Today, Kendrick Lamar escalated his rap war with Drake in a huge way, launching an intercontinental ballistic missile with “Euphoria,” his response to Drake’s paired sallies, “Push-Ups” and “Taylor Made Freestyle.” After Kendrick initially threw down the gauntlet with his verse on Future and Metro Boomin’s We Don’t Trust You track “Like That,” fans were disappointed that it took him so long to clap back at Drake, especially after Drake made the critical error of employing AI reproductions of West Coast icons Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur on his latter response to “Like That.”
But any lingering disappointment was blown away — along with all expectations of plausible deniability — when Kendrick dropped “Euphoria,” the most scathing anti-Drake track from one of the Canadian competitor’s foes since “The Story Of Adidon.” In fact, that dust-up is one of the many points of contention Kendrick addresses in “Euphoria,” sneering, “F*ck all that pushin’ P, let me see you push-a-T / You better off spinnin’ again on him, you think about pushin’ me / He’s Terrance Thornton, I’m Terrance Crawford, I’m whoopin’ feet.” And that’s just one of the many, many haymakers Kendrick unloads on his opponent. Here are the 10 best lines from Kendrick’s latest Drake diss and what we think they mean.
“Cole and Aubrey know I’m a selfish n***; the crown is heavy / I pray they my real friends, if not, I’m YNW Melly”
Gifford, Florida rapper YNW Melly is currently on trial for allegedly plotting the murder of two members of his rap crew, YNW Sakchaser and YNW Juvy, and staging the scene to look like the result of a drive-by by rivals. K. Dot likens himself to Melly and Drake and J. Cole to Melly’s victims, pointing out how they couldn’t have been friends if Melly actually did set them up. In the same way, Kendrick doesn’t see Drake or Cole as friends in the rap business, only rivals.
“I hate the way that you walk, the way that you talk, I hate the way that you dress / I hate the way you sneak diss, if I catch flight, it’s gon’ be direct”
Self-explanatory, but it’s rare you see rappers state their emotions so plainly in rap battles. Kendrick doesn’t dress it up in any fancy metaphors, he just tells it like it is (although, on a personal note, I feel like if he REALLY didn’t like him this much, just fight it out. Let’s get all the way negative, as Vince Staples would say).
“My first one like my last one: it’s a classic, you don’t have one / Let your core audience stomach that; didn’t tell ’em where you get your abs from”
In “Push-Ups,” Drake taunts Kendrick over the lukewarm reception of his 2022 album Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers. “Your last one bricked, you really not on sh*t,” he mocked. “They make excuses for you ’cause they hate to see me lit.” Here, Kendrick stands up for his misunderstood album, and in a bit of a non-sequitur, redirects attention to the longstanding rumor that Drake got liposuction in order to cut a more impressive figure.
“Surprised you wanted that feature request / You know that we got some shit to address”
Not much of a diss, but more of a surprising reveal, this line dishes some behind-the-scenes dirt: That despite the tension between the two rappers, Drake still wants to work with Kendrick, who would rather air out dirty laundry than collaborate with Drake again. According to some internet rumors, the song K. Dot turned down? “First Person Shooter,” on which Drake allegedly began the latest round of “sneak-dissing.”
“When I see you stand by Sexyy Red, I believe you see two bad bitches / I believe you don’t like women, that’s real competition, you might pop ass with ’em”
On a personal level, I have to say, I’m disappointed. Rap’s love for casual misogyny rears its ugly head yet again. Kendrick isn’t quite as evolved as he made out on his last album, and yet, there’s something to the idea that Drake engages in just as much misogyny as any rapper, he just dresses it up in “nice guy” rhetoric.
“Let’s speak on percentage, show me your splits, I make sure I double back with you / You was signed to a n**** that’s signed to a n**** that said he was signed to that n****”
Here’s some inside baseball, but also a deft reminder that those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. When Drake baited Kendrick over his recording contract on “Push-Ups” (“The way you doin’ splits, bitch, your pants might rip”), he conveniently overlooked how bad his own first deal was. Now that Drake’s licensing his publishing to Republic, he’s in a better position, but it wasn’t too long ago he was in the same corner as a lot of rappers (and doing very little to improve conditions overall in the music biz).
“Why would I call around tryna get dirt on n****s? Y’all think all of my life is rap? / That’s ho sh*t, I got a son to raise, but I can see you know nothin’ ’bout that”
Another callback to “The Story Of Adidon,” Kendrick reminds listeners and Drake that rap gossip doesn’t dominate his waking hours — and that Drake had to be “bullied into being a father” (not to be a wet blanket, but I also hate this narrative for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that all this started on a record from Future, of all people).
“Am I battlin’ ghosts or AI? N**** feelin’ like Joel Osteen / Funny, he was in a film called AI and my sixth sense tellin’ me to off him”
Off the wordplay alone, this might be the best bar in the whole damn song, although Kendrick accidentally (?) pulls a Mrs. Howard from Abbott Elementary (and like Sheryl Lee Ralph’s iconic character, we all know what he means). For all you kids whose birth year starts with a “2,” Haley Joel Osment (the person he meant to reference, not mega-church televangelist Joel Osteen) was a child actor best known for two roles: The Sixth Sense and AI: Artificial Intelligence. In the first, he played a traumatized child who could “see dead people” and in the latter, he portrayed an abandoned android hoping to become a real boy a la Pinocchio.
Kendrick name-checks Osment to take another dig at Drake for using an AI Tupac voice on “Taylor Made,” and the perceived disrespect of using a deceased rap legend to make his point for him using technology — i.e. “ghost or AI.” Dot’s play on “sixth sense” ties the metaphor together but also underscores his natural instinct for battle.
“Whoever that’s f*ckin’ with him, f*ck you n****s, and f*ck the industry too / If you takin’ it there, I’m takin’ it further; psst, that’s somethin’ that you don’t wanna do”
Kendrick ends with a familiar refrain, calling back to his longstanding distaste for industry politics and cold regard for fame. However, he also ends on a warning to Drake — his reprisal could well be even more vicious and revelatory if Drake decides to continue the game.