be performing nine sets across three days at the Blue Note Jazz Festival’s Black Radio Experience 2024, which is going down in the Estate Wine Cave at The Meritage Resort & Spa in Napa, Calif., happening Aug. 30-Sept. 1.
In the eyes of Swifties, nothing is ever an accident. That’s why some fans are convinced that Taylor Swift subtly shaded Ye — formerly known as Kanye West — at her latest Eras Tour show following the rapper’s reference to her on his new album with Ty Dolla $ign, Vultures 2, which dropped hours before her performance in Warsaw Saturday (Aug. 3).
On the track “Lifestyle (Demo),” Lil Wayne name-checks the 14-time Grammy winner and her boyfriend — Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce — on his guest verse. “I twist my Taylor spliffs tight at the end like Travis Kelce,” he quips.
Though Ye himself doesn’t mention Swift, his choice to include a nod to her on his second joint LP with Ty Dolla $ign is noteworthy considering the “Donda” artist’s past feud with the pop star. That’s why the “Anti-Hero” musician’s wardrobe choice on her first Eras show after the track’s release turned some heads, with Swift sporting a T-shirt during the Red set reading, “I Bet You Think About Me.”
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“She’s so funny for wearing the I bet you think about me shirt after Ka*ye name dropped her and Travis in his song an actual comedian,” one person tweeted.
Though Swift has worn the shirt at past shows, a few fans think her choice to sport it at this particular performance at the PGE Narodowy was intentional. “saw the k*nye thing a little bit ago and I knew she was gonna wear it lmao,” the same Swiftie tweeted, to which another fan replied, “it makes so much sense now.”
Swift’s tumultuous relationship with Ye is one of the most storied music industry feuds of the past decade-plus. It all started when he interrupted her acceptance speech at the 2009 VMAs to declare that Beyoncé deserved the best female video honors more, after which they eventually patched things over — that is, until he bragged that the incident launched Swift’s career on his 2016 track “Famous.”
When Swift slammed Ye for the song, he claimed that he got the “Karma” singer’s blessing on a phone call before its release, which she denied. After that, his then-wife Kim Kardashian posted an edited recording of their conversation to portray Swift as a liar, something the latter spoke about as recently as last year.
“You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar,” she told TIME in her Person of the Year cover story in December. “That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.”
50 Cent is a savant in the art of war. With the litany of feuds 50’s been engaged in throughout his decorated career, the G-Unit mogul knows how to shrewdly navigate in battle, and he’s just about seen it all in hip-hop.
As part of his The Hollywood Reporter cover story published on Wednesday (July 31), Fiddy dished on the dust settling on the Kendrick Lamar and Drake feud, which he doesn’t chalk up as a loss for the 6 God.
“This is hip-hop. I think it’s competitive to a degree, obviously. Even Drake, his position and the attitude and his choices, those are 50 Cent choices,” he began. “‘F–k it, everybody got to get it then.’ When it becomes Drake versus Kendrick, it’s because it’s the only thing you can put up against Drake’s success.”
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When an artist has a successful run as long and dominant as Drake’s, 50 believes other rappers are waiting to see him fall from the top so they could have a shot at the throne. The Queens legend thinks it came to the point that people were poking holes in Drake’s artistry that really weren’t there.
“Look, our culture loves to see you go up because it’s confirmation that they can go up,” he added. “But when you stay up — ‘I want this s–t forever, man’ — they go, ‘Well, goddamn. When you going to come down? If you don’t come down, I ain’t going to have my chance to go up.’ And then it’s these clouds that come over you, and that cloud is doubt, a shadow of doubt that doesn’t come from material or your work ethic.”
The “In Da Club” rapper continued: “It’s doubt from the artist community, where they say, ‘I don’t know, his new s–t is cool, but it’s not his first s–t.’ They do that to you and Drake’s just experiencing what you experience as a backlash from success, from the consistency he’s delivered over and over. I don’t see a loss for Drake. The people who bought Drake material are going to buy Drake material when his next song comes out.”
