All three beats on Drake’s blockbuster diss track “Family Matters” go crazy, but it never had a chance of ringing off like say, “Back to Back.” Ironically, Drake focused more on lyrical performance; the last two verses on the song feature two flows iller than anything he caught on his last (admittedly overhated) album. It’s a good song that in a different scenario, against a different rapper, works effectively as the “red button nuke” Drake hyped it up to be. Alas, in this instance, he didn’t realize he was dealing with a demon, a master-strageizing Hater Extraordinaire. Lamar immediately stepped on “Family Matters” with the sinister, heavy “Meet the Grahams,” which effectively changed the conversation before the conversation had a chance to begin.
But “Meet the Grahams” is so ominous, in sound and content, that it took the air out of the room and deflated all of the excitement brewing around the beef. Which is why Kendrick releasing “Not Like Us” less than 24 hours later was an even more impressive chess move. In one fell swoop, he changed the narrative again—or rather, the sound of it. The very serious, ugly accusations against Drake are still there, but it’s a much smoother listen packaged in winkingly silly lines like “Certified Lover Boy? Certified pedophile.”
That some rap fans—and even Drake himself—were surprised Kendrick delivered a banger speaks to the fallacies that have surrounded K. Dot for the last year or two. For one, he is not the album-every-five-years artist some have been casting him out to be; the hiatus between 2017’s Damn. and 2022’s Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers is the outlier not the rule, especially considering that 1) nearly every artist except the psychotically consistent Drake took a one-year break around Covid, and 2) the 2018 Black Panther soundtrack is essentially a Kendrick album. And yes, Mr. Morale prioritized introspection over heaters, but this is still the same guy who gave us festival-ready jams like “m.a.a.d city,” “Humble,” and “King’s Dead,” to name a few. Some folks went into this battle wondering if Kendrick’s sometimes dense songwriting could match up against Drake’s IG-caption-ready quips. Now it’s all said and done and each of Kendrick’s disses going back to “Like That” has at least one line that’s spawned a meme across the timeline, and he did it over a wide array of beats from some of rap’s best and brightest producers: Metro Boomin, Cardo, Sounwave, The Alchemist.
But “Not Like Us” is a banger of a different BPM, summoning the raucous, party-starting homegrown energy of Mustard to deliver what would become Kendrick’s haymaker. Aside from showcasing Kendrick’s shrewdness in “Back to Back”-ing Drake, “Not Like Us” cleverly recasts this beef as a statement of LA pride. Mustard heralded the track’s release with the message that he’ll “never turn his back on his city,” and he laces Kendrick with one of his hardest beats in years on which K.Dot, with his LA dialect turned all the way up, declares “the city is back up, it’s a must we outside.” Throw in lines invoking hometown heroes like “It’s all eyes on me, and I’ma send it up to Pac” or “From Alondra down to Central, n-gga better not speak on Serena” and what we have is a ready-made new West Coast anthem that the members can hit their dances to and the civilians can unwisely try to imitate.
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