The history lesson is over. It's March 2024, and it's been 11 years since Control. It's been a couple years since we last heard from Kendrick Lamar, whose most recent album, Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, was his most divisive album to date. Drake is still churning out hits, but he's somewhat similarly on a run of projects that aren't quite popping. Both these guys are at strange points in their respective careers. They're also at a strange point in their coexistence as hip-hop superstars. That these two guys don't quite like or respect each other is at this point obvious. These guys haven't been on a song together since A $AP Rocky's fucking problems more than a decade ago. And while the simmering feud that began with Control never boiled over, there's all sorts of online hip-hop forensics suggesting veiled shots on various songs from both camps aimed at each other. Kendrick grumbling about a rapper with a ghostwriter on King Kunta. Drake addressing a fake woke, fake deep adversary who goes unnamed on At The Gates. It's a cold war that doesn't seem like it'll ever be settled, but also doesn't seem like it'll ever have a real cause for either of these guys to really heat up and pop off. They're in a decade-long deadlock, but Kendrick Lamar is about to seize the upper hand. Everybody

likes a fight. Don't sit up here and people tell me that you don't like watching a fight or that you won't. You can't get mesmerized by a fight.

That's Joel Anderson, a senior staff writer here at The Ringer and also a former host of Slow Burn, a podcast series at Slate. Joel reported and hosted a season of Slow Burn about Biggie and Tupac. So Joel has spent a lot of time in his professional capacity as a journalist thinking about rap beat, about the motivations, about the skill, about the stakes, which sometimes get to be tragically high, as in the case of Big and Pac. But beef, at its purest, at its best, beef is a crucial part of the art form. Beef, ideally, isn't about wanton violence or random disrespect. Beef is about proving you are who you say you are. Beef is about backing up all those brags on all those records about you being the best. It's been that way since rappers were first rocking Adidas and Kangol's on Queens Boulevard. And when it's

like people that seem like they're equally yoked, when LL, Cool J, and Cool Moe D get in the beef, that seems like a big deal. Like, both those dudes are cool. Who's gonna lose? You know? We'll

hear the answer to that question as it relates to Drake and Kendrick Lamar soon enough. On March 22nd, 2024, Future and Metro Boomin' drop a collab album, We Don't Trust You. Kendrick is on here, on a song called Like That. His verse is aggressive. His verse is shockingly direct.

Oh,

is Kendrick Lamar about to start naming names again? Is this about to get dramatic? Well, well, well. Drake recently had Cole with him on a song called First Person Shooter on Drake's last album for All the Dogs. Kendrick is going at Drake and Cole together. First Person Shooter, I hope they came with three switches. Hmm. I get the feeling that this is really ultimately about Drake though. Kendrick Lamar wants to bury him once and for all. Every generation of hip-hop gets the defining blockbuster rap beef it deserves. MC Shan versus KRS-One, Jay-Z versus Nas, Gucci versus Jeezy, and now, Kendrick vs. Drake. Fucking finally. Drake has been on top of the rap game for a very long time, an unprecedented stretch. He's outwitted, outplayed, outlasted. He isn't about to be overthrown by a hip-hop monk who releases 12 songs every three years. Right? The hip-hop writer Jason Buford thinks Drake just fundamentally doesn't respect Kendrick's approach to rap stardom. Kendrick has that thing where he takes

years off, and you don't hear from him. And I think Drake finds that corny, and he doesn't understand why people like that. Jason Buford

is something of a Drake defender. That's why I wanted to talk to him. Because I do think it's important to consider both sides and grapple in good faith with his position in this beef and his legacy in hip-hop. 78 top 10 hits. 13 number ones. 13 chart-topping albums. Drake was the hip-hop soundtrack to so many summers. He's not going out without a fight. Like that becomes the number one song in the country. Drake can't ignore it at this point. He can't let this shit slide, especially given the number of people who are suddenly publicly fouling him at this point. Future, Rick Ross, The Weeknd, ASAP Rocky, Ja Morant. His one crucial ally in all of this, J. Cole, fumbled his own response to Kendrick, and then quickly, wisely, backed out of this beef altogether. So now Drake is caught out. But he also lives for this sort of drama, this sort of opportunity to talk down to his lessors. It's a little less than a month after Like That dropped that Drake responds. He drops push-ups, well, everyone. The whole situation was, in his words, a 20v1. But primarily, Drake's setting the stage for a big showdown with Kendrick. When

