podcast
The Assignment with Audie Cornish
Every Monday on The Assignment, host Audie Cornish explores the animating forces of American politics. It’s not about the horserace, it’s about the larger cultural ideas driving the American electorate. Audie draws on the deep well of CNN reporters, editors, and contributors to examine topics like the nuances of building electoral coalitions, and the role the media plays in modern elections. Every Thursday, Audie pulls listeners out of their digital echo chambers to hear from the people whose lives intersect with the news cycle, as well as deep conversations with people driving the headlines. From astrology’s modern renaissance to the free speech wars on campus, no topic is off the table.
How Social Media Amplified the Drake-Kendrick Rap Beef
The Assignment with Audie Cornish
May 16, 2024
What can we learn from the first great rap battle of the streaming age? Like the ones that came before, the recent rap beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake is defined by lyrical dexterity and sheer intensity. But UNLIKE past battles this one was remarkable for its speed. Both rappers released songs within hours and even minutes of each other. Audie talks with CNN Entertainment Reporter Lisa Respers France about this moment, and how social media pushed this beef to a fever pitch.
Read Lisa’s reporting on the feud :
Kendrick Lamar and Drake gave us an epic hip-hop beef weekend. Here’s what to know
Questlove was not happy with Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s beef: ‘Nobody won the war’
Episode Transcript
Audie Cornish
00:00:01
Okay. By now you have probably heard that rappers Kendrick Lamar and Drake went after each other in a once in a generation rap battle. And like the ones that came before, this one was defined by lyrical dexterity and sheer intensity. But unlike past battles that benefited from a breather between releases, this beef was remarkable for its speed. Songs released within minutes of each other, an escalation from teasing and poking about skills, to wildly personal attacks to allegations of domestic and sexual abuse. Meanwhile, the fans of social media's virtual coliseum were they not entertained, they were entertained.
Youtube reaction compilation
00:00:43
Are ya'll trolling me? Kendrick did not, bro. He dropped again?! No again, bruh. After Meet The Grahams? What is going on? This is getting crazy bruh. This man be popping up at all time of hours. I left a whole cookout for this. I can't even go shopping, bro. I need sleep. I live here now. As you guys can see, cause Kendrick won't let me leave.
Audie Cornish
00:01:07
'By the time algorithms were done, the Kendrick-Drake beef had reached far beyond the walls of hip hop. So let's say you're a CNN pop culture reporter. You couldn't get away from it.
Lisa Respers France
00:01:17
I feel like even people who were not into these artists before got into this beef.
Audie Cornish
00:01:24
Or at least heard about it.
Lisa Respers France
00:01:25
My chiropractor asked me about.
Audie Cornish
00:01:26
Wait. I'm sorry, what?
Lisa Respers France
00:01:27
My chiropractor asked me about it. You know, I'm going I'm going to get adjusted and he's like explaining to me about this whole hip hop beef. And I was like, sir, you came to the right client.
Audie Cornish
00:01:39
And I knew I couldn't avoid it. When you, our listeners, started messaging.
Aramond Wilkins
00:01:44
Hello. Hi. Good day, Miss Cornish. My name is Aramond Wilkins and I have some questions to pose to your guest about rap beef. Is rap beef essential to the survival or culture of rap or hip hop music? Is beef a necessary element for hip hop to exist?
Audie Cornish
00:02:04
Thanks to our listener, Aramond Wilkins, for kicking this off, because I realized I had another question. What can we learn from the first great rap battle of the streaming age? I'm Audie Cornish, and this is The Assignment.
Lisa Respers France
00:02:23
My name is Lisa Respers France and I am a reporter. I cover pop culture here at CNN.
Audie Cornish
00:02:30
'Lisa has been following every twist and turn of this truly viral cultural moment, and she wrote up an extensive blow by blow article for cnn.com that details all the finer points of the Kendrick-Drake beef. And we are not going to do that here. So if you want a primer, I suggest you hit pause and read Lisa's reporting, which we will place in our episode notes. All right. So where to begin? Lisa, are the men okay?
Lisa Respers France
00:02:57
They're not okay, actually. So I mean, we have to keep in mind that as far as I'm concerned, rap music was just started as a way for men to be able to write poetry to each other.
Audie Cornish
00:03:06
Okay.
Lisa Respers France
00:03:07
So so if we if you start there.
