Im glad people are calling out drake for being a sexual predator but I dont trust all the rappers he be beefing with. Like some of them are doing it just for clout and are using it as a chance to get back at drake for personal reasons and would have never spoke up about drake dating teenagers if drake hadnt become persona non grata in the last few days. Its like harvey weinstein. People in hollywood knew for years there was rumors people spoke up and lost their jobs but it wasnt until he was done thats when everyone came out with shit on him. Like everyone who knew he was a predator before this and worked with him then and became angry at him not for the predator shit needs to go too!
Yeah Rick Ross has beef with Drake but dude had a line about slipping molly in a woman's champagne lol. And yeah it doesn't seem like Kendrick was the one who spearheaded this - it was Metro Boomin and Future, and Future is a piece of shit deadbeat, but Kendrick doesn't seem to care too much about that.
Counter point, the Drake-Kendrick beef will be forgotten in like two months and nothing major will change because of it.
It's really good quality spectacle and I'm here for it.
Some of the best lines I've heard in years is coming out of this feud. Of course, almost all of it is coming from Kendrick's side, but still, you need two to tango.
IDK, this guy is kinda reaching. I could see where he's coming from if he was saying this beef and the things Kendrick is talking about reflect larger societal issues, but how could they possibly be shaping them? Pop culture, and all of the superstructure, arise out of the material base but has extremely little power to do anything except reinforce it. That's why Kendrick and other conscious artists limit the scope of their message to a very specific part of the struggle, which elements of the ruling class are already ready to recuperate and make concessions in (more Black billionaires! (which is not what Kendrick is asking for but it's definitely the safe, capitalist response to this tide of conscious hip hop (and it's what other artists like Jay Z put forward as their solution) and even the most radical artists don't want to bite the hand that feeds them)). Even then, I don't want to be too cynical as to obscure what some smaller rappers out there are doing, others like Noname have put forward a more materialist criticism and have been outspoken about genocide and imperialism. How much of a difference does that make? Probably quite a lot, I'm sure many of the people in campus protests right now can attribute part of their political development to pop culture. But is it the actual, deciding factor for the movement and progression of history?
Ultimately the amount of change these artists can enact is limited due to their positions relying on capital; streaming platforms and record companies aren't gonna keep Fred Hampton on board for too long if that's really bringing about political action that threatens their bottom line.
Of course pop culture doesn't change anything. After Weinstein got arrested we never got many updates about whether similar abuses have seized, and I assume not because nothing systemic was changed. Epstein dies, Maxwell goes to prison, nothing changes. Drake has an absurdly large contract with many brands - it's unlikely to do anything unless Kendrick has some scathing, undeniable evidence that compels the police to go after Drake - but I doubt that would happen because it might self-incriminate Kendrick for various reasons, and doing it "officially" (i.e. working directly with the cops) is career suicide for Kendrick, so he basically only has vague jabs and perhaps inadmissible exposes
I'm sure many of the people in campus protests right now can attribute part of their political development to pop culture.
I would not trust many people who can be swayed by products lol
tiktoks should be banned so we can be free of the moronic editing technique of separately splicing together every single clause a presenter speaks.
are you talking about jump cuts, because that's been a problem in youtube videos since the early 10s, and it was way worse then (it might even still be worse now)
Nah, not jump cuts, look at how the video cuts in the middle of the sentence which leads to a pretty jarring viewing experience if you're not used to it. He sometimes cuts 2 or 3 times in just one sentence, super disorienting.
Tired of hearing vout this and not actually hearing the songs, I went to look up Kendrick Lamar expecting to hate it because I'm old and all rap sounds like shit to me these days.
And... This kinda hits. This Lamar kid's got somethin.
the most critically acclaimed rapper of his generation has something
amazing
Just because “mainstream” rap isn’t good doesn’t mean people haven’t constantly been releasing quality stuff.
Also, Kendrick is pushing 40 and has been putting out music for 2 decades, so he’s not exactly a part of the younger generation of rappers.