While 50 is confident Drake will bounce back, because of his own antics in battle, his enemies didn’t suffer the same fate. “Now, the s–t that I do, it ruins your whole f—ing career,” he gravely declared.
Kendrick and Drake’s back-and-forth came to a close in early May, and the fan consensus is that the winner was Lamar, with which Billboard agreed.K. Dot’s “Not Like Us” is still simmering and holding strong on the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 3 on the Aug. 3 dated tally.
50 and Drake actually linked up earlier in July, and the Power creator teased a collaboration on the TV side from the duo. He shared a photo of the two together on Instagram and wrote, “Brainstorming last night me and @champagnepapi gonna get the [camera emoji] rolling biggest ting on your TV.”
Kevin Hart revived his Chocolate Droppa rap alter ego to make a surprise appearance as part of Kai Cenat’s AMP 2024 Freshman Cypher, which arrived Sunday (July 28). Hart grabbed the mic following Kai’s freestyle and channeled his inner-Kendrick Lamar by quoting a bar from Drake diss track “Not Like Us.”
“Sometimes you gotta pop out and show n—-s. I guess this is my pop-out,” he began. “Let’s get it!”
Move over Drake, Kendrick and J. Cole, because Chocolate Droppa has had enough of the “big 3” talk in the rap game. “All this talk about the Big 3, f–k that, them not me/ Goddamn, I’m mad/ Oh s–t, you sad/ Well, it’s time to get glad, ’cause I’m back and I’m really mad,” Hart raps.
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The comedian shows off his bilingual ability and is flanked by Cenat along with streamers JustFanum, Duke Dennis, Agent 00, ImDavisss and chrisnxtdoor while rapping on a rooftop.
Hart took the mic with him when finishing off his fiery verse and walking away for dramatic effect. “You don’t get the mic back after what I did to it. This mic gotta be burned,” he concludes. “B—h, I’ll do another freestyle right now!”
Per usual, Hart is staying busy as a multi-faceted entertainer. He’s co-hosting an Olympic Highlights show with Keenan Thompson, which is dropping multiple episodes per week recapping the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris on Peacock.
The 45-year-old also has a new movie on the way, with Borderlands set to hit theaters on Aug. 9. The film inspired by the video game of the same name pairs Hart with costars Jamie Lee Curtis, Haley Bennett, Jack Black, Cate Blanchett and Ariana Greenblatt.
As if that weren’t enough, once Borderlands is rolled out and the Olympics wrap up, Hart will get back on the road in August for his Acting My Age Tour, which will stop by Seattle, Kansas City, Portland and more.
Watch Kevin Hart’s freestyle below:
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On “thanK you aIMee,” Taylor Swift seemingly predicts that Kim Kardashian will never be able to escape reminders of their feud. “And one day, your kid comes home singing a song that only us two is gonna know is about you,” she sings on the Tortured Poets Department track.
As it turns out, that same logic applies to friends’ kids, as well. On Wednesday (July 17), the Skims founder commented on Ivanka Trump’s birthday post on Instagram for her daughter Arabella, side-stepping the fact that the new 13-year-old had a Swift-themed cake.
“Happy Birthday Arabella 🤍🩷,” Kardashian simply wrote.
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Arabella is the oldest child of the former political advisor and Jared Kushner, who also share sons Joseph and Theodore. Her heart-shaped cake matched the one Swift tears into in her “Blank Space” music video, and featured lyrics written in icing: “Boys only want love if it’s torture.”
“Best cake for my favorite Swiftie,” Trump wrote over a photo of the dessert, which featured red icing on the inside to mimic the blood that came out of the pop star’s when she stabbed it in the 2014 video.
Kardashian’s comment comes three months after the release of “thanK you aIMee,” which was the last time Swift appeared to address her beef with the reality star. “When I picture my hometown/ There’s a bronze spray-tanned statue of you/ And a plaque underneath it/ That threatens to push me down the stairs at our school,” the 14-time Grammy winner sings on the track. “I can’t forgive the way you made me feel/ Screamed, ‘F–k you, Aimee’ to the night sky.”
