Drake’s Not Hyped About Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime Show

It used to be that the only time rap songs were subject to legal action was when the FBI, police departments and suburban parents got involved. Think of the use of Young Thug’s lyrics in a 2023 RICO indictment in Atlanta, Tupac Shakur’s lyrics in a lawsuit filed by the wife of a slain white state trooper in 1992 or N.W.A.’s “Fuck Tha Police” being the focus of a strongly worded letter from the FBI in 1989.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a Black rapper raising concern about another Black rapper’s song in a legal complaint, for reasons that should be obvious. But that’s exactly what Drake did in January. He filed a lawsuit against the record label, Universal Music Group, for widely promoting Kendrick Lamar’s “defamatory” song, “Not Like Us,” “because its lyrics, its album image and its music video all advance the false and malicious narrative that Drake is a pedophile.”

Drake is also on the same record label. (Both are signed under UMG but through different divisions: Republic Records for Drake and Interscope Records for Kendrick.)

Let’s try to put aside for a moment (as it seems Drake would want us to) that the legal complaint came on the heels of a fiery, lengthy and riveting rap battle between the two stars last year — of which Lamar was proverbially crowned the winner. Or that “Not Like Us,” which dropped on May 4, became the hit of the year, a virtual death knell to Drake’s reputation, and potentially contributed to Lamar being given the highly coveted title of this Sunday’s Super Bowl halftime performer.

Or that in the weeks following Drake’s 81-page filing, much of the live audience at last weekend’s Grammys could be heard reciting the diss track’s “a minor” line as Lamar accepted the award for Record of the Year.

Because in Drake’s legal complaint, he doesn’t exactly claim that he has an issue with the success or popularity of “Not Like Us,” but rather how it became successful and popular — and at what expense to him and his safety. For instance, the lawsuit cites that UMG used bots “to artificially inflate the spread of the recording on Spotify.”

It also claims that the shooting of Drake’s security guard at the rapper’s Toronto home, where one of the “armed group of assailants” yelled “Fuck Drake,” was a result of the messaging in “Not Like Us” released just days earlier. Drake alleges he had to pull his son out of elementary school and arrange for his mother and child to leave Toronto altogether. “Day to day,” the complaint reads, “Drake continues to take steps to address persistent threats to his security.”

But as Mumtaz Kynaston-Pearson, principal legal counsel at Mimecast, told HuffPost, you can poke holes through most of Drake’s allegations in the suit. An obvious point about all of this is one many others have also made: by definition, diss tracks and rap battles are inflammatory against the other artist.

“That is literally how this works,” Kynaston-Pearson said. “You have rap beefs, and people say inappropriate, negative things about each other. That is the medium in which you are playing and certainly in which Kendrick Lamar is playing and Drake is playing.”

And neither of them, least of all Drake, is new to this. He has come for one rapper after the next — Meek Mill, Kanye West and Pusha T, to name a few — over the many years since he first blew up. Now, that includes last year’s battle with Lamar, the very same one that produced “Not Like Us.”

On the diss track “Family Matters,” Drake rapped that Lamar abuses his partner, Whitney Alford, and that one of their kids is not his: “They hired a crisis management team / To clean up the fact that you beat on your queen.” So, it’s more than a little awkward that Drake would want to take legal action against something that he himself is guilty of.

As Kynaston-Pearson explained, there’s a name for that in the eye of the law.

“In court, it could be used by UMG against him as an unclean hands defense,” she said. “Basically, if you’re asserting a claim, but you have done the same thing, how can you say that what I’ve done is different?”

It looks foolish. But there is one critical difference here, if you choose to believe Drake’s claims: There’s been no reported physical violence or threat of violence against Lamar or anyone around him in the wake of the release of “Family Matters.”

You could take a number of things from that, though. But firstly, Kynaston-Pearson said that connecting “Not Like Us” to the violence that occurred at Drake’s home is tough to substantiate.

