While the current I-Dislike-You-More-Than-You-Dislike-Me rapping competition between Kendrick Lamar and Drake has been entertaining enough, I can’t help but find the whole thing tedious and at times depressing. I was disappointed in Kendrick’s last album, feeling his self-righteousness had crossed the line into grating self-parody. The Eckhart Tolle quotes. That godawful “WE CRY TOGETHER” song! The false-ringing “MOTHER I SOBER,” which finishes with his wife saying, “You did it…you broke a generational curse” (did he, though?)—it was all so wearying and joyless.
Now Kendrick has dropped four (five if you count “Like That,” which got the ball rolling on this tiresome ordeal) consecutive disses against Drake, each one more severe than the last yet none coming close to the holy-shit-he-went-there lawlessness of Pusha T’s own three-minute Drake diss, “The Story of Adidon.”
Though I do like that Pusha T song, there’s something inherently corny about diss tracks in general nowadays and I thought Kendrick was someone who would share that sentiment. Perhaps in the 90s, when lyrical takedowns in rap could and did result in actual bloodshed, there was something at stake. Now rap beef seems akin to jury duty, an obligation for rich, mid-30s stars to pay grudging respect to the tradition of hip-hop and pay the rent on their credibility.
It is time for the rap diss to go the way of the rap skit. I wish Kendrick would have responded with a skit. Or even better, I wish he would have hit Drake with a wordless, twelve-minute ambient piece called “UNTITLED” and have Andre 3000 play flute over it.
In an article for Complex, the writer Jayson Buford summed up the limpness of the dispute in a review of Kendrick’s first real diss track, “Euphoria”:
These guys don’t have all that much to say to each other. It is not Biggie and Pac, who were competing over pride, women, violence, money. Jay-Z and Nas were trying to vie for the heart of New York. Jadakiss was tired of 50 Cent’s seemingly unmovable force. Drake is a pop star who can rap, a fan of hip-hop who can sing. Kendrick Lamar is a bare-knuckles poet, someone who I imagine raps without even hearing a beat. “Euphoria” is not whimsical, nor fanciful enough. It’s far messier, full of air punches, and sexless.
I understand why some have dismissed the entire beef as marketing. Though unlikely, the theory does underline the listlessness of it all. It feels like little more than just something to do. Can Kendrick really hate Drake this much? If so, why? The character assassination of Lamar’s recent tirades are certainly vicious and petty and contain the hallmarks of classic diss tracks, but something is missing. What does a fan take from all this other than, “Oh, these two really aren’t friends!” I personally don’t care if Drake is a “master manipulator,” if he is hiding a second child, if he’s confused about his racial identity, because I don’t care about Drake to begin with. He is such a shameless bozo that I actually find him likable a lot of the time. It is so completely reasonable for Kendrick to not like or respect Drake that an EP’s worth of anti-Drake music makes it seem as if Kendrick not only respects Drake, but possibly loves him dearly.
I’m sure Drake will retaliate with another stupid song and Kendrick will return serve and on and on. But the latter’s raps feel sputtering and unfocused, as if these are angry emails he wrote late at night and sent off without taking a day to ask himself, “Do I actually care? Is this the best use of my time and effort? Was Haley Joel Osteen the name of that child actor from The Sixth Sense and AI or should I perhaps conduct a simple fucking google search to verify this?”
You know nothing will come of it. None of these songs will become classics, the dispute will fizzle, and when both men are in their forties they’ll appear together on the same shitty DJ Khaled track.
Some beef you just can’t buy into: Take Disney’s The Fox And The Hound.
I was telling my kids a bedtime story involving a fox who was watching a movie about a fox. It was getting very meta. I had no idea what I was saying. Sometimes my bedtime stories go well, other times I hope my kids will fall asleep before I have to decide what I’m even talking about. This story was at least engaging enough to get my eldest daughter (Olive, 5) to ask, “What’s the fox movie?” She wanted to know which movie the fox was watching. So sweet!
I struggled to think of a fox movie. Fantastic Mr. Fox occurs to me immediately now, but it was nowhere to be found in my brain at the time. “The Fox and the Hound,” I said. “Have you seen that?”
