The film “Paid in Full,” from 2002, is a fictionalized retelling of the brief but titanic reign of three real-life New York drug kingpins during the crack era of the mid-eighties. As in many films about the Black drug kingpin, or the Black mobster, or the Black power player, lording over a city or a block through sometimes nefarious means, the protagonists Rico, Mitch, and Ace—based on the life and death of Rich Porter and his partners Azie Faizon and Alpo Martinez—are certainly not heroes, but no matter their misdeeds, which in this case were abundant, they’re not entirely villains, either. When I first saw the movie, two decades ago, the men’s quest for power felt not unfamiliar to me, from the blocks I knew growing up and the people who populated them, hustling against odds that were sometimes as small as a summer storm and other times as vast as an ocean of neon-blue police lights. Whatever its material or human costs, the hustle could feel heroic if you emerged as a survivor.
In a scene from the film’s final act, Mitch (Mekhi Phifer), goes to see Ace (Wood Harris), while Ace is recovering from nine bullet wounds that he sustained during a robbery attempt, including a shot in the head at close range. Rico (Cam’ron) has chided Ace for being less than enthused about reëntering the drug trade before storming off, exiting the room, and Ace turns to Rico and says that he sees the world differently now—he’s out of the game, no turning back. Rico nods, appreciatively, but resists the newfound clarity of his wounded friend. Rico loves the game, he insists. He loves the hustle. It’s not even about the money; it’s about the love. He provides the streets with what they need, and the streets love him in return. He’ll never depart from the game, because it is within the game that he sees a kind of code, a type of honor to which one must adhere. To me, his comments seemed to apply not just to hustling but to broader aspects of worldly success. Once you’ve fulfilled every desire, or once you’ve surpassed certain levels of dreaming, you have to find something else to show up for. You didn’t have fame, and now you have it. You didn’t have money, and now it comes in so fast that you can’t spend it. No one has anything you desire, and so it might be easy to fall victim to a kind of apathy, a loss of principles. You have to be motivated by something else.
Among the things that have made Kendrick Lamar both fascinating and a bit dangerous, for those who have chosen to cross him this year, is the fact that he doesn’t seem to desire anything that his peers have. He also doesn’t appear to be especially afraid of anyone. Lamar has always been fearless and eager to antagonize, though it feels like a lifetime ago in the Arc of Kendrick that we heard his verse on Big Sean’s 2013 song “Control,” exuding the same kind of combative bravado that he’s spent much of 2024 pushing forward. In “Control,” Kendrick challenged his rivals by name, rattling off a short list of m.c.s who were, at the time, generally considered (more or less) his equals in terms of cultural capital, if not in talent. The antagonizing was done in the name of reinvigorating competition within the genre. Hip-hop is, historically, a competitive sport, and not just the rapping; all of its elements lean on competition, be it breaking, d.j.’ing, or graffiti. Kendrick, it seemed, was eager to ignite a return to form.
Though no major flash point came in the aftermath of “Control” (there were small feuds and jabs, but nothing that left a mark), Lamar found something lasting within the approach. He’d nudge his peers, and nudge them repeatedly, until someone pushed back. Lamar has dual critical and commercial bona fides, a pairing that not all of his mainstream rap contemporaries have access to. Famously, he won a Pulitzer Prize for the album “DAMN.,” from 2017, a sort of expansion upon “Good Kid, M.A.A.D City,” from 2012. Both were records of rich storytelling, detailing what it was like for a young Black person to harden himself in opposition to his circumstances while still maintaining a love for his place and the people in it. Lamar’s more recent “Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers,” from 2022, earned the most nominations of any album by a male artist at the Grammy Awards, including a nod for Album of the Year. The record was praised for its intimacy and its thematic tenderness, with Lamar exploring his personal journey with therapy, his struggles with generational trauma, and the ways that trauma might be transferrable to his children.
Kendrick hasn’t been steeping only in outright antagonism or provocation, but there is an undercurrent of it in his work, even in something as inward-facing as “Mr. Morale,” that suggests a distaste for those who are coasting on past successes or pandering for easy stardom. In his verse on “Control,” after he lists all the rappers he is poking, he says, “I’ve got love for all y’all, BUT”—what follows are the words “I’m trynna murder you niggas,” but they could have been anything. The conjunction represented an over-all ethos: I love you, I love this work we are all doing together, and for the sake of sustaining it I need you all to rise to my level, or I will drag some of you there.
In 2024, the person he chose to drag was Drake. The saga began when Drake and J. Cole released the song “First Person Shooter,” in the fall of 2023. It was supposed to be a fun, triumphant romp between two of the biggest rappers of the moment, a radio- and club-friendly offering on Drake’s album, “For All the Dogs,” which was commercially successful but critically panned. In the lyrics, J. Cole mentioned himself and Drake as a part of rap’s “Big Three” alongside Lamar. It seemed, to me, like a throwaway line, as forgettable as the song itself.
The Kendrick Lamar-Drake feud that ensued has been litigated endlessly, to the point where there isn’t much else interesting to say about its song-by-song minutiae or its beat-by-beat time line. It does seem, though, that Kendrick was ultimately offended to be mentioned in the same category as Drake, a superstar who has, for years, seemed interested in capitalizing on his stardom without actually growing or advancing his craft. Lamar’s initial response reflects an attitude of “I am not like the rest of these guys,” which had festered and grown into a kind of resentment. After a handful of songs traded back and forth between Drake and Lamar, some of them deeply personal, interweaving rumors about each other’s families and children, “Not Like Us” achieved what most diss tracks do not: it became as big of a song as its target. It was the No. 1 rap song in the country, played during sporting events, played while cutting to commercials on national television, played by marching bands at high schools and colleges, a song so big that it wouldn’t die, making it impossible for Drake to fashion a musical response that would hold up alongside the albatross of the tune, with its sharp stabs of synth and relentless, mocking, accusatory lyrics (including Lamar’s accusation that Drake is a user of people, a colonizer of sound, and a pedophile).
As of today, Drake has brought one petition claiming that the song was given preferential treatment by Spotify and Universal Music Group—which has called the claims “offensive and untrue”—and another alleging defamation. Such legal retaliation is, to say the least, an uncommon path to chart during a rap battle. It feels like confirmation that Drake was bested musically, bludgeoned by Lamar’s song into a submission that he doesn’t seem, at the moment, to have a plan for recovering from. Rarely is a career of Drake’s magnitude taken down entirely, and I suspect that Drake’s has not been. But the feud caused a hole through which the vessel of Drake’s musical empire began to take on water. One grand miscalculation that continues to be made on the Internet, largely among Drake fans, is that because Drake is a bigger artist he can claim victory. But that does not take into account the central premise that we began with: Drake does not seem to have anything that Kendrick Lamar wants. Lamar is plenty famous, plenty popular, and has plenty accolades. Drake’s stardom is, seemingly in Lamar’s eyes, hollow, built on a foundation of falsehoods, or at least exaggerations, and done without principles. The mansion is big, but it is empty. The voice in it is lonely, even if other people are in the room.
