The rap game is on fire right now, because three of its biggest players are going at it, and it’s getting out of hand.
The beef between Drake, J Cole and Kendrick Lamar is heating up and recently made headlines again after Cole apologized for his diss track “7 Minute Drill” against Lamar, citing it didn’t sit well with him and was a complete misstep.
“I ain’t gonna lie to y’all the past two days felt terrible,” Cole told fans at the Dreamville Festival in North Carolina.
“I’m so proud of that project, except for one part,” he continued, referring to the diss track on his latest body of work Might Delete Later.
He went on to say that it was the “lamest” thing he’s ever done in his life.
When the song first dropped, Cole was called out for promoting transphobic language, while others just thought it fell flat.
However, in terms of the apology, reaction online was mixed, some people believed it was mature of him to apologize.
“The thing about Cole is he’s on his own path. He succumbed to peer pressure and did something that doesn’t sit right with his spirit. There’s no shame in reclaiming the energy he wants to put out into the world,” one X user wrote.
Meanwhile, others thought his behaviour wasn’t fitting for a rap icon of his status, who could easily run circles around anyone in a rap battle.
“Rappers used to kill each other over this s** now they make amends and go to therapy and read Bell Hooks BOOOOO,” someone else said.
“Female rappers could never. Just some prideful bad b** that ain’t never gonna forgive and let go,” another person chimed in.
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
Despite all three rappers collaborating with each other in the past, it was no secret that Lamar claimed he was ahead of the pack for years, with the genius talent, accolades and fanbase to back it up.
And with a few disses here and there from Lamar’s camp directed at Drake it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.
However, with Drake’s dominance on the charts things took a real turn when he dropped his latest album “For All The Dogs.”
In it, he features Cole on a track called “First Person Shooter” and things went downhill when Cole said that the three of them were basically the three musketeers in the game, but suggested he was the best.
“Lot of n*** debatin’ my numeral. Not the three, not the two, I’m the U-N-O. Yeah numero U-N-O,” Cole rapped.
“Love when they argue the hardest MC. Is it K. Dot? Is it Aubrey? Or me? We the big three, like we started a league. But right now I feel like Muhammad Ali,” he continued later in the song.
In the same track, Drake referred to himself as “one away from Micheal.”
As you can imagine, comparing themselves to some of the greats did not sit well with Lamar who responded back in March.
“Mother*** the big three, n**, it’s just big me,” he said on “Like That” alongside Future and Metro Boomin. Interestingly, the track was mostly aimed at Drake for some reason.
“That’s a K with all these nines, he gon’ see Pet Dematary,” he also said taking a jab at Drake’s “For All The Dogs” album.
Drake fans are now itching for a response after the artist posted a cryptic Instagram story possibly hinting at taking the crown once and for all.
CULTURE EXPERT WEIGHS IN
Dalton Higgins, Canada’s favourite expert on hip hop culture, who has also authored six pop culture books and taught an entire university course on the rise of Drake and The Weekend, told Now Toronto that rap beefs are nothing new and has been a thing since the genre’s inception.
“Hip Hop culture, and rap music in particular, has always been emcee’s “battling” one another. It’s the reason why most of the G.O.A.T’s in the culture, everyone from 50 Cent, Roxanne Shante, Jay-Z, Lauryn Hill and Nas, to the late Notorious B.I.G and Tupac, have written diss tracks and/or have been embroiled in some pretty tenuous rap battles, to see who wields the ultimate supremacy, in the area of lyrical and microphone skills,” he said.
Higgins also admits that past rap battles and disses have definitely turned deadly, where people used to fight for their lives to secure their place in music.
“Sadly, and too oftentimes, many people who critique this aspect of the culture, aren’t of the culture, aren’t Black, and the like, try to dismiss this aspect, perhaps out of ignorance of the genesis of hip hop culture, to which battling has always been central,” he continued.
Higgins also notes that the constant drama can also come from toxic masculinity too and that it’s “a whole other ball of wax worth unpacking in another story.”
When asked who he’s putting his money on of the three, he says Lamar takes it home.
“Though I will say that J Cole might write the most clever rhymes of the bunch, and Drake might write the most catchy of the group,” he said.
So where do we go from here? Well, it looks like Lamar has the upper hand now that things have simmered down with Cole taking himself out of the equation and with Drake currently M.I.A.
But rap fans know you can never get too comfortable!