That's certainly in his favor. I called him kid because he's about 10 years younger than me and I was being cute
i can't tell the difference between a guy self-consciously doing conscious jazz rap, who deliberately positions himself as stylistic through-line to the 90s and puts himself in literal conversation with hiphop greats, and his "wack" contemporaries
why pretend to be an old head -- you can just say you've never, once, listened to hip hop lol
I like what I've heard of Lamar so far. I like that stuff that sets him apart. It's many of his contemporaries I don't like.
i mean he’s been mainstream for 14 years now i think we’re well into a new generation after his
Which one did you hear? Not Like Us is a pretty standard trap beat with some more lyrical complexity than usual, but it's really nothing out of left field musically. It sounds like a pretty average trap song. The other 2 are a little more involved, but again nothing too crazy since these songs were made on a tight schedule. If this is really your first introduction to Kendrick I highly recommend you do yourself a favor and listen to To Pimp a Butterfly.
I may have already heard To Pimp a Butterfly? Not sure. But I will.
But the fact that these were in a subgenre I usually hate is what surprised me here.
IMO trap music is always unfairly maligned in mainstream discussions outside of the hip hop sphere (i.e. in predominantly white spaces). It's a broad genre, there's some low brow trap music, then there's your Earl Sweatshirts, Jpegmafias, Uzis, etc. who take the genre and do some very interesting things with it. Kendrick has been known to freely take a lot of influence from different subgenres and he definitely also shows that the attitude that a lot of people, especially oldheads, took toward "mumble rap," was super shortsighted. It's like dismissing randomness in video games because slot machines exist.
There was a period where everyone was doing the migos flow. ~2017-2022 felt like a relative genetic bottleneck in hiphop structure. I agree there are some trap artists that diverge, and a lot of the vocal anti "mumble rap" discourse is carrying strong racial undertones, but I don't think crackery is enough to explain the sharp trend towards the Atlanta sound.
It felt like industry was collectively realizing they can capitalize on the triplet flow's popularity more than artists independently drawing inspiration from it. Message-wise, trap also seems easier for capital to co-opt and commodify than what came before.
Not sure I have a thesis here, just my thoughts.
It's possible. I'm a relatively new hip hop fan (started listening in 2018, 2019-ish) and I basically have always heard trap as the dominant subgenre. But I've also viewed it as hella diverse because I always stayed a bit closer to the underground, seeing trends of abstract hip hop and some experimental artists taking trap and doing interesting things with it, rather than the commercial trap which skated around the same few flows with nothing much to say. And, IDK, is trap really any worse than bling rap as far as being easy to co-opt?
You think the Bay gon' let you disrespect ‘Pac, n*
I think that Oakland show gon' be your last stop, n*
I used to just hate Drake cause I'm Canadian. Now I kinda like Kendrick Lamar for owning a dude so hard I has to see what the fuss was about. Now I have other reasons, as stenchcore scum who pays little attention to mainstream music, Kendrick goty clicks and I told co-workers about it. He was like if you made Narduar really mad at you.
I feel like if you're writing mean songs about how much you hate someone you've already lost. Why doesn't the diss-ee simply make a
meme of them and be done?It doesn't work if you don't walk away after that, then you become the
The what now?
No like seriously, I know Drake is some sort of rapper or whatever I don't know, the other guy I heard of him once. It must be because these people don't really reach Argentina at all lol. I'm being 200% honest.
That's fair enough, but I'm not American either and Drake is very frequently on the radio here (also a Spanish speaking place). I'm surprised there's anywhere in the world where the people who are online enough to be here haven't heard Hotline Bling.
Then be very surprised because that song isn't really popular everywhere
FD Signifier talked about this way more in depth on his Drake hate video from a couple years ago. He talks about the branch Drake came from and how Drake is the inevitable conclusion once capitalist forces began working their way into hip hop. It's a really good video for anyone interested in the topic/has 3 hours to kill.
lmao
