‘A lot of rich guys arguing’: inside the rap beef of the decade with Drake, Kendrick Lamar and more

One rapper is accused of being derivative while another is mocked for his height. This jibe leads another to join in and accuse the taller man of having buttock implants. A fourth man decides to join in, but quickly retracts his comments for the sake of an easier life. And so it goes on, a feud labelled as a “civil war” in US rap, despite many of the lyrics (so far) leaning towards playground-level insults.

It would be noteworthy enough to have even two of America’s biggest rappers embroiled in a spat – but around a dozen are currently engaged in this feud, with new beefs cropping up seemingly daily. Drake, Kendrick Lamar, J Cole, Future, the Weeknd and Rick Ross are among the combatants; Kanye West entered the fray over the weekend, while a separate squabble between R&B singer Chris Brown and rapper Quavo has also sprung into life, seemingly sparked in the heat of the current conflagration.

To the uninitiated, it might resemble the kind of fiery combat that culminated with the murders of feuding rap titans 2Pac and the Notorious BIG in the mid-1990s. But for Alphonse Pierre, rap critic at Pitchfork, it feels much more like “a lot of rich guys arguing”. He compares the situation to 50 Cent beefing with 90% of the industry when he released The Massacre in 2005 – and he senses it will stick to songs rather than result in real-life violence.

This unprecedented multi-person slanging match began in March, when Lamar made a guest appearance on Like That, the raucous No 1 single from producer Metro Boomin and rapper Future’s collaborative latest album We Don’t Trust You.

“All your dogs getting buried,” Lamar rapped with venom, mocking Drake’s 2023 album For All the Dogs. “He gon’ see the Pet Sematary!” His verse appeared to take offence to a guest verse on Drake’s For All the Dogs single First Person Shooter, in which fellow rapper J Cole had rapped that the trio were “the big three” of mainstream rap. “Motherfuck the big three … it is just me,” Lamar hit back.

Drake and Lamar have been exchanging barbs for years, with many believing Lamar’s 2015 hit King Kunta – “a rapper with a ghostwriter? What the fuck happened?” – was aimed at rap’s biggest mainstream superstar. But the clash never really progressed beyond cryptic disses until recent weeks, prompting Drake to fire back with his own song Push Ups, with juvenile digs at Lamar’s 5ft 5in stature (“How the fuck you big steppin’ with a size-seven men’s on?”) and his suburbia-friendly collaborations with Maroon 5 and Taylor Swift. Last weekend brought another track, Taylor Made Freestyle, with Drake suggesting Lamar has stayed quiet since Like That out of fear of being eclipsed by Swift’s new album release. Drake even used AI technology to imitate the voices of 2Pac and Snoop Dogg, and criticise their fellow LA rapper Lamar’s supposed cowardice.

On the title track to We Don’t Trust You, Future accused Drake of “acting like a fed” amid rumours of them sharing lovers, and Cole’s own offering was 7 Minute Drill, which insinuated that Lamar’s career had “fallen off like the Simpsons”. But he swiftly pulled it from streaming platforms, saying that dissing “didn’t sit right with my spirit”. It took him out of the game, says Chicago rapper Chris Crack: “That was like when Black people are having a party and 9pm rolls around so the kid goes to bed and the adults can get wild.” Cole, he says, “can spin it all the ways he’d like, but it was cowardly, and he is one of the little guys now.”

Then came another new Future and Metro Boomin album, We Still Don’t Trust You, where high-profile guests A$AP Rocky and the Weeknd made semi-veiled disses against Drake, respectively for being jealous of Rocky’s relationship to singer Rihanna and whether Drake can really be a self-styled gangster when he makes so many TikToks. Adding even more spice, Drake’s former friend, rapper Rick Ross, started attacking him on Instagram and released his own diss song, Champagne Moments, which makes the bizarre claim Drake has had cosmetic surgery on his buttocks; Drake retorted with insults about the size of his Miami house.

It means April has been the cruellest month in terms of diss tracks for years: a major chapter in one of rap’s most longstanding traditions. From Boogie Down Productions’ The Bridge Is Over to 2Pac’s bloodthirsty Hit Em Up, the genre has always seen its biggest stars compete for lyrical supremacy using imaginative insults, and Pitchfork’s Pierre says the beefs are good for creativity as new rappers such as Sexyy Red and GloRilla come to dominate the conversation: “This beef probably came around at a good time for the slightly older guard, who definitely needed a little juice.” Drake also perhaps senses this is a source of rap-scene credibility to offset his often pop-leaning music, and a chance to redeem himself after being seen as the loser in a bitter 2018 feud with Pusha T, who used diss track The Story of Adidon to reveal Drake had secretly fathered a child.

As fans wait for a Lamar retort to Drake, some have spread fake AI-made Lamar disses online with the intention of stirring up misinformation. As well as Drake’s fake AI west coast legends, some initially suspected his track Push Ups of being AI-created. Producer Brainorchestra says AI is worrying, and threatens the legitimacy of the craft. If a rapper’s “diss isn’t received well, they then just pretend it was made by AI,” he says. “In the future real-life violence could even happen due to fake AI disses.”

Meanwhile, every few hours on social media someone posts a meme depicting Drake as Marvel supervillain Thanos – a lone god battling for survival against a squad of superhero peers – and Thanos, of course, ended up vanquished. But whatever the outcome, Crack cannot see the “Drake era” stopping any time soon. “I definitely think this is all about dethroning the ‘king’,” he says. “But if it takes the whole industry to take down one man, then they’re already admitting he’s the king.”