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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/ToErrDivine on 2024-07-17 05:09:43+00:00.
Hi, everyone, welcome back to the Drake-Kendrick writeup. Part one can be found here.
Act Two: The First Charge- ‘Push Ups’/‘Taylor Made Freestyle’
‘7 Minute Drill’ was released on April 5, 2024. Just over a week later on April 13, a couple of demo versions of a diss track Drake was making, 'Push Ups', were leaked. On April 19, it was officially released.
OK, so, there is a lot to talk about here. See, Drake didn’t just respond to Kendrick, he took a whole lot of shots at a lot of different rappers. But let’s be real, I don’t think anyone’s really interested in what Drake said about Future or Metro Boomin or the Weeknd. You want to hear about what he said about Kendrick. So, here it is.
(Well, there are bits that aren’t about Kendrick that are important, but we’ll get to them later.)
In 'Push Ups', Drake does the following:
1: Directly rebuts Kendrick’s claim that he was ‘snatchin’ chains and burnin’ tattoos’ in ‘Like That’ (‘You won’t ever take no chain off us’)
2: Mocks Kendrick for being short, as Kendrick is around 5’5 while Drake is around 6’0 (‘How the fuck you big steppin’ with a men’s size seven on?’ and ‘Pipsqueak, pipe down’ and ‘Top say drop, your little midget ass better fuckin’). One should also note that the cover for ‘Push Ups’ is the chart for the US size seven shoe.
3: Alleges that Kendrick’s deal with his old label, Top Dawg Entertainment (which he signed when he was 16) was so one-sided that Kendrick had to give them 50% of everything he earned (‘Extortion baby, whole career, you been shook up/’cause Top told you ‘Drop and give me fifty’, like some push-ups, huh’ and ‘Top say drop, you better drop and give them fifty’)
4: Says that Mr Morale & the Big Steppers didn’t do well commercially in the long run (‘Your last one bricked, you really not on shit/They make excuses for you ‘cause they hate to see me lit’)
5: Mocks Kendrick for having previously appeared on songs by Maroon 5 and Taylor Swift (‘Maroon 5 need a verse, better make it witty/Then we need a verse for the Swifties’)
6: Says that Kendrick isn’t just surpassed by Drake, but by other artists as well (‘You ain’t in no big three, SZA got you wiped down/Travis got you wiped down, Savage got you wiped down’)
7: Points out how unfair the feud has become as it’s now Kendrick and multiple others against Drake ‘What the fuck is this, a twenty v one, nigga?’ and ‘Drop and give me fifty, all you fuck niggas teamin’ up’)
8: Mocks Kendrick’s previous attempts to compare himself to Prince while disparaging Drake comparing himself to Michael Jackson ‘What’s a prince to a king? He a son, nigga’)
9: Says that Drake is more beloved in Kendrick’s hometown of Compton than Kendrick himself (‘Get more love in the city that you from, nigga’)
10: Compares himself to Whitney Houston in a way that brings up Kendrick’s fiancée, Whitney Alford, and might be intended to imply through a double entendre that Alford is cheating on Kendrick (‘I be with some bodyguards like Whitney’)
10: Says bluntly that the beef did not start with ‘Like That’ and has in fact been brewing for some time (‘And that fuckin’ song y’all got did not start the beef with us/This shit been brewin’ in a pot, now I’m heatin’ up/I don’t care what Cole think, that Dot shit was weak as fuck’)
11: Implies that Kendrick can’t make any move in the feud without permission, will have to ask Anthony Tiffith (CEO of Top Dawg Entertainment and a producer who’s worked with Kendrick since 2004) either to see if he can have that permission or for instructions to settle the feud despite Kendrick having left TDE in 2022, and won’t have any support from the label or fellow signees in the feud (‘Nigga callin’ Top to see if Top wanna peace it up/“Top, wanna peace it up? Top, wanna peace it up?”/Nah, pussy, now you on your own when you speakin’ up’)
12: Implies that Interscope Records and Kendrick begged Twitch star Kai Cenat to stream with Kendrick for extra publicity (‘Beggin’ Kai Cenat, boy, you not fuckin’ beatin’ us’)
13: Says that Kendrick has nowhere near Drake’s levels of money, fans and chart ratings (‘Numbers-wise, I’m outta here, you not fuckin’ creepin’ up/Money-wise, I’m outta here, you not fuckin’ sneakin’ up’)
14: And finally, warns everyone on the opposing side to back off, lest they force Drake to reveal things they don’t want the world knowing (‘This ain’t even everything I know, don’t wake the demon up’)
(Not gonna lie, 'Push Ups' is actually pretty good, questionable veracity of the lyrics aside.)