Audie Cornish
00:03:11
Here we are. Then it's an expression of love, loss, hate.
Lisa Respers France
00:03:15
All that.
Audie Cornish
00:03:16
All of that. It's Shakespearean.
Lisa Respers France
00:03:17
Then it is very Shakespearean.
Audie Cornish
00:03:19
Which sounds better than in your your writing you said this is the equivalent of the Marvel Infinity War of hip hop superheroes battling it out. Far less romantic.
Lisa Respers France
00:03:30
Far less romantic. Exactly.
Audie Cornish
00:03:32
So there's many places where we could say this started. I'm just going to put in a I'm going to put a pin in 7 Minute Drill, a song that came on a surprise project that was called Might Delete Later. And this came from actually J. Cole. So I'm pinning this on J. Cole, who like, quote unquote started all of this. Can you tell us what happened on that song?
Lisa Respers France
00:03:53
Well, we have to actually go back before that because before J. Cole did that song, what happened was he did a song with Drake prior to that, in which he referred to himself, Drake and Kendrick Lamar as the big three. Which I have consistently been saying, like if someone referred to me is like the big three in my industry, I would be flattered by that. Yeah, Kendrick Lamar was not at all flattered by that. So he goes on and has a bit of a, how should we say, not very positive reaction to it. And he records the song with Future and Metro Booming on their album, in which he says there is no big three, there's only Big Me.
Audie Cornish
00:04:41
Which is a very typical hip hop boast on the best. This is like hip hop beef 101.
Lisa Respers France
00:04:47
Right, exactly, exactly. So then J. Cole comes out with this song and he decides that he's going to do this diss track aimed at Kendrick Lamar. Within days he had taken the track down. And he then during a concert, says to everybody that he feels bad about it. You know, he exits himself.
Audie Cornish
00:05:05
He publicly apologizes and is and is also to your point about emotions, saying he just doesn't feel good about it.
Lisa Respers France
00:05:13
J. Cole may have been the smartest one out of all because early on he was like, yeah, I'm out, I'm tapping out, I'm done. And not so much for Kendrick Lamar and Drake.
Audie Cornish
00:05:24
I want to talk about the song Family Matters, which was one of Drake's diss track, so to speak, eight minutes. And he basically makes this song about Kendrick Lamar and his longtime fiance, who in the sort of storybook profiling of Kendrick Lamar, is someone he's known since high school. He has this love part of the Kendrick Lamar narrative, right, of this thoughtful guy who respects women, respects black women, etc..
Lisa Respers France
00:05:53
Yeah. And Drake made it into something completely different, you know? I mean, allegations of domestic violence, of infidelity. He went really, really hard in a way that felt extremely disrespectful to some people because I hate to even compare hip hop to the mob, but a lot of people like to use those types of analogies.
Audie Cornish
00:06:17
Well the rappers do. Like right around the community from, especially in the 80s and 90s, there was a lot of affinity for mobster type movies.
Lisa Respers France
00:06:26
Absolutely. And I'm a huge fan of Mafia anything. So if you follow that, you know that children and women are supposed to be off limits. You're supposed to leave them alone. Like, your issue is, is with the person, the man that's opposite you. And so by him bringing in the love of Kendrick's life into this whole thing just felt a level of personal ness that we were like, oh, this is this is really like, this isn't about selling records. A lot of people felt this isn't about getting, you know, your art out there. This now becomes, no, these two guys really, legitimately do not have love for each other. That's that's what it felt like watching from the outside.
Audie Cornish
00:07:08
One of the things that's interesting about this is you have two men who are, if not middle age, this is probably the millennial generation's beef, right? And both of them are at the top of their game in different ways. So it's not that shocking that these two titans would be going at each other.
Lisa Respers France
00:07:29
As you pointed out, the both of these men, Drake and Kendrick, are of a certain age, and at a certain point, you feel like you should act like you're above it, right? You should act like I'm at the top of my game. I don't even see you. You know, that's how a lot of people felt. Like Drake maybe could have handled it, but. But at the same time, rap music is all about posturing, you know, and Drake and Kendrick Lamar, neither one of them got to the top by backing down. So while I understand it, I don't think it worked out in the way that Drake necessarily expected it to, because it does not feel to a lot of people like Drake emerged as the winner for someone who is as incredibly successful. But I also think that his success in some ways plays into why he's an easy target. Because when people look at Drake, who is a biracial Canadian who got his start acting on a teen drama, you're coming into a game where people already aren't going to view you as completely authentic. You know, I remember when he first came out and first started having success, there was a lot of conversation that Drake was merely cosplaying being a rapper, and he quieted a lot of people with his success. I mean, the man has has sold like a gazillion records and he absolutely has a fan base, but his fan base in many ways feels a little bit different from Kendrick Lamar. They feel that his fan base feels a little less gritty and a little more polished and a little more Hollywood. And like I said, I feel like that makes Drake an easy target for people to want to come for him.
