"Black popular culture, like all popular cultures in the modern world, is bound to be contradictory, and this is not because we haven't fought the cultural battle well enough."
—Stuart Hall
In January 2024, Yasiin Bey, the artist formerly known as Mos Def, did a rare interview on "The Cutting Room Floor" podcast, where an offhand comment he made about Drake's music being mall-music pop went viral on social media. Of course, bringing up Drake instantly became many listeners' biggest takeaway, but what's stuck with me since then was a broader question Bey raised about the role of commercial aesthetics in a society that often feels close to falling apart. "What happens when this thing collapses?" he quipped. "What happens when the columns start buckling? Are we not in some early stage of that at this present hour?"
Two months after that interview, Future and Metro Boomin dropped "Like That"—and Kendrick Lamar's fiery guest verse set off the genre's biggest conflict in a generation. We watched two of hip-hop's most important brands engage in deep surveillance, infiltration, sabotage, trafficking in information (or disinformation, depending on who you believe): rival camps engaged in "an arms race of fictions," indifferent toward collateral damage. As it all unfolded last spring, I wondered just how much things might escalate—if we were headed towards a kind of mutually-assured destruction for a certain kind of rap star.
Instead, we got the year of "Not Like Us." Perhaps no other rap diss has ever functioned so effectively as a pop hit. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 three separate times in the past year, and it's one of the most-awarded songs in Grammys history. Lamar has reached a commercial peak, with a number-one album, Super Bowl halftime show, and an ongoing international tour in the song's wake. Most importantly, "Not Like Us" has saturated American culture to a surreal degree. Hip-hop has been pop for a while now, but there's something particularly strange about hearing a diss record like this one at the Olympics and the Democratic National Convention. To go a step further, it suggests something deeper about our contradictory relationship to hip-hop as a cultural and political force. So maybe we should take a step back and pick apart this moment: try to locate ourselves in relation to the song, but also the world that's given it such a long life in the mainstream.
Who is the "us" in "Not Like Us"? If we take the song's rhetoric at face value, perhaps it seems clear: Drake and the OVO brand he created represent literal and figurative predation. Invoking the commodified labor used to build the modern South, Lamar argues that Drake methodically borrowed from Atlanta hip-hop to make himself more marketable as a rapper—"not a colleague," but a "colonizer." His pointed use of regional sounds—a triumphant beat by DJ Mustard, a cadence borrowed from the late Drakeo the Ruler—assert a claim to authenticity that Drake, by comparison, often lacks in his artistic persona. Jarringly, that claim is surrounded by bombshell accusations of misogyny that characterizes both sides, turning violence against women and girls into rhetorical linchpins.
Nevertheless, the song's malleability is textbook pop. Within a cultural landscape that consumes everything, scrubbing away context in the process, anyone can be "us." Lamar seems very aware of that process: speaking to Harper's Bazaar in October, he vaguely described the "us" as "the energy of who I am, the type of man I represent." He calls on a capacious masculinity—which makes sense, all things considered—but a void of meaning is patently visible, too: "This man has morals, he has values, he believes in something, he stands on something." Critics like Pitchfork's Alphonse Pierre and Rolling Stone's Andre Gee have pointed out the deep contradictions in these claims to a moral high ground.
Black music has long been an important tool for soft power, manufacturing consent for the coups, occupations, and drone strikes that reproduce the image of American peace and prosperity. I'm not suggesting that the beef was meant to distract from political issues, or that both artists haven't made institutional critiques on and off their records. But there's a reason that this particular beef would attract this level of attention at this particular moment, and it goes beyond their respective popularity.
Before we fully understood the neo-fascist turn that's now shaken our political foundations—before we could really see the columns buckling in front of us—we were saturated with the language of a national "culture war." When you peel back the layers, that language pointed to a newly-intensifying stage of class war, of neocolonialism, of counterinsurgency. Increasingly, we treat culture and politics as synonymous; political questions are increasingly wrapped up in representation, behavior, style, who and what is getting the most attention. It was easy, perhaps too easy, for a war within hip-hop to become a symbol of a broader culture war. It seemed inevitable that Kamala Harris' presidential campaign would latch onto it, too. "The majority of us believe in freedom and equality," she remarked in a pre-taped segment for the BET Awards. "But these extremists, as they say—they 'not like us.'"
