Drake beef not about Gaza
With the feud between two of rap’s biggest stars, Kendrick Lamar and Drake, spilling over into the headlines (and possibly real-life violence) last week, everybody with a heartbeat and a blue check mark on X is sharing their hottest take on the matter.
A few especially unhinged online commentators have tried to rope the Drake-kendrick beef into the conflict in Gaza, with some invoking the former’s Jewish roots to cast him as a proxy for the State of Israel.
One representative tweet, registering more than one-million views in three days, reads: “This #Kendrick vs #drake isn’t just rap, it’s Palestine vs Israel, it’s the people vs the status quo, it’s culture vs the colonizer, it’s the rebels vs the empire, it’s black vs acting black.”
Not to be outdone by the “Palestinian flag in bio” crowd, Seattle-based rapper Macklemore took his own gratuitous shot at Drake in the pro-palestine protest song Hind’s Hall, released on May 6.
“I want a ceasefire, f--k a response from Drake,” Macklemore raps toward the song’s conclusion.
(The Canadian content doesn’t end with Drake — the official music video for Hind’s Hall includes an overhead shot of the words “FREE PALASTINE” (sic) spray painted across the steps of a University of Ottawa building.)
While the line is a transparent attempt, on the part of Macklemore, to gain clout by piggybacking on the hottest story in hip hop right now, he still had to be aware of how some would interpret his namechecking of the industry’s most prominent Jewish performer in this context — especially given the blatant antisemitism folded into “disses” of Drake volleyed by other artists in recent weeks.
In a profane video story posted to Instagram last month, rap mogul Rick Ross launched into a racist tirade targeting Drake’s Ashkenazi heritage, calling him “big nose” and referring to his entourage as “the pastrami posse.” (A yellow emoji nose was superimposed over the video for part of the story.)
Kendrick Lamar (coincidentally, a Pulitzer Prize laureate) has, thus far, treaded more lightly around Drake’s connection to the Jewish faith. He’s nevertheless taken multiple shots at his rival’s ethnicity in the four “diss tracks” he’s released thus far into the feud.
In his latest track, released May 4, targeting Drake, tellingly titled Not Like Us, Lamar raps, “You not a colleague, you a f-king
DRAKE ... HAS MADE NO BONES ABOUT HIS JEWISH ROOTS.
colonizer”; ostensibly, a reference to Drake’s purported history of ripping off the musical stylings of lesser-known recording artists from Atlanta and other Black cultural hotbeds in the United States.
“Colonizer” is, of course, also a popular term with the “Free Palestine” crowd, who tend to see Israel as a white-settler colony — despite being a majority nonwhite country. His use of the politically loaded term was not lost on sharp-eared listeners.
Born in Toronto to a Jewish mother and African-american father, Drake has long embraced his hybrid identity. The music video for his 2011 single HYFR, for instance, opens with tape-recorded footage from his bar mitzvah years earlier and features him rapping at a synagogue. The rap megastar has also been known to appear at real-life bar and bat mitzvahs from time to time.
Drake, a clean-cut former child actor, has dealt with criticism throughout his career for both appropriating various musical genres and contributing to the “gentrification” of hip hop away from its inner-city roots. Although no stranger to controversy, he now faces an unprecedented backlash, as several of the culture’s biggest names close ranks behind his archrival Kendrick Lamar.
The synchronicity of the Lamar-led campaign against Drake — who, again, has made no bones about his Jewish roots over the years — with a broader uptick in antisemitism driven by the events in Gaza, is indeed curious; but we should resist the urge to look too deeply into it. The situation is combustible enough as is, without tacking global politics onto it. (The security guard shot outside of Drake’s Toronto property last week suffered life-threatening injuries.)
The intensifying feud between Drake and Kendrick Lamar tells us a lot about the culture of hip hop — and in particular the continued practice of gatekeeping artists who don’t fit the traditional inner-city Black mould. By contrast, it tells us virtually nothing about what’s going on in the Middle East.
Just this once, let’s not shoehorn politics into everything.