“No.”
“It’s good! Wanna watch it?”
“Yeah.”
I had not seen The Fox and the Hound since I was little and could not remember what happens. Was it good? I had no idea. It is not a Disney classic, nor is it a flop. It’s just kind of there.
The next day I sat down with my daughters to watch it. A baby fox, left outside a farm by its soon-to-be-shot-dead mother, is found by a large female owl named Big Mama. And I must say that this owl—speaking through the low, lilting voice of singer and actress Pearl Bailey—is clearly meant to be perceived by the audience as a large-bosomed Black woman. Her character is in the “serene, caregiving old Black lady” mold and might as well have an apron on. When you watch Aladdin on Disney+, you get a disclaimer that the movie contains harmful stereotypes, and maybe this film should have one too.
The offensiveness of the Nurturing Black Nanny character has surfaced in the news the past week following Drew Barrymore’s plea to Kamala Harris on television that Kamala be America’s “Momala.” New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote, “the stereotype at play is that of the mammy—the caretaker, the bosom in which all can rest, the apron on which we have a right to hang…It’s an illustration of the nanny-fication of Black women that casts them as racialized human security blankets—forgiving, tranquil and even magical.”
The problems with this movie don’t end with casual racism. I think I could have improvised a better version of the tale as a bedtime story for my kids and I probably wouldn’t have racialized the owl (I tend to steer clear of accents when telling stories as I’m not good at them).
The most glaring narrative problem is that the friendship between the fox and hound is not well-established and their falling out makes no sense. Copper (the hound) grows into a bloodthirsty hunting dog voiced by Kurt Russell. Tod hasn’t seen him for a while and pays a visit. Copper is not unhappy to see Tod but advises him not to tarry—his master, Amos, will surely blow his head off with a shotgun if he sees him. Tod assures Copper he only wanted to say a quick hello, but it’s too late. His presence becomes known and a chase ensues.
Copper’s training takes over. He hunts Tod down, tells him he’ll let him go this once. But things are already well out of hand! Chief, an older dog and Copper’s mentor, soon spots Tod on the train tracks on the overhead bridge, but gets knocked off the bridge by an oncoming train and falls, breaking his leg. Copper finds Chief laying in agony. He looks up at the bridge, finding Tod peering over.
“I swear to you, Tod,” Copper sneers, “if it’s the last thing I do, I’ll get you for this!” So Copper went from being conditioned to want to kill Tod to genuinely wanting to kill him because this other stupid dog broke a fucking leg? And what was it Tod did to sign his own death warrant? HE ATTEMPTED TO SAY HELLO TO HIS BEST FRIEND.
My kids lost interest in the movie after an hour and went to draw or some shit. I couldn’t blame them. It’s about as compelling as the Drake-and-Kendrick saga. Who cares whether these unremarkable guys resume their unremarkable friendship or decide to kill one another?
In the final scene (yes I continued watching this children’s movie that my children had stopped watching) Tod watches Copper from a far-off hillside. Their worlds can no longer intersect, the friendship will never be what it was, but a respectful understanding between fox and hound has been established, I guess? But who’s to say the fox won’t later feel slighted by a sneak-diss posted to the hound’s Instagram story and proceed to drop nine consecutive diss tracks about him? This could go on and on.
Oh, Drake responded to Kendrick again as I was writing this. Neat. Wouldn’t surprise me if Kendrick has responded to that response by the time I hit publish. I will keep listening to these songs no matter how queasy they make me. This is the beef our culture deserves. Nothing on the internet ever resolves. In four years, I expect to be listening to the 978th Kendrick song about Drake liking shitty TV shows while reading a new Charles Blow op-ed on why Kamala should not have chosen “Tell Momala About it, Child!” as her presidential campaign slogan.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to decide if I want to watch The Fox and The Hound 2 with my kids (by myself) tonight or not! Synopsis: “Copper abandons his best friend Tod to join the music band Singing Strays, who want to attract the attention of a talent scout.”
Music has come between the fox and the hound! Hot dog. Here’s hoping this film has a diss track or ten.