Rap's love of war metaphors finds its fullest expression in beef. But as Bey noted 20 years ago, rap warfare is not like imperial warfare—and as Joy James wrote in 2020, "war is not a metaphor." The George Floyd uprisings have inspired vibrant militancy, stagnant reform, and brutal police repression with a shared intensity. America's Black leadership class is largely sidestepping (and, at times, actively supporting) the ongoing Palestinian genocide, along with lesser-known genocides and violent regime changes across the African diaspora: in Tigray, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Haiti. There is a war on Black life, a war on the colonized world being carried out on our behalf, wars on bodily autonomy and collective memory. Real wars are overlapping with imagined ones.
Black music has long been an important tool for soft power, manufacturing consent for the coups, occupations, and drone strikes that reproduce the image of American peace and prosperity.
Meanwhile, post-beef Drake has traveled down a few major currents. There are his appeals to nostalgia: a 100 GB data dump of behind-the-scenes content from more welcome eras, an album of cynical balladry with longtime collaborator PARTYNEXTDOOR. He's also diving deeper into the streaming world—a world that sits uncomfortably close to the far right—while using it to promote an ongoing deal with gambling mega-site Stake (which is reportedly worth over $100 million per year). All these moves are calculated efforts to recenter himself as the consummate pop star, bigger than any perceived wound to his brand. On the opening night of his Anita Max Win tour in Australia, he boiled this down into his outfit: a hoodie covered in bullet holes, smoke pouring off his back. But what the hip-hop world has been drawn to most are Drake's multiple legal filings against his parent label, Universal Music Group, accusing them of artificially inflating the success of "Not Like Us" while reframing its accusations as defamatory.
As I noted in a 2024 interview with USA Today, Lamar and Drake's back and forth has hinged on the "economy of reaction" that surrounds both artists—including music reactors on YouTube, streamers, and media personalities. Content creators have suggested that both artists' teams removed certain copyright restrictions on their diss tracks, allowing them to gain revenue by commenting on the beef. That claim is key to Drake's current lawsuit, along with multiple break-in attempts at his Toronto home, a shooting that injured a bodyguard, and the unspoken "pay-to-play" tactics that labels have historically used to promote their flagship artists. In an amended filing, his legal team argues that UMG had a vested interest in listeners treating "Not Like Us" as an exposé: "By devaluing Drake's music and brand, UMG would gain leverage to force Drake to sign a new deal on terms more favorable to UMG."
Drake's initial filing (which also included Spotify) invoked New York's RICO Act, drawing immediate comparisons to YSL's RICO case. Like last year's beef, the narrative surrounding YSL has been heavily influenced by fan reactions. As traditional news media often overlooked the minutiae of the YSL trial, social media pundits were constant fixtures—whether it was widespread claims that Gunna was a "snitch" for taking an Alford plea, or an anonymous 25-year-old providing detailed accounts of trial proceedings. Many of these same online spaces relied on lyrics to treat the Atlanta prosecutors' accusations as real, even as the broader music industry worried about the implications. UMG's response to Drake quietly invokes those concerns, arguing that the suit "seeks to weaponize the legal process to silence an artist's creative expression."
Although these cases hinge on a shared question about how we treat rap lyrics, there are significant tensions between the two. A popular narrative online—and a key part of UMG's defense—is that Drake's legal retaliation undermines the spirit of traditional rap beef, in which outlandish claims are bound by a shared understanding to "keep it on wax." At the same time, rap fans and pundits have explicitly treated these claims as genuine revelations—pushing each diss into a spectacle that questions the artists' ethical standings. It's not that the audience doesn't want the state involved—it sometimes feels like the audience wants to be an arbitrator alongside the state.
This feeling was, in some ways, by design. Beefs have always delved into messy personal revelations, real and exaggerated, but it feels the line between the two is now constantly up for negotiation. Throughout the beef, listeners were implicitly deputized to take Lamar and Drake's accusations into real life. We didn't just scrutinize each verse for strategy and technical flair—we scraped social media pages, interviews, and forgotten news stories to verify their most shocking accusations. When "Not Like Us" dropped—less than a day after Lamar's excoriating "Meet the Grahams"—the media landscape was primed to accelerate its impact: the corporate monopolies that guide the spread of digital culture, the collapse of traditional media, the blurring of public and private space, and AI tech that makes collective truth and personal authorship easier to manipulate. Our deep investment was heightened by the mediums we rely on for political and cultural discourse, which increasingly happen in tandem.