I heard push-ups, I was like, okay. Okay. I didn't think it was great, but I did think it was funny. And I did think he gets at a lot of things that I find a little bit irritating about Kendrick Lamar. He gets that in push-ups. I wouldn't say I was confident, but I was like, okay, we might have ourselves a little bit of a sparring match here. I didn't think it would end up being a football brawl, but I was like, okay, we might have a little bit of a sparring match.

Push-ups is jokes, mostly. Stuff like... How the

fuck you big stepping with a size 7 men's on? How the fuck you big

stepping with a size 7 men's on? Because Kendrick is 5'5". The shoe size bit is the first of a dozen or so jokes that Drake will make about Kendrick's height throughout this beef, which, to be clear, I actually think were mostly pretty good jokes. The thing is, Drake is funny. In general, Drake is at his worst when he's on songs, taking himself super seriously, and trying to sell this moody mob boss persona that he's been retreating into for the past decade or so. He's at his best when he's self-aware and just straight up clever. Here's Hunter Harris. Push-ups

is a fun song. What can I say? And so the fact that he responds to Kendrick and it's kind of like the most alive sounded in the studio in some time, I think is very telling. Push-ups

is a corrective. You think Drake sings too much? You think he's got to stick up his ass these days? But now he's going to rap, and he's got jokes. He's rapping for his life. He's going to overwhelm Kendrick Lamar the same way he overwhelmed Meek Mill almost a decade earlier, and the rap beef that really cemented Drake's status as a sort of apex predator at the top of the rap game. Push-ups leaks, initially. It takes a week for Drake to officially release the song, but then, on the Friday when it does drop, Drake then also drops a second diss, Taylor Made Freestyle. This was a more forgettable sort of gimmick track where he further taunts Kendrick with sarcastic and weirdly AI assisted impersonations of Snoop and Tupac. Joel and Jason both saw TaylorMade Freestyle as an unforced error on Drake's part. The

Tupac thing was a misstep though, right? You don't have enough stripes on the wall to do that. Okay,

Drake, you're getting to be a little bit of a, you know, Snapchat cornball. Like this is too much technology

for hip hop right now. It's at this point in the beef that DJ Head is acting as a sort of unofficial emissary for Kendrick's camp on Twitter, where this beef is quickly becoming an all-time social media spectacle, but also a one-sided one, as everyone is waiting for Kendrick to respond to both push-ups and TaylorMade freestyle at this point. When

I got involved, it wasn't pretty over here because the homie wasn't saying anything. People love to forget that part, that everybody, everybody, Charlemagne texting me, I don't know, head, they on your ass. The homie whack, hey, head, hey, man, I don't know. You know what I'm saying? Everybody.

11 days after pushups, Kendrick Lamar drops Euphoria. This, too, is a corrective to an extent. You think Kendrick is this sort of cartoonishly intense firebrand? You think he's off-putting? Well, for the first minute of Euphoria, Kendrick is chilling. Them

superpowers get neutralized. I can only watch in silence. The famous actor we once knew is looking paranoid and now spiraling. You

think Kendrick is elusive. Well, the rest of Euphoria is him saying very plainly what his problems are with Drake. I

hate the way that you walk, the way that you talk. I hate the way that you dress. I hate the way that you sneak this. If I just flight, it's gonna be direct. His pettiness

was something else. His bluntness was a bomb. It was so incredibly thrilling, liberating even, to hear someone so unencumbered by hip-hop's late tendency toward passive aggression. Hunter Harris felt that deeply.

I listen to Euphoria a lot. And my boyfriend is like, whenever he hears me listen to it, he's like, this is so energizing to you in a frightening way.