“It’s a very hard but high bar for Drake to prove that it was down very much to this track and it being published and pushed by UMG that has caused him the safety threats and the personal harm that he suffered,” the attorney said.

She wondered whether it could have been on account of something else entirely.

“Is this happening just because of the fact that he is a big media personality?” Kynaston-Pearson said. “Not everyone’s going to like him. That’s just the reality of being a famous person. So is this due to just people disliking him or the specific lyrics in ‘Not Like Us?’”

As many who may not have known prior to last year’s battle quickly found out, Drake already has a lot of haters out there that predate his war of words with Lamar. So, who can really tell in this case what actually triggered the violence?

Something else that’s interesting about this alleged causal effect of violence following the release of “Not Like Us” is the question of why no one reacted similarly about Drake rapping that Lamar abuses his partner on “Family Matters”?

“That’s a very valid point,” Kynaston-Pearson said. “It’s quite interesting, isn’t it? Maybe Lamar just has more vigilante fans.”

She pointed to the Me Too era, when more people today have immediate, occasionally knee-jerk reactions to any assertion that a man harmed a child or woman — whether or not it’s been proven.

“This comes at a time when Sean Combs is in the media,” Kynaston-Pearson said. “And there were lyrics in the past alluding to his crimes that were overlooked. Maybe people are hypersensitive at the moment because of it.”

However, this doesn’t really explain why that presumed hypersensitivity wouldn’t have extended to Drake’s claim about Lamar being an abuser. That is unless none of the violence or alleged threats have anything to do with “Not Like Us” and, to Kynaston-Pearson’s point, everything to do with Drake being just disliked by so many people.

Maybe the distinction isn’t “vigilante” fans, but rather a lack of media literacy that renders some people unable to discern between reality and art. And, due in no part to the song or artist (or, in this case, record label), fans feel empowered to enact violence against the person on the receiving end of a diss track. That’s a real concern that could have dire repercussions.

None of that could be ameliorated with a defamation lawsuit, though. Artists, including Drake, have the creative license to express themselves on a track without legal recourse. That First Amendment right has especially helped hip-hop artists, many of whom are Black and have been disproportionately impacted by the unfair judicial system. The ACLU has been particularly crucial in defending that.

However, if Drake’s lawsuit should go to trial (Kynaston-Pearson believes that he and UMG will likely settle), it has the potential to set a terrible precedent.

“Do you really want to end up in that situation again where you have to have disclaimers going, ‘This is art,’” Kynaston-Pearson said. “‘Please be warned that this is not factual content.’ Even as a lawyer, it feels like it takes away from the art to some extent.”

“And I fully appreciate the point you’re making about the fact that people don’t have the media literacy that they really should,” she added. “But at the same time, making things more ‘legal’ by adding disclaimers onto content, I think, takes away from it somehow.”

It also does not encourage people to grapple with that important relationship between lyricism and truth. That’s inherent to understanding hip-hop and especially rap battles. You’d think someone like Drake, who seems to grasp this with his own diss tracks, would appreciate that.

“Most people go, ‘This is fanciful, it’s creative, it’s a form of venting,’” Kynaston-Pearson said. “Maybe that’s a sight that Drake’s lost. Maybe it’s unfortunate that the shooting happened and, personal circumstances notwithstanding, that was what set him down this path.”

Or there could be something else that actually answers a critical question that Kynaston-Pearson raised: Why isn’t Drake suing Lamar?

“If he was really miffed about the lyrics of ‘Not Like Us,’ being called a pedophile, you would go after the person who created the content,” she said. “You would say to Kendrick Lamar, ‘I’m sorry, what you are saying is gross falsification. I need you to retract that statement.’”

While a lawsuit against Lamar might have mandated that he admit, if true, that the lyrics are false and that Drake is not a pedophile, it would have been a corny way to end a rap battle. (Though, possibly not as corny as what he’s actually doing).

That kind of move would have also put Drake, who has a Black father and a white mother, into further conflict with Black critics who’ve repeatedly held him to task about his relationship with his Blackness.

