I am perhaps the last person who ought to be writing about hip-hop, and the last person who is likely to, but I’m naturally mesmerized by the spillover of the Drake-Kendrick Lamar musical feud into the courts. In 2024, after a long period of coded wisecracks traded between the two artists (it’s all explained in amazing detail on Wikipedia, complete with a table), the cold war warmed up and they began to confront one another directly, writing whole musical tracks full of banter and one-upmanship.
In a matter of weeks, the feud escalated from cat-like swipes — I’m better than you, no I’m better than you, you’re short, you had lousy plastic surgery — to explicit accusations of criminality, bastardy and perversion. In early May Lamar released “Not Like Us,” a song in which he specifically calls Drake a pedophile and leader of a sex-trafficking ring. The song became a genuine popular megahit and is universally regarded as having ended the feud à la World War II. Total atomic Kendrick cultural victory. Even the Wikipedia military-style info-box says so.
This put Drake in a situation — well, if recourse to defamation law were ever justified, you might say this was the time. You and I wouldn’t like it much if a disgusting accusation against us had been turned into a rhyme, and seared into the brains of half of North Americans under 40, while we fended off armed vigilante attacks in our own homes. Within the newspaper profession, there’s a strong cultural prejudice against appealing to the law of defamation. This prejudice is a million times stronger in hip-hop, with its pervasive innate hostility to the law — and in fact Drake seems to have half-honoured that norm by not suing Lamar personally. Instead, obeying the Willie Sutton principle, he filed actions against UMG, the record label he shares with Lamar. Imagine, someone making a profit off our intricately, expensively produced artistic feud!
The main theatre of action is the U.S. District Court for southern New York, where Drake is claiming defamation and harassment by the label. Drake’s federal lawsuit was filed before Kendrick Lamar was chosen as the lead halftime performer at the Super Bowl, where he delivered a live “Not Like Us” for an audience often supposed to be in the neighbourhood of a billion people. The claim was amended last month to include the Super Bowl performance, and UMG has now fired back asking for dismissal of the whole action. Variety and Billboard have published details of the latest barrages.
A funny legal wrinkle has been introduced because the NFL asked Lamar to leave the specific word “pedophile” out of his Super Bowl version of “Not Like Us.” The whole song is about how Drake “likes ‘em young,” to quote just one line that was left in at the game, and 60 to 80 per cent of the viewers must have been fully aware of the omitted content.
Drake’s lawyers are arguing that the censorship of the crucial word just goes to show that it’s defamatory. UMG’s lawyers are pointing out that their company was already being sued and that they’re allowed to take steps to protect against “threats … of additional meritless litigation.” UMG also continues to reiterate what its representatives have said in their defence all along: Drake is a longtime enthusiast of nasty interpersonal rap battles, and he seemed delighted to contest this one until it got out of hand and he lost decisively. “Apparently, Drake’s lawyers believe that when Drake willingly participates in a performative rap-battle of music and poetry, he can be ‘defamed’ even though he engages in the exact same form of creative expression.”
You have to admit they have a point — but they may need to win more points to prevail in court. If they don’t, they could be facing what could easily be one of the largest defamation awards in the whole history of adversarial justice. And the effects of a Drake victory on hip-hop, whatever you make of it as an art form or as a social phenomenon, would probably be cataclysmic.
— Colby Cosh
