Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and the Benefits of Beef

Critics at Large | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

Society & Culture

4.4 • 679 Ratings

🗓️ 16 May 2024

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The rap superstars Drake and Kendrick Lamar have been on a collision course for a decade, trading periodic diss tracks to assert their superiority—but earlier this month the long-simmering beef erupted into a showdown that said as much about the artists as it did about the art. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz examine how the back-and-forth devolved from a litigation of craft into a series of ad-hominem attacks alleging everything from cultural appropriation to pedophilia. They discuss the way rivalries function in the creative world, fuelling new work and compelling audiences to pay closer attention to it than ever before. The hosts also consider other feuds of note, from a nineteenth-century debate over Shakespearean actors that ended in violence to the writer Renata Adler’s blistering takedown of the film critic Pauline Kael in The New York Review of Books. Why do so many of these schisms revolve around fundamental questions of authenticity and belonging? And, once they start to spiral, is there any going back? “Conflict can be productive emotionally and also artistically,” Schwartz says. “But this is not a place that we can permanently reside.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“DAMN.,” by Kendrick Lamar
“To Pimp a Butterfly,” by Kendrick Lamar
“Control,” by Big Sean featuring Kendrick Lamar and Jay Electronica
“First Person Shooter,” by Drake featuring J. Cole
“Like That,” by Future, Metro Boomin, and Kendrick Lamar
“Push Ups,” by Drake
“Taylor Made Freestyle,” by Drake
“Back to Back,” by Drake
“euphoria,” by Kendrick Lamar
“6:16 in LA,” by Kendrick Lamar
“meet the grahams,” by Kendrick Lamar
“Not Like Us,” by Kendrick Lamar
“THE HEART PART 6,” by Drake
“Stormy Daniels’s American Dream,” by Naomi Fry (The New Yorker)
“The Perils of Pauline,” by Renata Adler (The New York Review of Books)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Do you guys have any beefs, feuds, nemesies, no?
0:05.2	No, I have a comment on it.
0:08.1	You have a comment on beef and feuds and nemesies?
0:11.7	Yeah, my own personal relationship to it.
0:14.3	Could you please comment on your personal relationship to it?
0:16.4	Yeah, I mean, my personal relationship is never reveal the feud because then it gives too much power to your, you know, enemy.
0:31.3	Yeah.
0:32.4	I've had a feud.
1:13.6	Go on. Meanwhile, Alex. I've had a feud. It's just, uh, going, oh, I, I have feuds. I just, uh. Well, I try not to. And I don't, and I don't enjoy it. But the feud I had is a feud that I think many, many others have had. Mm-hmm. And the thing about a neighbor feud feud. Well, this is... Oh, it's not this. Oh, I see. Oops, sorry. Multiple feuds. Alex Woods. So many, she can't even tell which one she's talking about. This feud, this feud was with a neighbor at a previous apartment. The neighbor, living below the apartment that I was living in, had armed herself with a broom.
1:17.8	Oh, God.
1:18.5	And that broom was deployed willy-nilly.
1:23.2	Truly, if this neighbor heard a footfall, the broom was coming out with a three-wrap structure.
1:30.6	Boom, boom, boom.
1:31.9	I'm not beginning the feud, but I'm also prepared to keep it going for as long as it takes, and I will bang back.
1:38.4	You know what?
1:39.4	Do you start walking a little harder on the way to the kitchen?
1:41.5	I mean, you know, when you're talking neighbors, you're entering the mindset of a rap beef. By accessing my feelings about the neighbor feud, I can actually gain, this is a very good... You understand Drake. Yeah, I'm gaining an emotional entry that heretofore was a little bit out of my reach. Right now, I'm in it. I'm in it. I mean, I get it. There's a lot of rage
2:03.6	within. Sometimes it takes a little bit of a push to access it. But once the flood gates open,
2:12.2	ooh boy. Welcome to Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker.
2:23.2	I'm Alex Schwartz.
2:24.3	I'm Nomi Fry.
2:25.3	And I'm Vincent Cunningham.
	...

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