Audie Cornish
00:09:01
That's always a catch 22 of hip hop, because hip hop, like country music, is heavily reliant on authenticity narratives. You know that where you come from, that origin story has to be airtight in order for you to have support from a core community that confers status.
Lisa Respers France
00:09:21
I completely agree with that. And at the same time, you don't see people in country music having these types of beefs. You don't see somebody being like, hey, you know, meet me outside the barn with your shotgun type of thing, you know.
Audie Cornish
00:09:35
No, but you can be ostracized, which we recently talked about, right? Like with Beyonce, like you, you're just never going to be in if you're not, if you don't meet the bar of all the credentialing. But for hip hop, there's still a way in, but success, etc. it's a hard climb.
Lisa Respers France
00:09:53
It is a very hard climb. And when you climb to the top, people are going to come for you. And when you have two of the top rappers in the game going at each other, I think that's what caused so many people to have such a huge interest in that.
Audie Cornish
00:10:05
I actually wondered if you're also witnessing to insecure people who are not at the peak of their powers.
Lisa Respers France
00:10:12
'Oh, that's an interesting way to look at it. I, I think it's difficult for any rapper to feel like they're not at the peak of their powers. I think that there's so much, ego and grandiosity when it comes to hip hop and the level that you have to be at in believing that it is all about you to make it to the top. I think it's very. Hard for. Them to have humility. I think it's very hard for them--
Audie Cornish
00:10:38
The narcissism is baked in, is what you're saying.
Lisa Respers France
00:10:40
It's that's what that's what hip hop is all about. It's all about narcissism. I mean, I it it started out as just good times on a, you know, New York City block and people coming together and having a good time. But if you really look at the way that hip hop has progressed, there's a lot of chest thumping and always has been. But now it is amplified because not only do you have your core group of people around you telling you how amazing you are, you got all of social media and all the likes and all the comments and going viral. So how did you remain grounded
Audie Cornish
00:11:15
It's us. You're saying we are part of the problem?
Lisa Respers France
00:11:18
We... We... Audie, we are the problem. Not part of, we are the problem.
Audie Cornish
00:11:25
I feel attacked.
Lisa Respers France
00:11:27
Yeah, well, I mean, if the truth hurts, it's probably the truth.
Audie Cornish
00:11:31
Oh, okay. Let's pause. let's pause while I regroup. Okay? After the break, Lisa answers a listener's questions and tries to help us understand how this rap beef fits into the larger cultural conversation. We'll be back in a moment. This is The Assignment. I'm Audie Cornish. And I'm here with CNN's Lisa Respers France talking about the Kendrick Lamar Drake rap beef. So at the top of the pod, we heard a little bit from one of our listeners, Aramond Wilkins, who challenged us to cover this story, and he came up with some really great questions. Seriously, Aramond, props. You have a future in production, but here's the first one.
Aramond Wilkins
00:12:19
How do you think social media has impacted the consumption of beef or the reach of the beef?
Audie Cornish
00:12:28
And we've touched on that a little, but I'd love your take on that.
Lisa Respers France
00:12:32
Social media is the reason why we're even sitting here right now, because the beef spread far and wide. I had to use a translator on my phone to read some of the postings, to just figure out where people are coming from.
Audie Cornish
00:12:48
Oh, you mean in other languages?
Lisa Respers France
00:12:49
In other languages? Yes. Because people were talking about this beef around the world. This wasn't just a US thing like this got to be so big, because that's how big the reach of social media is. So social media amplified and allowed more people to be able to, I'm going to say, enjoy what was going on because people leaned into this. This was delicious snackage for so many people because you had all of the elements, you had drama, you had anger, you had allegations, some of them criminal. You had beats, you had clever rhymes. I mean, even I feel like even people who were not into these artists before got into this beef.
