We’ve fallen into a beautiful rhythm with Kendrick Lamar where he stays silent just long enough for us to develop lofty ideas about his art and intentions, which he periodically shows up to shred. Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers staged a messy divorce from the expectations of the audience that turned the To Pimp a Butterfly single “Alright” into a protest anthem. When Morale’s therapy sessions failed to beat the Serious Artist allegations he shouldered, he brought buddy-comedy airs to “Hillbillies” with his cousin Baby Keem. Kendrick’s old-school in the sense that we have no idea what’s going on in his head. He’s not part of the extremely online brigade. We learn how he views the world by pressing play.
Today, we found out Kendrick isn’t a fan of the “Big Three” conversations percolating around himself, Drake, and J. Cole, ratified last fall by the Dreamville Records co-founder in “First Person Shooter” off Aubrey’s For All the Dogs: “Love when they argue the hardest MC / Is it K-Dot? Is it Aubrey? Or me? / We the big three like we started a league, but right now, I feel like Muhammad Ali.”
Kendrick’s response? Dropping into Future and Metro Boomin’s We Don’t Trust You heater “Like That” to tell everyone to kick rocks:
Motherfuck the big three, nigga, it’s just big me
Nigga, bum, what? I’m really like that
And your best work is a light pack
Nigga, Prince outlived Mike Jack
Nigga, bum, ’fore all your dogs gettin’ buried
That’s a K with all these nines, he gon’ see Pet Sematary.
Mind-palacing the cold war between Drake and Kendrick can be confusing. Dot contributed an incredible freestyle to Take Care and appeared as an opener on the 2012 Club Paradise tour, then listed Drake in the swarm of rappers he identified as the competition in Big Sean’s “Control” and claimed that it “tucked a sensitive rapper back in his pajama clothes” in a 2013 BET Hip-Hop Awards cipher. Relations never seemed right again. (Pour one out for Sean, whose latest bars are once again being papered over by Kendrick discourse.) Drake blasts out subliminals like LeBron James blows chalk, and for clues on how this tiff got to death threats, check last year’s unreleased Lil Uzi Vert collaboration “At the Gates” (“Fake woke niggas fake deep / You ain’t know fame before me.”)
With “Like That,” Kendrick isn’t just refusing the olive branch offered in “Shooter,” he’s delivering a string of quips you can’t attribute to anyone else and saying what many are thinking about Big Three debates: He’s not in the same league. Drake and Cole maintain prominence by adapting sound and subject matter to meet the times. Their catalogues aren’t spotless; they’re works in progress. But Kendrick is building a library and trusting us to trust him for a good read. When we’re enumerating the most brilliant musical statements of this era, we’re not looking at For All the Dogs or The Off-Season, where our Big Two emeritus each peer into the darkness of the decade.
The next few weeks could get childish. Threatening to send Drake to the pet cemetery seems destined to draw a direct response. (Doing this on a Future and Metro project complicates already dicey relations, with Drake and Future frequent collaborators.) That’s what Kendrick wants, though, right? The excuse to make his grievances public? He knows he’s not dealing with a show-up-at-your-studio type of adversary, and he must know he made it weird between Drake and Future. Per usual, we’re left wondering what Kendrick Lamar was thinking. Was wedging into the Drake/Future/Metro saga his strategy? What’s the endgame here? How does Drake reassert himself after “Like That” AND Megan Thee Stallion’s brutal bars for him in “Hiss”? How do you flame K. Dot? Has Drake met his match (again)? What did J. Cole do this time to deserve it?
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