“It’s not the question if he’s Black enough or not ‘down enough’; it’s Drake’s particular way of forcing the issue of his Blackness that underlines his doubts with his own identity,” Israel Daramol wrote for Defector last May at the peak of the Drake-Lamar battle.

Even from a legal standpoint, Drake’s moves have been baffling.

“How does he look in the hip-hop community, having to cry to the courts to get the response he wants?” Kynaston-Pearson asked. “Why didn’t he handle it in the way of the community? Why did he not just release another track?”

The popular answer to that is that he didn’t have one — and that could be a truth he is unable to cope with.

But Kynaston-Pearson has a theory for what could be going on here.

An under-discussed detail about Drake’s defamation case, which his legal team includes in the lawsuit, is that the contract between him and UMG is up for renegotiation this year. “Established artists whose contracts are coming up for renewal are in an improved position to demand higher take rates due to the improvement in the visibility of cash flows and risk reduction,” the suit reads.

The lawsuit further claims that UMG was incentivized to reduce that bargaining leverage ahead of the contract renewal and alleges that Lamar has “a short-term deal with UMG to see if UMG could prove its value to him — to promote him more effectively than any other music company could — in a compressed timeframe.”

That effort, the suit also claims, included the use of social media, AI bots and illegal payola (the act of paying third parties to artificially inflate the metrics).

“Is this being used as a negotiation tactic?” Kynaston-Pearson asked plainly. “Does he want more money from UMG? Does he want to leave UMG?”

“It is a pretty bizarre thing to do, sue your own record label,” the lawyer continued. “If it’s a third-party record label, you have a bit more understanding around it. But when it’s your own record label, you kind of go, ’What’s the long game here that Drake’s trying to play?’”

Kynaston-Pearson speculated that Drake, who is seeking a list of damages in his lawsuit (including compensatory and punitive), could be trying to leave UMG for his own record label (OVO Sound) or make UMG look bad so that OVO looks more attractive to potential artists.

“The industry is a little bit cutthroat and murky,” she said. “So, is this part of the game that he’s playing to promote himself as the victim here, hurt his old record label, before he jumps ship to another label — or impact other artists of UMG because then that means more money for him?”

So, this could be a series of goofy moves for an otherwise common objective in the music industry.

With that said, there is one allegation that is “the only credible part” about Drake’s lawsuit, according to Kynaston-Pearson: paying third parties to use bots to stream “Not Like Us” on Spotify 30 million times. While a footnote in the lawsuit reads that Spotify “found no evidence to substantiate” that claim, this is something that can and should be verified — and is particularly urgent in today’s era of misinformation.

“Because there’s a finite pot of streaming royalties,” she said. “If UMG are pushing one song far more, there’s less in the pot for Drake to receive. That means that their licensing rates and financial payments increase, but there’s a negative impact on the other person’s payments out.”

Fair point. But getting back to UMG’s potential “unclean hands defense,” couldn’t Drake’s claims raise questions about how he might have also benefited from this in the past?

In short, yes — and it could all splash right back in Drake’s face if the case goes to trial.

“So, when they are pushing one of Drake’s songs, what’s to say they’re not doing all of the same things there?” Kynaston-Pearson said.

“UMG’s whole point is they want to make money,” she added. “They have a very popular artist who’ll make them money. It’s a diss track and he says negative things about Drake on it. But all they care about is, ’This is popular.’”

And the plan was effective.

“’Fans of Kendrick Lamar’s will enjoy this,’” the lawyer continued. “’How do we get it out to as many people as possible so that we as a company who are in the process of making money, make more money? That is what we want to do. How do we make that money?’”

Enter: Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show this weekend.

Drake is likely livid about the upcoming performance, especially after going well out of his way to hobble it. Clearly, it didn’t work. The only thing he accomplished was looking like a clown. Sure, maybe a legally and business-savvy clown — but a clown nonetheless.