The beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake absorbed a great deal of oxygen this year, and from a distance it might appear that all the stakes for hip-hop in 2024 boiled down to this war of titans. But if anything, that battle was a head fake — the genre was innovating and mutating at a rapid clip in smaller scenes, and it began to feel as if the biggest stars were largely preoccupied with each other, not with what’s transpiring down below.
777 slot machineJOE COSCARELLI Last year, rap was dead, at least according to the Billboard charts and the health-of-the-genre hand-wringers obsessed with them. This year, thanks to big singles and albums from artists like Future (with Metro Boomin), Kendrick Lamar, Eminem and Tyler, the Creator, there were signs of life commercially, and some more substantial material to chew on.
But nothing skews perception about a genre’s vitality like two of its biggest stars — in this case, Lamar and Drake — trying repeatedly to ruin one another’s lives via extremely personal and vitriolic music, leading to endless headlines, IRL arguments and a chart-topping checkmate in Lamar’s “Not Like Us.”
Robinson’s history of comments that have been widely criticized as antisemitic and anti-gay made him a deeply polarizing figure in North Carolina long before his bid for governor was upended last week by a CNN report that he had called himself a “Black NAZI” and praised slavery while posting on a pornographic website between 2008 and 2012. Now, some of his allies are abandoning him. Most of his senior campaign staff members have resigned. The Republican Governors Association said that its pro-Robinson ads would expire tomorrow and that no new ones had been placed. And former President Donald Trump, who endorsed Robinson in the spring, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids,” did not mention him once during his rally in the state over the weekend.
Jon, is rap in a better place than it was this time last year? Or did a noisy run by the (aging!) members of the hip-hop 1 Percent — most of whom have been around for a decade-plus, if not longer — only mask the chaos and confusion of the other 99 percent, exacerbating the growing pains of a genre that is increasingly top-heavy?
JON CARAMANICA What was lost among the callous accusations, the memes and meta-memes, and the lightly acrid smell hanging over the Drake-Kendrick beef is the last-gaspness of it all.
Drake is 38, Lamar is 37. Drake has been a genre titan for well over a decade, an improbably long run. Lamar remains the connoisseur’s choice, as he’s been for almost as long. Hip-hop regenerates constantly, and yet there has been an almost despotic grip on the throne(s) for some time.
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