In the Midst of War, Kendrick Lamar Delivered the Song of the Summer

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When the dust settles and we look back on The Great Rap War of Spring 2024, the minutiae of Drake and Kendrick Lamar's conflict will start to slip away. We’ll talk less and less about the speed with which the tracks came, the affiliates on either side who stoked fans with hype and misinformation, the A.I fakeouts, who lied about what. What will endure, above all else, is a packed function screaming two words in unison when the DJ cuts the beat out: “A Minorrrrrrrrrr!”

Kendrick doesn’t just have the W; as the weather heats up slowly but surely, he appears— with all due props to Cash Cobain and Tommy Richman—to have the leading contender for Song of the Summer. How in the hell did this happen? 2024 has been a historically bizarre year on many fronts, but it may not get more hilariously bemusing than the fact that the number one song in the country has not just one but at least three call-and-response moments in which we’re encouraged to call one of music’s biggest artists a sex pest.

Some fans may have favored Kendrick Lamar from the moment his ten-year simmering beef with Drake finally exploded back in March; Drake is, in some regards, an underrated lyricist, but the always technically-dazzling Lamar out-rapping him was a safe bet. (Drake even poked fun at this idea early on, challenging Kendrick to hit him with a “quintuple entendre.”) But no one, not even the Overly Dedicated day-one diehards, could’ve predicted that Kendrick would out-Drake Drake.

When Drake goes to war, a banger usually comes out of it—even if it’s not actually a diss track. In 2018, after Pusha T’s “Story of Adidon” defused Drake’s album rollout and sent him into a rare month-long radio silence, he retreated into the studio to rework the project; the viral smash “In My Feelings” was one of the tracks he emerged with. Three summers before that, Drake launched his onslaught against Meek Mill with a three-pack: the diss appetizer “Charged Up,” the instantly forgotten up-tempo “Right Hand,” and a little pop jam that would go on to become “Hotline Bling,” Drake’s highest charting solo song at the time and one of his most enduring.

I thought for sure Drake, beset by smoke on all sides from Lamar and several others, would run that summer 2015 play again here. For Drake, the statement he likes to make in conflicts isn’t to just bar his enemies up with smarmy one-liners, he likes to double down on his industry dominance with a hit—and with half of the industry against you, what better way to beat your chest than to deliver an umpteenth inescapable crowd-pleaser?

Well, that…did not happen. Instead, the guy who Drake said couldn’t see him “numbers-wise” is about to score his second No. 1 song out of this skirmish, and this time he did it all by himself.

All three beats on Drake’s blockbuster diss track “Family Matters” go crazy, but it never had a chance of ringing off like say, “Back to Back.” Ironically, Drake focused more on lyrical performance; the last two verses on the song feature two flows iller than anything he caught on his last (admittedly overhated) album. It’s a good song that in a different scenario, against a different rapper, works effectively as the “red button nuke” Drake hyped it up to be. Alas, in this instance, he didn’t realize he was dealing with a demon, a master-strageizing Hater Extraordinaire. Lamar immediately stepped on “Family Matters” with the sinister, heavy “Meet the Grahams,” which effectively changed the conversation before the conversation had a chance to begin.

But “Meet the Grahams” is so ominous, in sound and content, that it took the air out of the room and deflated all of the excitement brewing around the beef. Which is why Kendrick releasing “Not Like Us” less than 24 hours later was an even more impressive chess move. In one fell swoop, he changed the narrative again—or rather, the sound of it. The very serious, ugly accusations against Drake are still there, but it’s a much smoother listen packaged in winkingly silly lines like “Certified Lover Boy? Certified pedophile.”

