Kendrick Lamar and Drake: The Inimitable Ones

The malicious beef between rap superstars Kendrick Lamar and Drake shows that even artificial intelligence doesn’t stand a chance against human abysses.

Since highly developed artificial intelligence became a mass phenomenon last year, the question has been simmering: Can AI really replace me?

Will it soon be sleeping in my little bed and eating my honey?

Dystopias of the superfluous human, a literally programmed nuclear war, alarming appeals from the most renowned scientists, strikes, honey jars frantically buried in internet-free bunkers... Yes, dogs have stopped eating students’ homework because it tastes like nothing but ChatGPT! And then?

Then, many medieval wars are still being fought in the ultra-modern world, climate goals are being missed in good old tradition, children are being conceived, knees are being popped back into place, cats are being petted, and fries are being fried. In short, life goes on with all its probabilities and improbabilities. That of AI as well, but how, when, and where remains not quite tangible. Or does it? And it’s precisely here that the (at the time of writing, ongoing) dispute between American rap superstars Drake and Kendrick Lamar enters our survival considerations.

Certainly, not every reader of Shatter the Standards will be a die-hard rap fan. Therefore, it may attach little importance to the conflict between the two musicians. Please, it’s a free country. But these really aren’t just anybody!

Drake, born Aubrey Graham in Toronto, has been so incredibly successful for over a decade that he is regularly touted as the legitimate heir to the King of Pop, Michael Jackson—of course not if you ask Kendrick Lamar. Or, actually, even by Kendrick Lamar. But only so he can style himself as the rightful successor to Prince and rap: “Prince outlived Mike Jack!”

Kendrick Lamar is based in Los Angeles and, therefore, conveniently never had a particularly long way to put his 17 (!) Grammys at home. A genius. An author who can do with language what only the very few people on this planet can do. The Pulitzer Prize jury judged the same and awarded Lamar their honors in 2018 as the first rapper ever. And what humans can achieve through language is one of the substantial questions in artificial intelligence. So, in humanity’s spring of 2024, language superstar Drake versus language superstar Kendrick Lamar. War of the Language stars! Line by line, tooth for tooth. And in the end, the winner is artificial intelligence! At least, it seemed that way for a short time. And perhaps that would have even been the more human-friendly outcome. “How’s that?” you ask.

And what’s the dispute about anyway? No idea. It’s quite possible that they themselves don’t know anymore. The range of mutual accusations initially included feet too small, lack of talent, blackmail ability, bad fatherhood, too few hits, lack of melanin (Drake has a white, Jewish mother), cultural alienation, surgically attached six-packs and nose reductions, miserable fashion sense, irrelevance, megalomania, cowardice, manipulation. To highlight just a few of the attempted insults. And the AI?

Let’s start with the fact that Drake’s first attack song, “Push Ups,” was initially dismissed as the work of AI because the song was only leaked on unofficial channels like YouTube. His management had to re-release the song on all official platforms for it actually to be recognized as Drake’s work. And even that wasn’t proof enough for some. In this sense, Drake realized that the AI song is really fire, so now he’s passing it off as his own. At least, that’s what many comments on social media said. There were doubts about the authenticity of these comments; after all, they could also come from bots.

At this point, an eternally fresh sentence is permitted: Such things didn’t exist in the past! Not even a year and a half ago. And maybe Drake, at 37, a child of the ancient eighties, will have called out perplexed: AI? Me? That didn’t exist in the past! That would at least explain his next step, a kind of tech defiance reaction: performing one verse himself on the track “Taylor Made Freestyle,” another with the voice of rap legend Snoop Dogg (who knew nothing about it, as he clarified on Instagram the same day). In the first of the three verses, Tupac Shakur, murdered in 1996, raps against Kendrick. And even if Tupac were the most radical despiser of Kendrick Lamar under God’s sun—he would have had to drag himself from the grave into the studio, resurrected from the dead. Well, that’s exactly what Drake did. You might find this novel mix of humans, posthumously collaborating humans, and machines tasteless. But annihilating?

