Kendrick Lamar has spent much of his career generally floating above the fray of hot-takes and passing feuds — he releases music on his own timetable, his social media usage is scarce, he doles out guest appearances sparingly. But as everyone saw with his fire-starting, fight-picking verse on “Control” more than 10 years ago, when he does opt to get his hands dirty, sparks tend to fly.
So it proved with the late-night March 21 release of Lamar’s feature on the new Future and Metro Boomin track, “Like That.” Taking unspoken (yet unsubtle) aim at Drake and J. Cole, Lamar's feature lit up social media almost immediately.
The main target of Lamar’s ire, it seems, is the song “First Person Shooter,” a Drake and Cole feature from the former’s October release For All the Dogs. On the song, Cole groups himself and Drake with Kendrick, rapping: “Love when they argue the hardest MC / Is it K. Dot? Is it Aubrey? Or me? / We the big three, like we started a league.”
On “Like That,” Lamar responds: “Yeah get up with me, f--k sneak dissing / ‘First Person Shooter,’ I hope they came with three switches.” He later adds: “Motherf--k the big three, n---a, it’s just big me.”
Elsewhere on the song, Lamar seems to take up another of Drake’s lyrics from “First Person Shooter,” in which he compares his sales records to those of Michael Jackson (Drake even dons a bedazzled glove and breaks into an MJ-esque spin in the song’s video). “Prince outlived Mike, Jack,” Lamar raps here, going on to nod to Dogs' album title with a combative Pet Sematary reference at the close of his verse.
Though Drake had a guest feature on Lamar’s 2012 major label debut, Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City, following Lamar’s appearance on Drake’s Take Care a year earlier, the rappers have seemingly had a frostier relationship since then.
The two have taken wildly divergent paths since those days, when both were among rap’s hottest emerging stars. Drake spent the next decade releasing enormous amounts of music, breaking decades-old Billboard chart records and becoming one of the most ubiquitous pop stars of the current century. Lamar, on the other hand, has carved out a more esoteric trajectory, becoming the first rapper to win the Pulitzer Prize on the strength of adventurous, provocative albums like To Pimp a Butterfly. (Lamar’s last album, 2022’s Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, was arguably his least-commercial work yet, though it still debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.)
Lamar famously called Drake out by name on “Control” — amidst just about all of his most prominent peers, Cole included, and seemingly in the context of healthy competition — but any bad feelings the two might have expressed about each other since then were usually cloaked in heavy layers of plausible deniability. Until now, at least.
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Drake and Cole are still in the midst of their joint It’s All a Blur Tour, and all eyes will surely be on the pair's next stop to see what response, if any, they've cooked up after this week's broadside.
Meanwhile, Future and Metro Boomin will follow the release of their latest collaborative album We Don’t Trust You with a performance at Lollapalooza later this year. (Notably, Future and Drake have been almost constant collaborators over the years, even releasing the 2015 joint album What a Time to Be Alive…featuring production from Metro Boomin. What this latest track means for the future of their professional relationship remains to be seen.)
