When attention turns to the Favorite Male Hip-Hop Artist category at this year’s American Music Awards, two names will stand out among the nominees like luminous beacons: Kendrick Lamar and Drake, bitterest of enemies, combatants in the most ubiquitous rap beef the culture has seen in a generation.
To be clear, there should be no attempt to pitch the award as the next skirmish in Kendrick and Drake’s long-time conflict that escalated so rapidly last year. (Also nominated, it’s worth noting, are Eminem, Future, and Tyler, the Creator.) It’s plain to see that Kendrick sealed the win when he so viciously stunted on Drake during his Super Bowl halftime show in February. But Drake’s presence in the category does act as a reminder that he is still active, still releasing music, and still a tier-one genre draw. As the pummelled star defiantly told an Australian crowd in February, “My name is Drake. I started in 2008, I came all the way from Toronto, Canada. The year is now 2025, and Drizzy Drake is very much still alive.”
His heartbeat may be strong, but this is a new reality for Drake. Though he’s previously suffered a bad loss to Pusha T, the thrashing he’s experienced at the hands of the merciless Kendrick has been on another level. It has undeniably, perhaps unalterably, chipped away at his aura and skewered his career into a potentially hazardous new phase. Drizzy Drake is still alive, sure, but what is such an existence going to look like?
With remarkably poor timing, Some Sexy Songs 4 U, Drake’s joint album with fellow melodious Canadian PartyNextDoor, was released on Valentine’s Day — just five days after the Super Bowl humiliation. Living up to the title, there were no war cries or insults. For 73 minutes, fans could easily shut off their minds, listen to the hushed melodies and shadowy beats, and forget the Kendrick-Drake beef had happened at all. “Fuck a rap beef, I’m tryna get the party lit,” Drake raps on a song titled “Gimme a Hug.”
Some Sexy Songs 4 U duly went to the top of the Billboard charts, a sign that, for now, Drake’s commercial cachet remains strong. Evaluations of the music, however, were sniffy. For me, the project feels both disposable and inconsequential; at times, Drake barely feels present on it. The two headline artists don’t even appear together on every song, giving the sense the album was fleshed out with loosies pulled from various hard drives. If Drake was hoping to cleanse himself of the stench of defeat, this was no light rain. That said, the relatively low profile he’s kept while ostensibly in the middle of an album cycle indicates that his strategy might not be to blow people away with the quality of his work, but rather to let things blow over.
If we want to predict Drake’s fate, there aren’t many analogs from rap history to look to, because so few feuds have felt this one-sided. Jay-Z and Nas came out of their early 2000s beef both reinvigorated and inspired; Ice Cube and Common’s sharp battle in the mid-nineties ended at the behest of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan without too much collateral damage. Perhaps the most obvious comparison to Drake’s situation is the plight of Ja Rule, who, after his loss to Eminem and 50 Cent, favored a business-as-usual approach.
Having released an awkward attempt at tough guy posturing titled Blood in My Eye in 2002, his next album, R.U.L.E., included a healthy serving of pop-rap numbers he’d previously favored. It performed respectfully, cracking the Billboard top 10, but never again would Ja regain the popularity he had before the beef (I continue to argue that his music has aged finely). The next time Rule found himself in the cultural zeitgeist was due to his association with Fyre Fest.
If Drake is strategizing a reset that would draw a line under the clash with Kendrick, he might be well advised to abandon the lawsuit he’s launched in its wake against Universal Music Group (UMG) for its role in the release of Kendrick’s omnipresent diss track “Not Like Us.” The target of the suit is not Kendrick himself, but nevertheless, going down a legal avenue is so against the spirit of rap competition that it’s opened Drake up to further ridicule. Would any vindication he might feel with a legal victory be worth the continuing reputational cost?
Keeping the suit going also makes reconciliation more difficult. Rap beefs are frequently squashed, and often in a very public way. In this case, resolution might suit both parties, allowing them to move onto other projects and move through their careers without the feud taking up any oxygen or causing distractions. But even if such a move benefits Drake’s career, might it be too much for him to clink glasses with the man who has been shouting, “Certified lover boy? Certified pedophile” to sold out crowds?
Perhaps, instead, Drake’s villain season is coming, with the artist emerging like an emotionally scarred super villain, vowing revenge on a world that has spurned him. This appears unlikely, particularly because there’s still reason to believe that Drake’s fanbase, uncaring whether he’s a triumphant battle rapper or not, are still willing to be serviced with songs about popping bottles in Toronto clubs and being ghosted in the DMs. I’ve always felt Drake’s courting of street credibility while also trading on sensitivity has been an awkward combination. Perhaps he’ll finally commit to what he’s best suited for.
Really, though, the most likely outcome is Drake will do what he’s done with previous humiliations: carry on. And why not when we live in a post-shame world? Public standards are dead; street cred doesn’t mean what it used to. Win or lose at the AMAs or in this new post-beef world, Drake is still a draw and one of the biggest stories in town. And hip-hop will no doubt stay curious about how this next chapter is going to go.