Of course, Kendrick Lamar couldn’t let such mockery stand! He had to respond; anything else would be a capitulation in hip-hop culture and, thus, eternal shame. It’s probably even tantamount to the end of his career. Even Pulitzer Prizes don’t help there. Lamar’s counterattack then followed with his inimitable voice, inimitable flow, inimitable lyrical energy, and inimitable essence. It wasn’t Kendrick Lamar himself, but the AI imitating him that fought back. Yes, even autonomously claiming to possess compromising sexual material of Drake on a USB stick. AI-Kendrick went viral with tracks like “Owl Hunting” and “One Shot.”

On the other hand, some of these AI songs were apparently written by real humans again, more precisely, rappers who had merely used AI to sound deceptively like Kendrick Lamar. But does that make things more organic? If so, in what way? The really breathing and toilet-going Kendrick Lamar asked in his response “Euphoria”: “Am I battlin’ ghosts or AI?” A double lyrical humiliation for Drake. At the same time, however, it is an involuntary tribute to AI, which emerged as the laughing third party in this cultural battle of the giants.

Then, it was enough with the work. The human who wrote this text put down his little pen and thought: You really observed well what’s happening to humanity, old boy. This writing dime is honestly earned. Now, quickly into the warm little bed and nibble on a nice honey pot. That and maybe also that we could all already be in brutal competition with the omnipotent machine. Suppose even the most successful and virtuosic superstars in their field can hardly come out of the shadow of AI anymore.

However, Drake then released the song “Family Matters.” Undoubtedly genuine. Complete with a video in which he (for whatever reason) poses with Kendrick Lamar’s wife’s engagement ring. And accuses the conscientious Lamar, a professed Christian and family man, of domestic violence: “They hired a crisis management team to clean up the fact that you beat on your queen.” That’s already pretty dark and no longer as harmless as jokes about shoe sizes. Kendrick Lamar’s reply, however, is characterized by hip-hop commentators as entirely “nuclear.”

In “Meet the Grahams,” Lamar composes four verses in the form of letters: to Drake’s son, to Drake’s mother, to an allegedly hidden eleven-year-old daughter, and finally to Drake himself. And here, too, it’s no longer about vain cockfights like a surgically sucked-on washboard stomach. But about the most serious accusations: pedophilia and human trafficking. In the letter to the mother, Kendrick Lamar explicitly wishes death upon her son so that the abused woman can live. Still masterful in craft and language. But it doesn’t have much to do with entertaining popular music anymore (and that’s what rap is, for all its lyrical quality). These are criminal offenses.

Both interpreters drag their families, especially children, into the public fire. In the hip-hop world, there’s now a passionate debate about whether such means must also be allowed in the war of language stars. According to the simple principle, Whoever hits hardest wins the fight. Seen this way, Drake versus Kendrick Lamar is the best battle of all time—a double zenith for the culture. Nine highly competitive tracks within a few weeks have never been anything like this on this gigantic scale. (Actually, there is enough material for a joint album.)

Equally, the question arises of whether, from this point on, they are only destroying each other’s reputation—instead of proving who the inimitably better artist is. Wife-beater or pedophile, you can’t dance to either anymore—the double low point of the culture.

What no one is talking about anymore, however, is the role of artificial intelligence in this conflict. It couldn’t keep up with the intensity anymore. Couldn’t cut so deeply and bloodily evil. Also, AI is programmed not to be malicious, violent, or misanthropic. It can manage a bit bitchy and vindictive; that’s now proven and on the beat. But it can’t lie in wait for us armed in front of our house. At the beginning of last week, a (not yet identified) human shot at Drake’s villa in Toronto and critically injured a security guard. The machine has more impulse control there. This means an extremely macabre consolation for all our survival considerations: Artificial intelligence may be equal to us in almost everything or even already superior—but not in human abysses. In that, we remain unmatched for now.