That conflation of culture and politics is another key reason why "Not Like Us" is so firmly embedded in our cultural lexicon. For many fans and critics, the debate over personal property that seemingly grounded the beef quickly turned into a referendum on hip-hop and, by proxy, Blackness. Since they've become two of modern music's most important brands, Kendrick and Drake move as multimillion dollar institutions, impossibly bigger than themselves—always aware that audiences expect themself to channel something fundamental about our shared wants and needs with each new artistic or personal evolution. When "pop" in its broadest sense is inseparable from Black aesthetics—and Black aesthetics are treated like everyone's property—Black creators, critics, and audiences are often consumed by a drive to define and protect "authentic" racial performance on the most important platforms. To me, this anxiety was the beef's guiding question: whose performance of Black masculinity, moral values, and artistic vision feels the most genuine?
Shortly after "Not Like Us" dropped, Gee wrote that the song "isn't just a Drake diss, it's a rally against perpetrators who shifted hip-hop from a Black and brown community with culturally understood modes of being into an at-times parodic circus." David Dennis, Jr., writing for Andscape in February, argued that "part of Lamar's attack on his Canadian nemesis has been positioning Drake as an extension of an establishment whose goal is to tear down Black folks. Yes, Drake is a colonizer according to Lamar, but it's not just about that. It's about getting rid of all colonizers." Although these readings hold a lot of weight, especially in how the song has continued to be received, I can't help but wonder where Lamar fits into that framework as a political subject.
He's become revered for asking complex questions about Black political life, and his single "Alright" famously became a clarion call for the Black Lives Matter movement in the mid-2010s. But the perceived separation between Lamar and Drake can sometimes feel hollow. Lamar has not been exempt from pop crossovers, awkwardly hopping on trendy sounds, or staying silent about political issues that might hurt his immense financial and social capital. For every critique of capitalism, white supremacy, or cisheteropatriarchy, there are asides against "political correctness" and "cancel culture," phrases that invoke the specter of our familiar, reactionary culture war.
On his 2022 record Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers—messy, raw, confessional—he urges that Black celebrities "are not your savior." In that context, I was struck by how quickly mainstream culture has placed him back in a similar role. A victory for Lamar is a victory for "the culture," in that nebulous, defensive way we use the term these days. It's a moral and, ultimately, political victory. It reaffirms a particular image of Blackness that depends on hip-hop's fundamental contradiction, its double consciousness: the fact that it's simultaneously America's mainstream and one of its most enduring countercultures. When hip-hop aesthetics have seeped into everything, including capital and state power, the lines between real and imagined experience are constantly overlapping—just like the lines between our real and imagined wars. I'm reminded of a 1994 article by R.A. Judy, when he refers to authenticity in hip-hop as "hyper commodified affect." In other words, in hip-hop's global economy, being authentic is less important than performing in a way that feels authentic. That feeling is a commodity, and "Not Like Us" has shifted the market price.
In his 1992 article, "What Is This 'Black' in Black Popular Culture?," cultural theorist Stuart Hall argued that Black culture was increasingly turning to fixed, essentialist ideas of Blackness in order to protect its integrity: "'Good' Black popular culture can pass the test of authenticity—the reference to Black experience and to Black expressivity. These serve as the guarantees in the determination of which Black popular culture is right on, which is ours, and which is not." We've seen this move throughout the past decade, as "pro-Black" aesthetics have become more and more romanticized. Lamar's use of the term "colonizer," for example, feels indebted to its post-Black Panther meaning—where it serves much more as a taunt than a fully-grounded understanding of empire.
I also think of the response when Beyoncé released Cowboy Carter, her stadium-ready spin on Americana that finally won her that elusive Grammy for Album of the Year. Appealing to the Black Southern roots of country music, in the similar way that she mined Black dance music on Renaissance, critics have often suggested that her reclamation of these traditions can apply to us by proxy. In other words, a cultural victory for Beyoncé (greater recognition by mainstream institutions) is a moral and political victory for us. When you move through the world as an institution, your success begins to look like reform.
