The 1 Person Not Hyped About This Weekend's Super Bowl Halftime Show

With a bizarre lawsuit against his own label, Drake has done everything to hobble Kendrick Lamar's "Not Like Us." But all he might be looking for is more money.

It used to be that the only time rap songs were subject to legal action was when the FBI, police departments and suburban parents got involved. Think of the use of Young Thug’s lyrics in a 2023 RICO indictment in Atlanta, Tupac Shakur’s lyrics in a lawsuit filed by the wife of a slain white state trooper in 1992 or N.W.A.’s “Fuck Tha Police” being the focus of a strongly worded letter from the FBI in 1989.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a Black rapper raising concern about another Black rapper’s song in a legal complaint, for reasons that should be obvious. But that’s exactly what Drake did in January. He filed a lawsuit against the record label, Universal Music Group, for widely promoting Kendrick Lamar’s “defamatory” song, “Not Like Us,” “because its lyrics, its album image and its music video all advance the false and malicious narrative that Drake is a pedophile.”

Drake is also on the same record label. (Both are signed under UMG but through different divisions: Republic Records for Drake and Interscope Records for Kendrick.)

Let’s try to put aside for a moment (as it seems Drake would want us to) that the legal complaint came on the heels of a fiery, lengthy and riveting rap battle between the two stars last year — of which Lamar was proverbially crowned the winner. Or that “Not Like Us,” which dropped on May 4, became the hit of the year, a virtual death knell to Drake’s reputation, and potentially contributed to Lamar being given the highly coveted title of this Sunday’s Super Bowl halftime performer.

Or that in the weeks following Drake’s 81-page filing, much of the live audience at last weekend’s Grammys could be heard reciting the diss track’s “a minor” line as Lamar accepted the award for Record of the Year.