It was likely only a matter of time until Drake’s lawyers added Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime Show performance to the aggrieved Canadian rapper’s defamation lawsuit against their shared label, Universal Music Group. Today, Billboard confirmed that the inevitable has indeed happened. Although we’ve already argued that K. Dot’s show was probably about way more than Drake, the man who made Take Care and Certified Lover Boy was never NOT going to make it about himself.
Basically, here’s the gist: UMG wants to delay litigation, probably presuming that the longer this thing takes to go to court, the more likely it’ll be that cooler heads will prevail (read: Drake will realize how goofy this whole thing looks and call it off). Unfortunately for UMG’s legal team, Drake’s attorneys argued that delays are damaging their client’s career the longer it takes for the case to go to court (not, y’know… the fact that he lost a rap battle and sued his label over it). This is what they wrote:
Delaying discovery would unfairly prejudice plaintiff, who is continuing to suffer the consequences of UMG’s defamatory campaign. At the same time UMG has been delaying here, UMG launched new campaigns to further spread the defamatory content, including at the 2025 Super Bowl halftime show, which had over 133.5 million viewers.
For those who haven’t been keeping up, Drake sued UMG (which distributes both rapper’s music under joint ventures with their respective imprints) in January, claiming that it had unfairly and illicitly promoted Kendrick Lamar’s hit song “Not Like Us,” at the height of the two rappers’ feud last year. As “Not Like Us” includes a reference to online rumors about Drake’s supposed proclivity for women who are far too young for him (“Certified Lover Boy? Certified pedophiles!”), Drake considered this a defamatory attack by the label, which he says promoted the song to lower his standing in the public eye and give UMG more leverage in upcoming contract renewal negotiations.
Of course, the outcome of the recent filing amounts to this: Judge Jeannette Vargas denied UMG’s request to postpone an initial hearing, which is scheduled for April. If UMG does wish to continue to put off litigation, its team can make the request then. I suppose this could count as a win for Drake, who has, admittedly, been in desperate need of one. But on the other hand, much of the ridicule he’s received (the part that isn’t a direct reference to the “Say, Drake” meme that’s cropped up on the internet after the Super Bowl) has been about the fact that losing a battle and suing just ain’t hip-hop.