So, can we take anything from this moment that might help us imagine a different relationship to power—something that might destabilize the hold that real colonizers have on our culture? My mind goes to a couple of different places, one being Drakeo the Ruler. Throughout Kendrick's recent output, you can hear the influence of Drakeo's self-described "nervous music"—as Jeff Weiss put it, "the music that you make when you're driving around South L.A. in a $100,000 car, looking over your shoulder at every red light to see whether you're being followed by a cop or a killer." "Not Like Us" oozes that cadence, and Kendrick builds on it across GNX, a surprise victory-lap that highlights L.A. up-and-comers while repackaging contemporary West Coast aesthetics into a shiny, Jack Anthonoff-assisted pop-rap record.
It's hard not to think about Drakeo's particular relationship to the state: held for years in an L.A. jail on dubious gang charges, his lyrics used as evidence of his guilt. His 2020 album Thank You for Using GTL, one of the sharpest musical statements made from a jail phone, considers the constructed nature of truth as a shared tactic of hip-hop rhetoric and state repression. "It might sound real, but it's fictional," he raps on that album's outro. "I love that my imagination gets to you." When he sneered, "I'm a real nigga, and you fictional," the noise of the jail bleeding into the phone call, the stakes feel higher than anything I heard during this recent beef.
Then there's the Super Bowl halftime show. Although some critics were quick to label the performance as a radical or subversive statement (similar to Beyoncé's Black Panther Party cosplay in 2016), the most radical moment came when background dancer Zül-Qarnaįn Nantambu displayed Palestinian and Sudanese flags before being taken away by security. At first, many viewers thought the protest was part of the performance, but it soon became clear that Nantambu worked alone. In an interview with Dazed, he spoke of his motivations: "I don't know the nuances, but I would like the suffering to end. I would like them to be treated like human beings. I would like them to live like how we're living in London and America. I would like them to have their civil liberties. That's the demand." Again, this moment is only adjacent to "Not Like Us," but it doesn't exist without it—and it feels so much clearer than the song itself.
The Palestinian genocide is a good example of how the roles of "commercial" or "conscious" rappers don't always line up neatly with their material interests. Drake and longtime producer Noah "40" Shebib signed onto an open letter by the Artists4Ceasefire collective, which has called for "a permanent ceasefire, the release of all hostages, and the delivery of lifesaving aid to civilians in Gaza." Lamar, on the other hand, has been noticeably silent.
Many hip-hop listeners imagine a distinction between artists who "speak truth to power" and artists who market themselves to fit the interests of power. But the lines aren't always so clear. Drake can take a more "progressive" (and perhaps riskier) position on Palestine while embodying the hollowness of late-stage capitalism—and jabbing at Lamar for "acting like an activist." Lamar, who crooned about his desire to be called an Israelite rather than Black in his 2017 record "YAH," can be a beacon of "pro-Blackness" in a settler colony, while selectively engaging with real struggles of decolonization. Avoiding these contradictions would mean avoiding the terrain they've been fighting on.
The Palestinian genocide is a good example of how the roles of "commercial" or "conscious" rappers don't always line up neatly with their material interests.
Lamar is not the only rapper to invoke the Black Hebrew Israelites while pursuing Black empowerment; on the other hand, Black celebrities like Ye and Kyrie Irving have used their rhetoric to deny allegations of antisemitism. It's a reminder of just how abstracted Israel has become in our popular imagination—as a sovereign state, a center for several major religions, and a metaphor for the Black diasporic experience.
That abstraction feels particularly messy in our current moment: anti-Zionism is frequently misrepresented as antisemitic, while antisemitism is becoming increasingly normalized by the influence of conspiracy theorists and far-right pundits. Part of why supporting Palestinian resistance (and critiquing Israeli apartheid) has been so risky is that, within American pop culture, our language to describe them is incredibly murky. But pop culture is openly being weaponized as a terrain of struggle in this phase of the conflict. We're watching racial and geopolitical boundaries get renegotiated in real time—and our watching affects that process. We can't afford to accept that murkiness uncritically. Expecting clear political commitments from pop stars is always a messy proposition, doomed to disappoint in one way or another. But "Not Like Us" is undoubtedly doing something political, whether it meant to or not—and now we have to move forward from it.
In 2025, a year later, I hesitate to treat it as a victory for Blackness, for "the culture," for hip-hop as an inherently rebellious craft. Instead, I think Pitchfork's Pierre hit the nail on the head in a write-up last fall: "No matter what you say about it, you will be a hypocrite in some way." So if there's anything we should take away from this moment, the song's continued popularity calls on us to clarify our commitments, to say exactly what we want to dismantle and what we hope to build in its place.