In the minds of his fans, Nothing is ever corny when Kendrick does it, but when Cole or Drake does something it’s always corny
EVERYTHING Drake does is corny. Thats the point.
With Kendrick, everyone with a functioning brain knows that the deepfakes in the Heart Part 5 are meant to punctuate certain negative aspects of the culture and how one can lose their sense of self (OJ) their pride (Will Smith) their dignity (Jussie Smollet) and even their lives (Nipsey) through feeding into those negative aspects. Its an artistic statement
With Drake there’s no higher artistic expression he’s attempting to convey, there’s no message, there’s no theme. Its just a troll job tailored to the lowest common denominator of music fans for cheap shock value. The fact that it actually WORKS is a testament to the fact that Drake, himself an artist only by committee seeing as he doesn’t write or produce “his” music, has been allowed to get away with corniness his entire career. He was a child actor on a teen soap opera in which he was the token black kid who got beat up at least once per season, cheated on, disrespected, and ended up in a wheelchair suffering from erectile disfunction. He transitioned into music rapping and singing about the women who’d done him wrong and the people who didn’t believe in him and was able to catapult into Lil Wayne’s good graces, where he proceeded to collapse on stage, freestyle ghostwritten bars off a blackberry, drop a mixtape in which its biggest hit was written by someone else, and bragged about how he, as a grown ass man would be incorporating Whinny The Pooh into his next album. He drafted another Canadian artist to ghostwrite that album and thankfully, somewhere along the way that artist wised up and decided he didn’t want to part of the OVO sweat factory writing camps and bounced. Since then he’s been exposed for the ghostwriting, exposed for wave riding artists, exposed for fathering a child with a porn star, exposed for using his father to gain a modicum of clout amongst the American black community, exposed for fathering a child with a porn star, exposed for utilizing blackface to mock black American racism, exposed having a perhaps unhealthy obsession with young girls, exposed for a million things that would have ended another rapper’s career but somehow, some way, his corniness is looked over and given an eternal pass.
So yes, his usage of A.I. to diss Kendrick is supremely corny, but its on BRAND. And THATS the genius of it. We already have been conditioned to expect the lamest from him, and because HE can laugh at it we all can laugh along. We can pretend he came up with that concept, we can pretend he wrote those bars. We can give him full credit.