Looks like we are everyone agrees: Kendrick Lamar defeated Drake in one of the most exciting rap battles of the decade. To add insult to injury, Drake also found himself in legal hot water when he dissed the late rapper Tupac.
The tension between Lamar and Drake goes back decades, but this latest flare-up began last fall when J. Cole dropped a song calling Drake, Lamar and himself the “Big Three” in rap. This March, Lamar finally responded, dismissing Cole’s claim a scathing verse which disproved him and Drake. The battle raged, and soon, a legion of other hip-hop artists jumped in, released music, and took their side. against Drake.
The weekly feud has escalated into one of the most intense rap battles of the digital age. There were side battles (between Chris Brown and Quavo) and white flags (J. Cole apologized to Lamar and deleted his reply to the diss to the rapper). In the meantime, campaigns generated by social media and gifts against Drake, and support for diss tracks against him appeared on all from Japanese rap to Indian classical dance.
The feud has also sparked a debate about the increased role of technology in rap beefs, in addition to how and when artificial intelligence should be used in music.
A pivotal moment came on the track “Taylor Made,” where Drake he tried to deny Lamar uses AI vocals from Snoop Dogg and Tupac, a rap icon who was killed decades ago. Drake did not get permission from Tupac’s estate to use the late rapper’s vocals and was threatened with a lawsuit if he did not remove the track. Although Drake shot it down, his decision to use AI vocals furthered the debate among music fans and techies alike.
(Lamar and Drake could not be reached for comment by the time of publication.)
Rap battles have become time-honored on the internet
An artist like Tupac, who died in 1996, could not have imagined that artificial intelligence could imitate his voice so convincingly that one of the most popular rappers of the moment would put it in a song. He also couldn’t see how the nature of the social web would shape the future of music, where “each stream is a vote.”
In the early years, rappers had to channel their diss tracks over the radio, naturally releasing albums and mixtapes while giving interviews throughout the years of a feud. Responding to a diss could take days at most, whereas today it can only take seconds.
Lamar released a diss response to Drake within 20 minutes of Drake dropping his track against Lamar. Lamar hinted that there were leaks in Drake’s camp that made it possible for him to fall so quickly, and that’s a diss in itself. Before the Internet was so ubiquitous, this speed would have been impossible.
Drake’s response to his feud with Meek Mill nearly 10 years ago saw him release two songs in four days. But Lamar put out four songs in five days during that battle, including two in one day. No one had to rush out to buy CDs or pull over their cars to listen to the radio, as one founder recalled doing during Jay-Z’s infamous feud with Nas. Instead, tracks were quickly dropped on YouTube, shared on Twitter, and then streamed on Spotify en loop.
The speed of these releases has its downsides: In another viral moment, Lamar confused actress Haley Joel Osment and televangelist Joel Osteen in his lyrics.
Fans also called Drake “chronic online” during the rap battle, as their real-time posts about the raps seemed to affect him. Some fans accused him of referring to popular tweets and memes people made about him during the controversy, then passing them off as his own thoughts and rapping about them. Many people online commented that they felt like Drake was writing his responses specifically for his fans to hear, instead of responding to Lamar. This near-instant feedback loop was in stark contrast to Lamar’s raps, which were scathing in their attacks solely on Drake.
This battle is also perhaps the first time such beef has extended to tech platforms on a large scale. Lamar fans are used Google Maps to essentially vandalize Drake’s mansion, renaming it “Own by Kendrick.” Streamers put in long hours on platforms like Twitch, YouTube, and Kick, waiting to see if they could be among the first to react to a newly released song.
Anthony Fantano, a popular music YouTuber, has posted at least six different live reaction videos in response to Drake and Lamar’s songs released over the past two weeks. These species reaction videos became so popular that the creators they say that Lamar (or his team) removed copyright restrictions from these songs, meaning they can profit from their videos. This move alone could give more meaning to the role of hip-hop backlash pundit.