That some rap fans—and even Drake himself—were surprised Kendrick delivered a banger speaks to the fallacies that have surrounded K. Dot for the last year or two. For one, he is not the album-every-five-years artist some have been casting him out to be; the hiatus between 2017’s Damn. and 2022’s Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers is the outlier not the rule, especially considering that 1) nearly every artist except the psychotically consistent Drake took a one-year break around Covid, and 2) the 2018 Black Panther soundtrack is essentially a Kendrick album. And yes, Mr. Morale prioritized introspection over heaters, but this is still the same guy who gave us festival-ready jams like “m.a.a.d city,” “Humble,” and “King’s Dead,” to name a few. Some folks went into this battle wondering if Kendrick’s sometimes dense songwriting could match up against Drake’s IG-caption-ready quips. Now it’s all said and done and each of Kendrick’s disses going back to “Like That” has at least one line that’s spawned a meme across the timeline, and he did it over a wide array of beats from some of rap’s best and brightest producers: Metro Boomin, Cardo, Sounwave, The Alchemist.

But “Not Like Us” is a banger of a different BPM, summoning the raucous, party-starting homegrown energy of Mustard to deliver what would become Kendrick’s haymaker. Aside from showcasing Kendrick’s shrewdness in “Back to Back”-ing Drake, “Not Like Us” cleverly recasts this beef as a statement of LA pride. Mustard heralded the track’s release with the message that he’ll “never turn his back on his city,” and he laces Kendrick with one of his hardest beats in years on which K.Dot, with his LA dialect turned all the way up, declares “the city is back up, it’s a must we outside.” Throw in lines invoking hometown heroes like “It’s all eyes on me, and I'ma send it up to Pac” or “From Alondra down to Central, n-gga better not speak on Serena” and what we have is a ready-made new West Coast anthem that the members can hit their dances to and the civilians can unwisely try to imitate.

It’s even more impressive upon realizing that with lines referencing “Family Matters” both by name and content—holding the “A minor” line is a rebuke to Drake’s “Dave Freeeee;” the last verse throws Drake’s joke that Kendrick raps like he’s “trying to get the slaves freed” back in his face by calling him an Atlanta colonizer—Kendrick may have had a skeleton for the song already in the tuck, but he wrote most of it the same day he put it out. Across the track, Kendrick masterfully toggles between technically impressive pockets and deceptively simple lines, strung together, as always, with theatrical delivery that really sells above all. He’s flowing his ass off, but not so much that lines like “Baka’s got a weird case, why is he around?” don’t stick to the ribs. It’s 1) a good question, 2) a hilariously phrased question, and 3) an amusingly delivered question, which is why it’s just one of several bars being used as a recurring meme format in tweets this week. Honestly: give Kendrick a Pulitzer again just off the strength of “Beat ya ass and hide the bible if God’s watching.”

It’ll be interesting to see how voting bodies react to this track; Kendrick could take the rest of 2024 off and still walk away with two of the year’s biggest songs. Come winter 2025, Grammy voters may blanch at the idea of nominating a song that spends much of its runtime alleging that five-time Grammy winner Drake keeps the company of sexual predators and may be one himself. But that’s cart before the horse: right now, this song has the longest legs out of any other to come out of this beef because it's enjoyable on a base level no matter how engaged you are with its context. Simply put: it’s fun as fuck. You may like Drake more than Kendrick, but we can all objectively get behind evergreen affirmations like “sometimes you gotta pop out and show n-ggas” or “Wop, wop, wop, wop, wop, I’mma do my stuff” over production that’s basically commanding you to turn up. Mustard is rarely not in his bag, but this beat sounds like it was a leftover from the pack he and YG used to run the airwaves 10 summers ago. (This track makes YG’s tease that he and Mustard are back in the studio chasing that same feeling very promising.)

Drake is already hinting that even in defeat, he’ll soon return with a vengeance to stake his own claim on the summer. It’d be foolish to count him out; this is the arena he’s lived in since 2009. But for now? The West is back up, the “F.A.N.s” are inside, and “Not Like Us” is a must-drop outside, everywhere. Are we live, friend?

Originally Appeared on GQ