Now, if Drake had left things with ‘Push Ups’, it would have gone a lot better for him… but he didn’t. As for why, I have a theory- as I previously mentioned, a couple of early versions of ‘Push Ups’ had been leaked the week before. Whether or not Drake was responsible, I think he saw the leaks as both a motivator and a goad to Kendrick- something that would urge him to release his own song. And since Kendrick hadn’t released a response by the time ‘Push Ups’ officially came out, I think Drake released the second song to goad him into a response. And that was a big mistake.
The mistake in question is the aforementioned ‘Taylor Made Freestyle’. Why was it a mistake? Because it features vocals from Drake- of course- and of AI versions of Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg, and Drake didn’t get permission beforehand to use simulacra of their voices. One of those men is alive, well, and fully able to tell Drake to knock it the fuck off in a variety of creative and interesting ways, and the other is a long-dead rap legend with a lot of people ready and willing to come to the defence of his memory if they feel that he’s been slighted. You know, like in the hypothetical case of some idiot making an unauthorised AI version of his voice to use on a diss track.
*long sigh, headdesk* I’m genuinely surprised that nobody in Drake’s camp told him that this was a terrible idea. (Unless, of course, somebody did tell him and he ignored them, which is always possible.)
(Also, I’d just like to say that I think it’s a bit hypocritical of Drake to say that he was mad about Ice Spice using AI Drake for a song without permission and then turn around and pull this shit.)
So, why Tupac and Snoop Dogg? Well, the former is obvious- Kendrick has idolised Tupac since he was eight years old, when his father took him to see Tupac and Dr Dre shooting the since-unreleased version of the video for ‘California Love’. He claimed to have had a vision of Tupac once who encouraged him to keep going, penned a tribute letter to Tupac for the 19th anniversary of his death, and at the end of To Pimp A Butterfly (originally named ‘Tu Pimp A Caterpillar’- spell out the acronym), he created… well, I’m not really sure what to call it. Basically, Kendrick took the audio of Tupac’s replies in a not especially well-known interview given a few weeks before his death, recorded new questions of his own and added the replies in, creating an entirely different interview. So, on the one hand, this definitely works as an attack, and I can absolutely see what Drake was going for, but it’s still a very dumb move. I mean, even setting aside everyone else’s response, this was guaranteed to really piss Kendrick off. Bad idea, people.
As for Snoop Dogg, I don’t know if he and Kendrick are particularly close friends or anything, but he’s a California rapper who’s held in great esteem, they’ve collaborated in the past, and in 2011, a group of West Coast rappers including Snoop Dogg symbolically and publicly ‘passed the torch’ to Kendrick, crowning him as the new king and spiritual leader of West Coast rap. One can see the implied insult here.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Drake used the undead AI voice of Tupac Shakur for the following:
1: Mocks how Kendrick is held in high acclaim by rappers from the West Coast (‘Kendrick, we need ya, the West Coast saviour’)
2: Goads Kendrick into continuing the feud properly rather than just throwing back some more sneak disses (‘Engraving your name in some hip hop history/If you deal with this viciously/You seem a little nervous about all the publicity’ and ‘We need a no-debated West Coast victory, man/Call him a bitch for me’)
3: Attempts to head off the obvious insults that Kendrick could make toward him, namely A, that he’s a light-skinned Black Canadian man in the American rap scene, and B, the continued rumours about him being a pe...
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