Drake hasn’t spoken on black issues AT ALL in his music the past 15 years. He claimed that the only time he ever experienced racism in his entire life was from American blacks. He Shang Tsunged black American culture to get himself hot while showing contempt for it. He never stood for anything other than the exploitation of the culture for his own gain and Kendrick just so happened to be the vessel with which Drake had to both face and be judged for it. Like Kendrick said “I’m what the CULTURE feels”, the truest verse in the entire beef. How you gonna tell a black man from the streets of Compton who made it out and gave back to his community AND made THE most successful socially conscious album of the last decade that he raps like he’s trying to “Free Slaves”? A half white Canadian who admitted he wasn’t raised even within the black culture of his own homeland and claimed American blacks were “racist” telling a black man from COMPTON that freeing the slaves was a bad thing.
Drake failed to read the room. He failed to fully comprehend what Kendrick as an artist stands for and how seriously people take that. Lets say even IF Kendrick is 100% a fraud who doesn’t give a flying 747 F U C K about the people in his own community and behind the scenes is tap dancing for Jimmy Iovine and serving Lyor Cohen butter biscuits in the backs of limousines; he’d still be one of the best method actors of all time and Drake should have RESPECTED that if he was going to actually have a chance at winning this war. But because he only ever wanted to use black American culture as window dressing (complete with braids, an ever changing accent, Southern “friends”, and a Memphis raised black dad rocking Steve Harvey suits) he failed to understand why that slavery line, the molestation jokes, and his status as the “bigger rapper” didn’t serve to assist him at all. He acted just like i’d expect Jack Harlow, Macklemore, or Machine Gun Kelly to act, except even they would have understood their proximity to whiteness was a deficit and tried to act accordingly. Drake thought he’d proven to the black community that he WAS one of us but that facade only holds up when your opponent is an idiot (Meek Mill) it wasn’t ever going to hold up with someone as authentically etched into BLACK culture as Kendrick Lamar