This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Music might be the food of love, but the food of music is beef, and music has been eating exceptionally well since October last year.

That’s when Canadian rapper Drake released the track “First Person Shooter”, though the trouble didn’t start with anything Drake said but rather with a guest verse from J Cole including the lines: “Love when they argue the hardest MC/ Is it K-Dot? Is it Aubrey? Or me?/ We the big three like we started a league.”

Aubrey here is Drake (real name Aubrey Drake Graham); K-Dot is Kendrick Lamar, less commercially successful but ultra critically acclaimed (in 2018, he became the first hip-hop artist to win a Pulitzer). It’s worth pausing to recognise that this was a compliment: Cole was saying that there are three great rappers in the world, himself, Drake and Lamar.

But maybe not a simple compliment, because relations between Drake and Lamar have been at a simmer for a long time now. It wasn’t always so: in fact, Drake first put Lamar in front of a mainstream audience in 2012 with a feature and a support slot on his tour.

Since then, though, the two have taken a series of plausibly deniable shots at each other. By putting them both on a level, Cole was bound to goad.

Kendrick hit back on “Like That”: “Motherfuck the big three … it’s just big me.” Then Cole released his own diss track, but deleted it within days. From now on, it was between Lamar and Drake, as they traded blows from track to track. Drake accused Lamar (without foundation) of beating his partner; Lamar accused Drake (again, with no evidence) of having a secret daughter and being a paedophile.

Drake hit hard, but Lamar was more precise in his cruelty, more clever in his games. On “Taylor Made Freestyle”, Drake claimed Lamar (who guested on Taylor Swift’s Bad Blood) was Swift’s plaything; Lamar embraced the insult by working with Swift’s long-time collaborator Jack Antonoff on a swing at Drake. Unwisely, Drake also used AI to replicate rapper Tupac Shakur, who died in 1996. That led to “Taylor Made Freestyle” being withdrawn after a complaint from Shakur’s estate.

At one point, phenomenally, Lamar released a response to Drake less than 30 minutes after Drake’s track hit the internet. The implication wasn’t just that Lamar works unbeatably fast. It was that Lamar had so successfully prodded Drake’s buttons with his previous effort, he had successfully predicted the response and recorded it in advance: an assertion of dominance that extended all the way into Drake’s own brain.

The climax of the battle came with Lamar’s “Not Like Us”, an absolute savaging of Drake to an irresistible beat. At a Juneteenth live show, Lamar performed the track six times to an ecstatic crowd, accompanied on stage by a roll call of east coast rap royalty. The point — that audiences and peers chose Lamar over Drake — wasn’t subtle, but it was conclusive. Drake might be literally alive, but in terms of reputation, this was a murder.

Pop fans are monstrous gossips and love to unpick this stuff in meticulous detail. That’s why, when Charli XCX released “Girl, So Confusing” this year on her incredible album Brat, speculation about who the girl might be ran wild.

Whoever she was, it was clear Charli had an awkward relationship with her: “I don’t know if you like me/ Sometimes I think you might hate me/ Sometimes I think I might hate you/ Maybe you just wanna be me.”

The only clue in the song was that “People say we’re alike/ They say we’ve got the same hair”, and the fact that the two “talk about making music”. So this was a fellow musician who had some resemblance to Charli.

Charli had said in interviews that she had felt jealous of the singer Lorde: both have long dark hair and large dark eyes. The photofit was in, the ID conclusive.

Which left the question: what was Lorde going to do now? Hit back, Kendrick-style? Inaugurate a cycle of furious ripostes that couldn’t stop until one of them was comprehensively ruined? Nothing of the sort. Instead, two weeks after the album, Charli released a remix of “Girl, So Confusing” — featuring Lorde.

“I was trapped in the hatred/ And your life seemed so awesome/ I never thought for a second/ My voice was in your head,” confesses Lorde, whilst receiving the nearest possible thing to total absolution for envious thoughts: a spot on the song of the person you envy, along with an admission that she envies you, too.

Then they both sing together: “And when we put this to bed/ The internet will go crazy.” The internet did. This offered so many things that pop obsessives love: a grudge, a rapprochement — and confirmation that the fans had guessed the underlying gossip correctly. Brat, already enjoying serious success, had achieved the kind of cultural moment that really deserves the overworked epithet “iconic”.

There are two ways you can think about the “Girl, So Confusing” story. As the Lamar–Drake beef shows, featuring on each other’s songs is no guarantee of a future without hostilities. Maybe the old anxieties will all come pouring back. Or, more hopefully: sometimes saying what you really feel can be the start of putting things right. So long as what you really feel isn’t that your rival is a sex offender.