It’s fitting that the Drake-Kendrick Lamar beef should end up on the Super Bowl field: “My intent from day one was to keep the nature of it as a sport,” Lamar said in an interview prior to his half-time show on Sunday. As the two rappers’ enmity built into a series of back-and-forth diss tracks in spring 2024, writers reached for boxing metaphors, describing “sparring”, “trading blows” or delivering “haymakers”. It was reminiscent of Pusha T’s words to the Guardian after his own spat with Drake: “What has been more energetic than this?” And of Drake’s own words on one of his earliest hits: “Sports and music are so synonymous / Cause we want to be them, and they want to be us.”
Drake fans might grumble that Lamar is now being less than sporting: having clearly won the beef thanks to the huge US No 1 success of Not Like Us – which framed Drake as a paedophile, a claim Drake outright rejected – he is now gleeful in victory. Last month he went to collect five Grammy awards for Not Like Us dressed in a “Canadian tuxedo”: Drake is from Toronto. At the Super Bowl, he brought out Serena Williams to dance during Not Like Us: Drake and Williams were once rumoured to be dating, and Drake later wrote hurt lyrics about her. Lamar’s special guest SZA was one of Drake’s own beloved creative foils. Lamar himself grinned down the camera as he rapped: “Say Drake, I hear you like ‘em young”. At both events, thousands-strong crowds chanted “tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A minor”, a line about paedophilia, at full volume – it was, Billboard stated, “even more deafening in the Superdome than the telecast suggested”. Kendrick wore a lower-case “a” pendant which some fans read as a reference to the line. The “stop, he’s already dead” Simpsons quote is being much shared, and has never been so appropriate.
