In the beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar, no one’s a winner

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Adrian Lee is an editor in The Globe and Mail’s Opinion section and a former juror for the Polaris Prize whose music criticism has appeared in Maclean’s, The Globe, and The Coast.

War was completely avoidable until it became terrible destiny. In one corner: a powerful, domineering, perhaps overconfident presence that defined an era. On the other: a bellicose great power in its own right, leery of the former’s encroachment into their lands.

And so the Athenian Empire and Sparta went to war. It emerged from a structural, accelerating friction between the two nations that students of geopolitics know as the Thucydides Trap, named after the ancient Greek historian who wrote that “it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”

Now, in a battle with much lower stakes but much higher production values, hip-hop finds itself in a new Peloponnesian War.

A low-boil disdain between two of the genre’s megastars – Toronto’s Aubrey Drake Graham and Los Angeles lyricist Kendrick Lamar – has spilled over into explicit public view. In brief: After each rapper repeatedly declined to interpret years of glancing boasts, subliminal digs and even unintended slights in good faith, Lamar’s line dismissing the idea that rap has a big three (“it’s just big me”) on Like That sparked the dry forest tinder in March. Drake released two tracks over six days in April – Push Ups and Taylor Made Freestyle – that for the first time took aim directly at Lamar. In turn, Lamar didn’t take swipes about his shoe size and relatively limited commercial success lying down, responding with Euphoria, which explosively castigated the Canadian rapper for, among other things, being a culture vulture.

Then, late Friday night, things escalated dramatically. Drake released Family Matters, assailing Lamar’s social-activist credibility. Just a half-hour later, Kendrick dropped Meet the Grahams, the most cruelly personal rap put to wax since Tupac Shakur laid waste to Notorious B.I.G. with Hit ‘Em Up. A day later, he doubled down with Not Like Us, going so far as to accuse Drake’s camp of pedophilia.

The rappers’ accusations have been largely unverifiable, but they have been cutthroat, ranging from drug use, partner infidelity, paternity claims, mockery about being molested and domestic abuse. In his latest response, The Heart (Part 6), Drake claimed Lamar’s child was fathered by his label’s former president; in Meet the Grahams, an imagined conversation with Drake’s dad, Lamar rapped, “You raised a horrible ... person” who “should die.” Former collaborators have taken sides, drawing lines in the sand and issuing insults that have dredged social-media dirty laundry to the booth. Certainly, Drake having to literally go on record to deny specific charges of grooming is not a winning manoeuvre. Both have pulled children into the picture.

In short, this beef is no longer about who’s at the top of the rap game. It’s about who can race to the bottom fastest.

Rap fans have thrilled to each development, with bar-by-bar analysis and furious debates over the victor. But that would make all this something of a game. Instead, what could have been seen as an energizing exercise in performance and posturing – in a genre that has an increasingly loose relationship with its founding value of authenticity – has tipped over into something altogether sadistic. As in our democracy at large, this mud-slinging will change no supporter’s minds about their flagbearer’s rivals, but it will leave everyone wounded, perhaps even mortally. And the biggest loser may be the decade-plus of peace, mutual flourishing and innovation that has been detonated.

Hip-hop is a cultural monolith now, an institution that has accrued influence by its major players agreeing to work toward a kind of collective commercial success. Drake in many ways has been the period’s defining voice and primary beneficiary, pushing sonic boundaries in ways that are only possible in peacetime. That doesn’t mean that personal tensions wouldn’t flare into lyrical haymakers; sparring is in rap’s very DNA. But red lines were largely restored by bottom lines. Collegiality, broadly speaking, was king, and the world got better music for it.

That era feels like it’s over now – and all because of a conflict that says less about the state of hip hop and more about the players involved.

While rap’s most iconic beefs were personal, they were often laden with meaning, too – forks in the road for the soul of hip hop. Tupac and Biggie’s personal falling-out became wrapped up in broader regional battles; their tragic killings led to an emotional realignment of hip hop’s modus operandi. For Jay Z and Nas, a record-studio slight turned into an ugly war of words that sucked up so much oxygen in New York, the cradle of the culture, that it led to a referendum on the city’s hegemony.

The Drake-Kendrick conflict does reach for such heights – particularly as the latter has worked to frame the ballot question around morality, and who gets to champion Black culture – but it’s hard to argue that this beef is about right or wrong any more, if it was ever about that. It feels like it’s about zero-sum hate now. Accusations of terrible and even criminal acts are being thrown out not in the name of justice or accountability for any alleged victim, but to score points.

And so Lamar, a Pulitzer Prize-winner whose last album was a treatise on doing therapy, and Drake, one of the most innovative and top-selling pop musicians of this generation, have each brought ruin to their carefully curated selves. No matter where this beef leads, these accusations will hang in the air like napalm. And for what?

The Thucydides Trap is incredibly hard to avert – just ask those involved in the war games between Beijing and Washington. The last time a deeply personal feud flared between two rap megastars, the turn-off required near-divine intervention: “Mom put in a call and said, ‘That went too far,’” Jay Z said in 2001 about his track Super Ugly, which crudely detailed his affair with the mother of Nas’s child. “I felt like I didn’t think about women’s feelings or [Nas’ former girlfriend’s] feelings, or even my mom. It was really like, ‘Let me meet your level of disrespect with this level of disrespect.’”

So now what? De-escalation doesn’t look to be happening any time soon. It feels as if we’re edging closer to a smouldering crater.

In 404 BC, Sparta won the Peloponnesian War, destabilizing the region, as war became the norm. Just a few decades later, Macedonia claimed supremacy. And then in 272 BC, a king named Pyrrhus of Epirus tried to take Sparta but was killed in the effort. He had previously suffered such unacceptable losses after initial success in a separate conflict against Rome that it gave rise to its own term in our lexicon: a pyrrhic victory.

There’s a lesson in there, a world away and two millennia later.