When You Regret Starting a Rap Beef

In what is currently the most popular song in the United States, Kendrick Lamar explains how he defines success. “Money, power, respect—the last one is better,” he raps on the Future and Metro Boomin track “Like That,” released last month.

The line could be Lamar’s motto. The 36-year-old Compton emcee is renowned not only for his popularity and influence but also for his renown itself. His lyrical dexterity, ambitious songwriting, and philosophical seriousness have made him the only rapper to ever win a Pulitzer, to name just one accolade. He’s among the most widely respected musicians to emerge in the past two decades in any genre, full stop.

Respect alone can’t buy you a house or smite your enemies. But in hip-hop, it’s proving to be an incredibly potent force. Last week, in response to Lamar’s “Like That” verse, the rapper J. Cole dissed the very thing that makes Kendrick beloved: his music. Just two days later, without prompting, J. Cole apologized profusely in public. This was astonishing—a sign of Lamar’s untouchability, and of growing pains for a rebellious genre that has become an institution.

The tensions trace back to last fall, when J. Cole featured on Drake’s hit “First Person Shooter.” Cole, a 39-year-old North Carolinian known for his sullen delivery of studiously written lyrics, rapped about the eternally disputed question of who’s “the hardest MC.” Cole’s verse asserted the existence of a “big three”: Drake, Lamar, and Cole himself. This was a provocation—although Cole has won plenty of acclaim and has highly devoted fans, he’s the least famous of the trio. But in gassing up his own importance, he also, implicitly, complimented Drake and Lamar as guys he looks up to.

Lamar was not flattered. “Motherfuck the big three, n****, it’s just big me” he rapped on Future’s “Like That,” before rhyming angrily about the bad things he’d do to anyone who challenged him. Full of wordplay, delivered with gasping ferocity, Lamar’s verse was a self-evident example of why he believes himself to be in a class of his own. It was also red meat for hip-hop fans: Lamar, who puts out music only every so often, had taken on two of the genre’s biggest stars, one of whom—Cole—clearly idolizes him. How would they respond? Would they escalate?

Last Friday, Cole took the bait. On a track called “7 Minute Drill,” he alleged that Lamar’s music had “fell off like The Simpsons.” He called one album boring. He called another album tragic. He also critiqued Lamar’s work ethic: “He averagin’ one hard verse like every thirty months or somethin’ / If he wasn’t dissin’, then we wouldn’t be discussin’ him.” These were somewhat explosive things to say, because Lamar’s entire value proposition is the unimpeachability of his catalog. But Cole added disclaimers to the song, noting his reluctance to flame Lamar: “I’m hesitant, I love my brother, but I’m not gonna lie.”

Cole’s ambivalence was deeper than even that line suggested. On Sunday, at Dreamville Festival—the annual North Carolina concert thrown by the label Cole founded in 2007—Cole gave a speech disavowing “7 Minute Drill” as “the lamest, goofiest shit,” and said he intended to pull it off streaming services. Commentators in the rap world were gobsmacked by this reversal. Many mocked Cole for backing down—a choice that made him, at least in terms of this particular beef, a loser. Some praised him for doing the mature thing and being honest about how he really felt, even if it exposed him to criticism. What’s clear is that no one expected this outcome. On social media, the common sentiment is: What happened to hip-hop?

[Read: Hip-hop’s fiercest critic]

Conflict is certainly in the genre’s DNA; ever since the advent of battle rapping in the early 1980s, hip-hop’s titans have forged their reputation in the heat of lyrical warfare. Cole, a student of the medium, channeled some of this history with “7 Minute Drill.” His diss of Lamar’s pace of output recalled Jay-Z slamming Nas for having “one hot album every ten year average” on the notorious 2001 track “Takeover.” Cole’s condescending notes of sympathy toward Lamar echoed Nas’s mildest line from the even more notorious “Ether,” his reply to Jay-Z’s diss: “What’s sad is I love you ’cause you’re my brother.”

But in many ways, this particular back-and-forth bears little resemblance to the genre’s signature skirmishes of the past few decades. Rap beef tends to present itself as a factual, serious, and brutal settling of real-life scores. Some lyrical provocations have appeared to connect to actual bloodshed, as with the 1990s feud between Tupac and Biggie. Many famous beefs have involved scandalous personal attacks. In 2018, Pusha T lyrically outed Drake as having parented a son out of wedlock. Just a few months ago, Nicki Minaj derogatorily brought up Megan Thee Stallion’s dead mother in a song.

By contrast, Cole and Lamar’s battle, if it can even be called that, was strictly professional. It didn’t invoke the men’s wives or kids or medical conditions. Rather, the conflict was over one question: Who’s the best? Cole’s verse in particular, essentially ranking Lamar’s albums, called to mind Letterboxd commentators debating Oscar nominees. Perhaps both rappers, having long ago proved their place in hip-hop’s firmament, felt they had nothing to gain from fighting dirty. And perhaps Cole realized that “7 Minute Drill,” full of claims he didn’t really seem to believe, undermined the very thing that gave Cole a claim to greatness in the first place: integrity. So he apologized.

That reversal makes for a weirdly wholesome but deflating outcome. Admitting his truth has cost Cole some respect in the short term, but success in hip-hop, a genre that celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, is now partly about longevity. Both Lamar and Cole are approaching their 40s and likely thinking about legacy management, in the way of rock-and-roll lifers and career politicians. For younger artists, hip-hop remains an art form about the messy struggle for survival—but Cole’s surrender suggests an approach with less fire, less rudeness, less competitive excellence. Then again, “Like That,” the song with Lamar’s scorching verse, is still riding high on the charts. And Drake, who’s not yet replied in song, has never been one to take the mature path.