Audie Cornish
00:13:34
Or at least heard about it
Lisa Respers France
00:13:36
My chiropractor asked me about it.
Audie Cornish
00:13:37
I'm sorry, what?
Lisa Respers France
00:13:38
My chiropractor asked me about it. You know, I'm going I'm going to get adjusted. And he's like explaining to me about this whole hip hop beef. And I was like, sir, you came to the right client, sir. So it was out there. Well, it was out there though, and that's because of social media. Social media allows these things to go around the world.
Audie Cornish
00:14:01
Aramond has another question. He says...
Aramond Wilkins
00:14:04
Do the different generations that consume rap music you beef in different ways? Could there be an educational divide in how people view beef? Does one group find it more entertaining? More crass? Is there level of ambivalence?
Audie Cornish
00:14:20
'You're a good person for this because, like you work at CNN, so like trying to explain this to the public, right? Like you're trying to get a cross-section of people to care.
Lisa Respers France
00:14:28
These are great questions, by the way, I think. Let's start with the first part about the generations. I feel like the younger generations are so used to, like we said earlier, people arguing on social media.
Audie Cornish
00:14:41
That's true they're at home.
Lisa Respers France
00:14:42
They're at home. This is this is their wheelhouse. They're very comfortable. They live in beef, you know, they live in beef. It's their address. And so I feel like their response to it felt very different to me, as opposed to someone who was old or someone who was alive when Tupac and Biggie died. Who immediately the first thing was like, oh, I hope this doesn't get to a point were there is violence.
Audie Cornish
00:15:07
I thought that. I was like, oh, where is this going to go? And then I talked myself out of it. And then there were news reports about a shooting outside of Drake's home in Toronto and like, yeah, my mind just went to the bad place.
Lisa Respers France
00:15:20
Right. And we're not clear on what caused that shooting. So we can't say it was because of the. Exactly. But, but, but the fact that it came directly on the heels of the weekend in which they have been going back and forth, it felt very ominous. So I feel like younger generations were much more into the entertainment aspect of it. And older people were more concerned about, as you said, where is this going? What is this going to become? Is this going to get serious? Is this going to result in violence? Because we remember the tragic loss of two artists in hip hop who were, again, two of the biggest artists in hip hop who had beef, and then they both ended up dead at a very young age, and we were deprived of all that they could have been. We will never know what could have happened with both Tupac and Biggie, not just in the genre of being hip hop artists, but Tupac was an actor. Biggie Smalls wanted to be an actor. There was so much future that we were denied. Many people feel because a beef that started on wax then escalated to the point where it became an in real life thing. So I feel like there's absolutely a divide between how this beef was perceived, but also how it affected people. You know, because I feel like initially it was a fun thing for a lot of people, and then it got very, very dark. The more we came with, the more serious allegations.
Audie Cornish
00:16:44
Yeah. Like we waited this long to tackle it on the show, in part because I was like, well, what if they drop another song and it says, something... even now I'm scared that somewhere there is a studio engineer ready to hit upload on something. But we persist. We persist.
Lisa Respers France
00:17:04
We we we do persist.
Audie Cornish
00:17:06
Aramond had another question, which was this...
Aramond Wilkins
00:17:08
How influential has rap these been to pushing the culture forward lyrically, financially, socially, etc. in any way at all? Has it been influential in any way at all in those aspects?
Lisa Respers France
00:17:23
'I think to answer that question, we have to start with a little bit of history and discuss the fact that rap beef has been around as long as rap has been around itself. You know, in 1981, Busy Bee and Kool Moe Dee were beefing, right? So they got embroiled in this beef and it became this historic thing that that resulted in the showdown that they had at the Harlem World Cup. Right. And it's just throughout the years we've always had hip hop beef. So there's always been rap beefs. If you listen to like, a song like South Bronx by Boogie Down Productions, which is considered a classic in hip hop, KRS-One goes off on MC Shan in that song, you know, that's that's an element of hip hop beef.
Audie Cornish
00:18:06
But it's necessary.? Meaning is it a necessary element of hip hop itself? This was another question that Aramond had.
