It seems that we are Everyone agrees: Kendrick Lamar defeated Drake in one of the most compelling rap battles of the decade. To make matters worse, Drake also landed himself in legal trouble when he deepfake the late rapper Tupac.
Tensions between Lamar and Drake go back decades, but this latest outburst began last fall when J. Cole released a song in which he referred to Drake, Lamar and himself as the “Big Three” in rap. In March of this year, Lamar finally responded, dismissing Cole’s claim with a scathing verse that discredited him and Drake. The battle ensued, and soon a legion of other hip-hop artists jumped in, releasing music and taking sides against Drake.
The week-long dispute escalated into one of the bitterest rap battles of the digital age. There were side fights (between Chris Brown and Quavo) and white flags (J. Cole apologized to Lamar and deleted his dissident response to the rapper). In the meantime, Social media created campaigns and giveaways against Drake, and support for diss tracks against him appeared in everything from Japanese rap to Indian classical dance.
The feud has also sparked discussion about the increasing role of technology in rap employment and how and when AI should be used in music.
A pivotal moment came in the track “Taylor Made,” in which Drake tried to diss Lamar with AI vocals from Snoop Dogg and Tupac, a rap icon killed decades ago. Drake did not receive permission from Tupac’s estate to use the late rapper’s vocals and was threatened with a lawsuit if he did not remove the track. Although Drake denied it, his decision to use AI singing caused debate among music lovers and techies alike.
(Lamar and Drake could not be reached for comment at the time of publication).
Rap battles chronically take place online
An artist like Tupac, who died in 1996, could never have imagined that artificial intelligence could imitate his voice so convincingly that one of today’s most popular rappers would incorporate it into a song. He also couldn’t understand how the nature of the social internet would shape the future of music, where “Every stream is a vote.”
In the early years, rappers had to distribute their dissident tracks via radio, release physical albums and mixtapes, and give interviews as the feud years progressed. Responding to a dissident can take days at most, whereas today it can take just seconds.
Lamar posted a diss reply to Drake just 20 minutes after Drake dropped his opinion against Lamar. Lamar insinuated that there were leaks in Drake’s camp that allowed him to crash so quickly, and that in itself is a dissent. Before the Internet was so ubiquitous, this speed would have been impossible.
In response to his feud with Meek Mill nearly a decade ago, Drake released two songs in four days. But Lamar dropped four songs in five days during that fight, including two in one day. No one had to rush out to buy CDs or stop their car to listen to the radio, as one of the founders did during Jay Z’s infamous feud with Nas. Instead, the tracks were quickly posted on YouTube, shared on Twitter, and then streamed on a loop on Spotify.
However, the speed of these releases also has disadvantages: In another viral moment, Lamar’s lyrics confused actor Haley Joel Osment and televangelist Joel Osteen.
Fans also called Drake “chronically online” during the rap battle, as her real-time posts about the raps appeared to influence him. Some fans accused him of referencing popular tweets and memes made about him during the feud, then passing them off as his own thoughts and rapping about them. Numerous people online commented that it felt like Drake was writing his responses specifically for his fans and not to respond to Lamar. This near-instantaneous feedback loop stood in stark contrast to Lamar’s raps, whose attacks were aimed solely at Drake.
This fight may also be the first time this conflict has expanded to technology platforms on a large scale. Lamar fans used Google Maps to virtually destroy Drake’s mansion and renamed it “Owned by Kendrick.” Streamers spent hours on platforms like Twitch, YouTube and Kick waiting to see if they could be among the first to respond to a newly released song.
Anthony Fantano, a popular music YouTuber, released no less than six different live reaction videos in response to Drake and Lamar’s songs released in the last two weeks. That kind of Reaction videos became so popular that creators say that Lamar (or his team) has lifted the copyright restrictions on these songs, that means, you can benefit from their videos. This move alone could bring more prominence to the role of the hip-hop reaction expert.
AI has entered the chat
The Kendrick-Drake feud is also the first mainstream rap battle to use AI.
Artists of all genres are reckoning with the simultaneous threat and potential of this technology. Some have used AI as an opportunity: art-pop duo Yacht trained an AI on 14 years of their music to create the 2019 record “Chain Tripping”; Holly Herndon and Grimes have both developed tools for other artists to create AI deepfakes using their voices. Other artists such as Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry have protested against the use of AI to undermine human creativity.
Consent is a key concern in artist debates about AI-generated music. Artists care deeply about what their peers do because the use of AI affects them all – without them knowing, their music could be used to train an AI model that another artist uses to complement their music .
While Herndon is at the forefront of musical experiments with AI, she also advocates for artists to remain in control of their work. She uses AI in her art, but is also the founder of Spawning, a startup that develops tools for artists to help them mine their work from popular AI training datasets. Meanwhile, chillwave musician Washed Out just released a controversial music video created entirely using Open AI’s Sora, a text-to-video model that hasn’t yet been released to the public.
Tupac’s estate would argue that Drake crossed a line by not having permission to emulate the late rapper. But Rich Fortune, the co-founder of AI-powered social planning app Hangtight, said it was creative that Drake was one of the first artists to use AI in a song, particularly a dissident track. Fortune says, “There are no rules in a fight.”
“If there was a time to see what the reaction would be, it would be now, because in war no punches are pulled,” he continued. He believes more artists will now try to use AI singing now that Drake, one of the biggest artists in the world, has effectively approved its use.
In fact, a dissident track against Drake in this feud used AI-generated work and has since turned into a meme against him. Producer Metro Boomin took over an AI song called BBL Drizzy and tried it on a track that has become one of the rallying cries against the rapper.
Meanwhile, artists as big as Beyoncé have taken a stand against the increasing presence of AI. In one of the few public comments she made about her genre-bending album “Cowboy Carter,” Beyoncé said, “The more I see the world evolving, the more I felt a deeper connection to purity.” With artificial intelligence and With digital filters and programming, I wanted to go back to real instruments.”
According to Fortune, the biggest hurdle for artists wanting to use AI right now is getting permission. Living artists may not be as interested in being recreated by AI, but the legacies of deceased musicians are. The problem is that many deceased old-school artists like Tupac cannot consent to imitation because AI-generated music was not a technology developed before their death.
“I don’t know if that’s necessarily a good thing, but it’s the direction we’re going,” Fortune said of using the work of deceased musicians. At least, he said, it opens up a new source of income for the estates of artists who don’t mind artificial reincarnation.
The Kendrick-Drake feud also revealed another aspect of AI: its potential ability to mimic artists with a less unique style. Luke Bailey, the founder of fintech company Neon Money Club, said Drake’s recent music lacks depth. This, coupled with claims that Drake was so directly and intentionally inspired by what he saw on the internet, raises concerns that he is doing something an AI bot might one day do.
“There are two types of musicians: one who can play what someone tells them and one who can create something original from scratch,” Bailey said. “AI is the former at this stage of its development.”
Bailey is right. Large language models (LLMs), the type of artificial intelligence that powers most deepfake tools, are inherently uncreative. These models synthesize massive amounts of data and then respond to a user-generated prompt by predicting the most likely response.
But the most famous music often takes the opposite approach: just look at Kendrick Lamar, a rapper whose tactics are so complex that he remains the only non-classical and jazz musician to win a Pulitzer Prize. He is often considered one of music’s leading thinkers and is known for his commentary on race and politics. AI currently lacks the cultural nuance to form its own opinion about society, let alone something as nuanced as race.
“[AI] “I can’t copy Kendrick’s depth, just his voice,” Bailey said, adding that fans have heard some pretty compelling AI-generated Drake songs in the past. “AI does not yet have any effective bars.”