Can Drake Ever Escape ‘Not Like Us’?

Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” dropped two years ago this week. At the time, Joe Biden was still president, “Brat Summer” had yet to enter the zeitgeist, and “AI slop” had not yet become the default texture of being online. Even so, the song’s impact lives on, able to recalibrate the architecture of the entire rap world. Even if you don’t count Drake’s now-dismissed lawsuit against Universal Music Group — in which his lawyers argued that the label knowingly published and promoted “Not Like Us” despite allegedly knowing its accusations were false and defamatory, a claim that he is currently trying to revive — the song’s afterlife has been unusually protracted. Most people can concede that, in the court of public opinion, Drake lost the battle, but there hasn’t yet been any sort of closing treatise from either of the two.

Now, with the upcoming release of Iceman — Drake’s first solo album since the conflict — it feels as if we’re back to square one, with fans relitigating the affair across social media. It is, in a way, a testament to how thoroughly “Not Like Us” succeeded in its mission. But something still seems unsettled. Consider the genre’s last heavyweight title fight: Jay-Z and Nas. The pair didn’t officially make peace until 2005, roughly four years after the height of their feud. But even two years in, the conflict had already begun to cool into mythology, as Jay used The Black Album to change the subject from his beef with Nas to his own legacy.

Unlike the songs volleyed in Jay and Nas’ beef — which had the fortune of occurring before stan culture, brain rot, misinformation, phone addiction, and AI turned every public dispute into content — “Not Like Us” feels engineered to make any kind of resolution impossible. The song does not merely beat Drake in public; it seeks to make him permanently illegible as a sympathetic figure, recasting the literal Aubrey Drake Graham not as a rival to be defeated, but as a man to be condemned. That so many former allies and peers seemed willing to line up against him only deepened the effect. The listening public could only assume the worst.

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That’s why two years later, it still doesn’t feel settled into history. What was everyone’s issue with Drake? The people closest to the spark have mostly chosen opacity. Even Metro Boomin, who helped light the fuse with We Don’t Trust You, has since sounded less like an instigator than a man slightly unnerved by what the internet did with the match he struck. Speaking at the Forbes Under 30 Summit, Metro compared the Drake-Kendrick conflict to Jay-Z and Nas’ battle, but argued that the terms had changed. “Back in the day, Jay-Z and Nas went at it, but I was a fan of both of ‘em,” he said. “Most people were.” Now, adding,  “The internet just makes it a little too wild now.” In a GQ interview that was only published in print, Future all but pretended the beef had never happened. “There was a beef?” he asked, according to reports of the interview. “I didn’t even know there was a beef.”

Kendrick, too, has offered little in the way of explanation. Even after performing “Not Like Us” at the Super Bowl, he has mostly declined to describe why, as he said on “Meet the Grahams,” he believed Drake’s moral failings meant he “should die.” Indeed, much of the lingering weight of the Drake and Kendrick beef is how potently it curdled into a moral reckoning as opposed to a rap battle. By the end, as Kendrick is warning various NBA players to keep their children away from Drake, the public’s view of the conflict entered much darker territory. 

In a Harper’s Bazaar interview with SZA, when asked what “Not Like Us” meant to him, Kendrick’s answer was less a clarification than a reframing. “Not like us is the energy of who I am, the type of man I represent,” he said, describing that man as someone with “morals,” “values,” and the willingness to recognize his mistakes. “If I’m thinking of ‘Not Like Us,’ I’m thinking of me and whoever identifies with that.” To a die-hard Kendrick fan, that answer may scan as spiritual discipline. To everyone else, it was maddeningly evasive.
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To their credit, both J. Cole and A$AP Rocky, who you could describe as ancillary characters in this whole thing, are among the only people to actually speak openly about the feud in anything other than riddles. Cole, who famously bowed out early, later told Cam’ron that the beef had turned rap fandom into politics: “You either Kendrick, or you Drake, and you got to pick a side.” Rocky, too, was unafraid to say his piece, telling DJ Akademiks ahead of the release of his album Don’t Be Dumb that his issue with Drake stemmed from shots Drake had taken at Rihanna, the mother of his children.

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Now, with Iceman, all signs point to an album where Drake tries to set the record straight. So far, his longform rollout has given fans a giant ice cube, a few mysterious livestreams, and a smattering of serviceable enough snippets and loosies. (Ironically, the last rap single to reach the Top 10 on the charts was Drake’s “What Did I Miss?” ) His lawsuit also isn’t helping. At one’s most charitable, you could argue that the whole thing is the equivalent of corporate damage control — how is one supposed to react to the word “pedophile” being so catchily attached to their name? — but that still doesn’t shield Drake from embarrassment. The impression remains that he was beaten so badly that he had to go to court to clear his name. 

So Iceman has to do a lot of work. It has to provide some insight into what the hell happened between Drake and basically everybody, while also getting the public to forget not only “Not Like Us,” but the fact that he took UMG to court over it. Two years later, that may be the real legacy of Kendrick’s song. More than just winning the battle, it changed the atmosphere around rap itself.