A few months before that, Swift called out the shapewear mogul by name in her December TIME Person of the Year interview. “You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar,” she reflected of their 2016 conflict, which involved Ye (formerly Kanye West) including disparaging lyrics about Swift in his song “Famous” that she claimed not to have approved, though he and his then-wife insisted she had on a call between the two artists.
“That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before,” she added at the time. “I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.”
Lil Wayne remained quiet for much of the Kendrick Lamar and Drake feud, but appeared to break his silence and throw his support behind the 6 God over the weekend.
The Young Money family bond between Young Angel and Young Lion is still going strong. During his performance at Zouk Nightclub in Las Vegas on Saturday night (July 13), Wayne took the intro of “The Motto” and tweaked lyrics to Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” while briefly flashing his OVO owl pendant chain.
“They don’t like us,” Wayne can be heard rapping to the T-Minus instrumental while dancing on stage. It appeared to draw some confusion from the audience, as some thought he was saying, “They not like us.”
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“Not Wayne being an instigator Him and Ab Soul are trying to reignite the beef, I guess lol,” one person tweeted.
Lil Wayne is actually name-dropped on “Not Like Us” when Kendrick raps, “F—-d on Wayne girl while he was in jail, that’s connivin’/ Then get his face tatted like a b—h apologizing.”
The lyric appears to reference when Weezy was behind bars on gun charges in NYC and Drake allegedly got romantically involved with Wayne’s then-girlfriend Tammy Torres. The New Orleans rapper addressed the rumored fling in his Gone’ Til November: A Journal of Rikers Island prison journal. “I woke up still feeling f–ked up about the f–ked-up day that I had. Hell is what it was! I’m used to arguing with my girl [daily], but finding out that she f–ked Drake was the absolute worst thing I could’ve found out,” he wrote.
Thanks to a boost from the release of the official music video on July 4, Lamar’s “Not Like Us” returned to the No. 1 slot on this week’s Billboard Hot 100 chart, and the Drake diss track’s momentum doesn’t appear to be slowing. Even though the dust is settling on the Drake and Lamar feud, “Not Like Us” continues to be a force in pop-culture and churns out headlines. Serena Williams even Crip walked to the song and mocked Drake while on stage at the ESPY Awards, which Wayne attended.
As for the Weezy and Kendrick Lamar relationship, the pair of hip-hop titans teamed up in the past on Tha Carter V‘s “Mona Lisa,” and fans have requested Weezy perform the 2018 record at concerts, but Wayne revealed in June he doesn’t remember the lyrics to it. “This is the second time I’ve seen this within my last three shows. Somebody had a sign that said, ‘Mona Lisa’… If y’all real Lil Wayne fans, you know I don’t know the lyrics to my s-t,” he said on stage.
The rapper continued: “You know how hard that f–king song is, girl… You know what I mean? I don’t like to rap the words, but I’m going to learn that s–t. I’m going to learn it. I got you.”
Watch Lil Wayne tweak the lyrics to “Not Like Us” during his concert below:
Not only was Drake out a six-figure wager following Canada’s loss to Argentina on the pitch in the Copa América semi-final on Tuesday (July 9), but the winning soccer team’s X account added insult to injury while trolling Drizzy. Argentina poured salt in the wound after the 2-0 victory over Canada by quoting Kendrick Lamar’s Drake […]
Ab-Soul is always representing for Top Dawg Entertainment, but he believes redemption is possible for Drake in the wake of the fallout of the 6 God’s feud with Kendrick Lamar.
Soul, a longtime Kendrick Lamar affiliate, took to X on Tuesday morning (July 9) to get some thoughts off about Drake and the beef, which he deemed to be not a “rap battle,” but “scripture.”
While he was always riding with K. Dot and the West Coast, the TDE rapper thinks there’s a path back to the top for Drizzy thanks to his potent skillset. “If Drake is the MC I imagine he can be. Redemption is not off the table,” he wrote.
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Fans were surprised to see Soul sticking up for Drake, as a heated back-and-forth broke out in his replies while the tweet went viral.
“After the 2Pac AI verse? Nah. the moment he did that he lost the battle forever. I hear you But that settles it for me,” one person wrote.