AI has entered the conversation
The Kendrick-Drake feud is also the first mainstream rap battle to use AI.
Artists from various genres are reckoning with the co-existing threat and potential of this technology. Some have embraced AI as an opportunity: Art pop duo Yacht trained an AI on 14 years of their music to create their 2019 record “Chain Tripping.” Holly Herndon and Grimes both have developed tools for other artists to create artificial intelligence deepfakes using their voices. Other artists such as Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry have protested the use of artificial intelligence to undermine human creativity.
Consent is a primary concern in artists’ discussions about AI-generated music. Artists care so much about what their peers are doing because using AI involves them all — unbeknownst to them, their music can be used to train an AI model that another artist uses to supplement their music .
While Herndon is at the forefront of musical experimentation with AI, she also argues that artists retain control over their work. She uses AI in her art, but is also the founder of Spawning, a startup that creates tools for artists to help them abstract their work from popular AI training datasets. Meanwhile, chillwave musician Washed Out has just released a controversial music video made entirely using Open AI’s Sora, a text-to-video model that has yet to be released to the public.
Tupac’s estate would argue that Drake crossed the line because he didn’t have his consent to impersonate the late rapper. But Rich Fortune, the co-founder of AI-powered social planning app Hangtight, said it was creative that Drake was one of the first artists to use AI in a song, especially in a diss track. Fortune says, “There are no rules in a battle.”
“If there was a time to see what the reaction would be, it would be now because no punches are pulled when he’s at war,” he continued. He believes more artists will now look to use AI vocals after Drake, one of the biggest artists in the world, has effectively endorsed its use.
In fact, a diss piece against Drake in this feud used AI-generated work and has since been turned into a meme against him. Producer Metro Boomin took an AI song called “BBL Drizzy” and sampled it on a track which has become one of the rallying cries against the rapper.
Meanwhile, artists as big as Beyoncé have taken a stand against the growing presence of AI. In one of the few public comments she’s made about her genre-bending album Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé said: “The more I see the world evolve, the more I’ve felt a deeper connection to purity. With artificial intelligence and digital filters and programming, I wanted to go back to real instruments.”
Fortune said the biggest hurdle now for artists who want to use AI is simply getting permission. Living artists may not be so eager to be copied by AI, but the estates of later musicians may be. The problem there is that many old-school artists who have passed away, like Tupac, cannot consent to imitation because AI-generated music was not a technology designed before their death.
“I don’t know if that’s necessarily a good thing, but it’s where we’re going,” Fortune said of using the work of later musicians. At the very least, he said, it opens up a new source of revenue for the estates of artists who don’t mind being artificially reincarnated.
The Kendrick-Drake feud also revealed another point about AI: its potential ability to mimic artists with less unique styles. Luke Bailey, the founder of fintech Neon Money Club, said Drake’s latest music lacks depth. This, combined with claims that Drake was so directly and deliberately inspired by what he saw online, raises the concern that he is doing something that an AI bot could one day do.
“There are two types of musicians: One who can play what someone tells her to play, and one who can create something original from scratch,” Bailey said. “AI is the first at this stage of its development.”
Bailey is right. Large language models (LLMs), the type of artificial intelligence that powers most deepfake tools, are inherently non-creative. These models synthesize giant chunks of data and then respond to a user-generated prompt by predicting the most likely response.
But more famous music often takes the opposite approach: Just look at Kendrick Lamar, a rapper whose bars are so complex that he remains the only non-classical and jazz musician to win a Pulitzer Prize. He is often regarded as one of the leading thinkers in music and is known for his commentary on race and politics. AI currently lacks the cultural nuance to form its own thoughts on society, not to mention something as colorful as race.
“[AI] I can’t replicate Kendrick’s depth, just his voice,” Bailey said, adding that fans have heard some convincing AI-generated Drake songs before. “The AI doesn’t have strong bars yet.”