Lisa Respers France
00:18:15
I think it is. That's that's a tough one because you don't want to to to rubber stamp it and say you have to have it. But I feel like because hip hop is the poetry of the streets, because it is about posturing and about gaining respect and holding in respect that it is a part. It's it's intrinsic. It feels intrinsic to hip hop music just because of what hip hop music started out as and what it has grown to be. And so I feel like there's a reason for it. I do feel like it's necessary on some levels. What becomes problematic is when it goes dark and when it gets to be too deep, and when it all of a sudden starts to feel dangerous. I think that's the problem. If we if we could, if we could have some more parameters around beef, I think millennials in particular would be much more comfortable with it.
Audie Cornish
00:19:12
In the end. Is there a winner? I've seen people say that that Drake kind of lost, but I've also seen writing that says, Kendrick Lamar is enjoying a Pyrrhic victory.
Lisa Respers France
00:19:29
That's an interesting question, because, you know, Questlove, refer to this as a wrestling match level mudslinging
Audie Cornish
00:19:37
Right and he, of course, is the drummer for The Roots and also has become a sort of elder statesman of the art form.
Lisa Respers France
00:19:44
'Right. And what he said and I thought this was heartbreaking and deep at the same time, he said, the hip hop is truly dead. And for him to take that position based on this beef felt very sad to me because I--
Audie Cornish
00:19:58
And generational a little bit.
Lisa Respers France
00:20:01
Yes, a little generational. But I think it's because he just he seemed to be expressing a level of disappointment with how much mudslinging happened, how dirty things got that quickly. His question about does this advance the culture? I'll tell you what it did advance it advanced money for Kendrick Lamar, because that weekend, immediately afterwards, his catalog, his streaming catalog was up by 49% and Drake's actually dropped by 5%. So when you ask the question if there was a winner for a lot of people, it did feel like Kendrick Lamar won because he reaped the financial benefit. His song charted higher than Drake song, and just in general, people felt like the speed with which he was responding and being able to drop multiple songs in response to just one of Drake's. A lot of people felt like Kendrick Lamar definitely came out on top when it came to this battle.
Audie Cornish
00:20:55
Well, I, I'm going to I'm going to weigh in and say, justice for J. Cole. He's the winner to me for opting out quickly on principle.
Lisa Respers France
00:21:10
Can I tell you my J. Cole story very quickly?
Audie Cornish
00:21:12
Okay.
Lisa Respers France
00:21:13
So prior to coming to CNN, I was the editor for Saint John's University's alumni magazine, and I went to go interview a group of young people who were involved in what was pretty much like their black student union and the young man who was heading it. I'm talking to him, and I'm thinking to myself, he's so poised. And one of the other young men said to me, oh, yeah, you know, he thinks he's a rapper. And I said, oh, do you rap? And I'm trying to be cool. I was like, oh, you spit, you know, trying to trying to be down.
Audie Cornish
00:21:46
Yeah. Hello fellow teens.
Lisa Respers France
00:21:47
Right. Exactly. So he says, he says, you know, I do a little something, something. And that person was J. Cole. So when J Cole blew up as an artist, I was like, oh my goodness, that's Jermaine. I remembered him as a student. And I will say that the common sense that he appears to have exhibited by getting out of this beef early on, I saw that when he was a college student.
Audie Cornish
00:22:10
I feel like it sounds like what you're saying is if you had stopped Jay Cole that moment, if you had been like, you're a terrible rapper and he quit the game, this beef never would have happened and the world would be completely different. What you're telling me is this is the like the butterfly effect moment of this story is go back in time and stop yourself from praising J. Cole in your alumni magazine article.
Lisa Respers France
00:22:35
Yeah, let's go with that, I love that. I love your version of that. And thanks for being my woman. That felt good. I'm just going to say, yeah, yeah, that that that's that made me feel very Missy Elliott on top of the world just now. I could have stopped this whole thing.
Audie Cornish
00:22:58
That's CNN entertainment reporter Lisa Respers France. We have links to all of her reporting in the show notes. And if you want to go deep into this beef, she's got you covered. Special thanks today also to Aramond Wilkins for giving us this assignment and for asking such thoughtful questions. Thank you. And also credit to YouTuber Johnny Odell for the compilation of reaction clips you heard at the top of the pod. That's it for this episode of The Assignment to production of CNN audio. This episode was produced by Isoke Samuel. Our senior producer is Matt Martinez. Dan Dzula is our technical director, and Steve Lichteig is the executive producer of CNN audio. We got support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Lenny Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Thanks, as always to Katie Hinman. I'm Audie Cornish. Thank you for listening.
