Is there any modern musician that can weaponise an image quite like Kendrick Lamar? The picture that sprang from Sunday’s Super Bowl halftime show – proliferated around the internet as meme and mission statement – may have been one of the American rapper’s less elaborate ones. Midway through “Not Like Us”, Lamar’s Grammy-winning, multi-platinum-charting 2024 single, the artist turns to the camera to directly address the song’s target, Canadian hip-hop star Drake. “Say Drake,” he raps, wearing what can only reasonably be described as a s***-eating grin. “I hear you like ‘em young.” By this point, the effect is obvious: this is what winning looks like.
The Super Bowl may be Lamar’s vituperative final shot in a mud-slinging diss track back-and-forth that began in 2013 – when Drake was slighted alongside several other rappers in Kendrick’s seismic guest verse on “Control” by Big Sean. Throughout the next decade, the pair would sporadically call each other out on record, before a flurry of targeted releases last year turned the cold war hot. Since “Not Like Us” first dropped last May, consensus has ruled Lamar the feud’s victor, not by points but by knockout. His five-award haul at the Grammys earlier this month would have been all the more stinging for the fact that wins for Drake have been increasingly scarce in recent years. Salting the wound further, Lamar’s outfit for the night – denim on denim, otherwise known as a “Canadian tuxedo” – was read by many as a veiled dig by Drake’s personal troll-in-chief.