Another said, “It’s genuinely hilarious how yall talking like he got outrapped but when yall remove this obvious bias yall have it can def be argued that he won the war of bars.”
Soul continued to clarify, “Key word ‘MC.’” He also made sure to explain he was backing Kendrick when it came to the rap war, as he didn’t want his rant taken out of context.
“But b4 my rant gets out of context. He could never Fucc wit da Gang’Nem on sum rap shyt. That was Never a question,” the 37-year-old declared. “We could still ‘potentially’ match ‘artistry’. (Removing my obvious personal/educated bias).”
Ab-Soul also hit the stage to help Lamar perform the live debut of his “6:16 in L.A.” Drake diss at the Pop Out concert on Juneteenth. In the past, they’ve connected on tracks such as “P&P 1.5,” “Illuminate” and “Ab Souls Outro.”
The consensus (including Billboard‘s) was that Kendrick Lamar was the winner in the Drake feud, and he’s continued to take a victory lap this summer. Dot delivered the “Not Like Us” video on July 4, which could give the diss track a boost on next week’s Hot 100, where it sits at No. 3.
Find Ab-Soul’s tweets about Drake and Kendrick below.
This was not a rap battle. It was scripture.— Ab-Soul (@abdashsoul) July 9, 2024
If Drake is the MC I imagine he can be. Redemption is not off the table.— Ab-Soul (@abdashsoul) July 9, 2024
But b4 my rant gets out of context. He could never Fucc wit da Gang’Nem on sum rap shyt. That was Never a question.— Ab-Soul (@abdashsoul) July 9, 2024
We could still “potentially” match “artistry”. (Removing my obvious personal/educated bias)— Ab-Soul (@abdashsoul) July 9, 2024
Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” has permeated different avenues of pop culture, and now, even libraries are feeling the impact of the Drake diss. The Los Angeles Public Library went viral over the weekend when it posted a video to TikTok and Instagram over the weekend, debating whether its owl puppet needed to say farewell […]
Joe Budden is finding new ways to wedge himself into the Drake and Kendrick Lamar feud. The rapper-turned-podcaster claims he played a role in the “takedown” of the 6 God dating back to his 2016 beef with Drake.
Budden hopped into a Twitter Spaces on Monday (June 24), where he took credit for starting to chip away at Drake with their feud before “passing the baton” to Pusha T and ultimately K. Dot earlier this year.
“It may sound narcissistic, but I don’t think any one man takes down Drake,” he said. “I think I passed the baton to Push, I think Push passed the baton to Kendrick, and the job is done now. That’s how I feel in my head and my heart.”
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Drake and Budden’s feud heated up in 2016 following the New Jersey native’s criticism of Drizzy’s Views album. The OVO boss took shots at Budden on “4PM in Calabasas,” and Budden fired away at Drake with a series of diss tracks including “Making a Murderer, Pt. 1,” “Wake” and “Afraid.”
Drizzy didn’t respond directly with a diss track, but replied by sniping at Budden on “No Shopping” with French Montana.
Two years later, Pusha T left a stain on Drake’s résumé in 2018 when claiming that Drizzy had a son named Adonis — well before Drizzy himself confirmed the news — on the scathing “The Story of Adidon” diss track, which Drake did not respond to.
The great rap war of 2024 was seemingly kicked off by K. Dot’s atomic verse on Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That” in March, which jabbed at both Drake and J. Cole.
Drake stepped up to deliver “Push Ups,” the AI-assisted “Taylor Made Freestyle,” “Family Matters” and “The Heart Part 6,” while Kendrick unleashed “Euphoria,” “6:16 in L.A,” the diabolical “Meet the Grahams” and the Mustard-produced kill shot “Not Like Us.”
The hip-hop community declared K. Dot to be the victor against Drake, and Lamar figuratively took a victory lap at his Pop Out concert on Juneteenth. He celebrated with thousands of fans inside the Kia Forum in Inglewood, Calif., where Kendrick performed a few of those Drake diss tracks for the first time and ran back “Not Like Us” five times in total.
Find Joe Budden’s full answer below.