(30 Jun 2025)
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Los Angeles – 23 May 2021
1. Medium shot Drake posing
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Los Angeles – 25 March 2015
2. Wide shot Drake walking arrivals line
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New York – 23 September 2013
3. Medium shot Drake talking to soccer player Tim Cahill
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Los Angeles – 17 March 2011
4. Medium zoom out Drake on arrivals line
5. Medium of Drake speaking to reporter
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Inglewood, California – 19 June 2024
6. Wide shot Kendrick Lamar on stage
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Paris – 23 June 2022
7. Wide shot Kendrick Lamar makes his way to the stage at Louis Vuitton show
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Los Angeles – 12 December 2024
++9:16 FOOTAGE++
8. Various Kendrick Lamar performing
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New Orleans – 9 February 2025
9. 5 x STILL IMAGES: Kendrick Lamar performs during halftime of the NFL Super Bowl 59 football game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles, Sunday, Feb. 9, 2025, in New Orleans. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)
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New Orleans – 6 February 2025
10. STILL IMAGE: Apple Music Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show performer Kendrick Lamar poses for a photographers after a news conference in New Orleans ahead of the NFL Super Bowl 59 football game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs. (AP Photo/Matt York)
STORYLINE:
A federal judge is pondering the nature of rap battles and the cutting wordplay in Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” the megahit diss track that spurred a defamation lawsuit from his fellow superstar Drake.
Drake sued Universal Music Group — both his and Lamar’s record label — over “Not Like Us,” saying the company published and promoted a song he deems slanderous. Universal says the lyrics are just hyperbole in the tradition of rap beefing, and the label is trying to get the case dismissed.
Judge Jeannette Vargas didn’t immediately decide after a lively hearing Monday, when the raw creativity of hip-hop brushed up against the staid confines of federal court.
“Who is the ordinary listener? Is it someone who’s going to catch all those references?” Vargas wondered aloud, addressing a legal standard that concerns how an average, reasonable person would understand a statement. “There’s so much specialized and nuanced to these lyrics.”
Neither artist attended the hearing.
The case stems from an epic feud between two of hip-hop’s biggest stars over one of 2024 biggest songs — the one that won the record of the year and song of the year Grammys, got the most Apple Music streams worldwide and helped make this winter’s Super Bowl halftime show the most watched ever.
Released as the two artists were trading a flurry of insult tracks, Lamar’s song calls out the Canadian-born Drake by name and impugns his authenticity, branding him “a colonizer” of rap culture who’s “not like us” in Lamar’s home turf of Compton, California, and, more broadly, West Coast rap.
“Not Like Us” also makes insinuations about Drake’s sex life, including "I hear you like ’em young" — implications that he rejects.
Drake’s suit says that the song amounts to “falsely accusing him of being a sex offender, engaging in pedophilic acts" and more. Contending that the track endangered him by fanning notions of vigilante justice, the suit blames “Not Like Us” not only for harming Drake’s image but for attempted break-ins and the shooting of a security guard at his Toronto home. The mansion was depicted in an aerial photo in the song’s cover art.
The average listener could be “a 13-year-old who’s dancing to the song at a bar mitzvah,” Gottlieb suggested.
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