Is It Okay to Record a Diss Track?
When they remember what you said and how you made them feel and then write a song about it
I will start today’s post by telling on myself: I don’t keep up with current music at all. I still download on iTunes, and within this realm, the last 10 tracks I purchased were songs released between 1967 and 2014. It will probably not surprise you that as a result, here are the things that I knew about Drake and Kendrick Lamar before this weekend:
Drake is from Canada. He was on what not everyone knows is a reboot of Degrassi, since in the original, Spike had a baby, Wheels left to find his dad, Snake found out his brother was gay and Drake wasn’t even born yet. He has a song called “Hotline Bling,” which I am only aware of because Barack Obama referenced it once, and another song called “God’s Plan,” which came to my attention because the video features him giving out cash in shopping malls. I could not sing or hum or maybe even recognize either of these songs on the radio, unless the lyrics are just “Hotline Bling” and “God’s Plan” repeated over and over again, which I am guessing they are not.
Drake’s Toronto residence somewhat incomprehensibly houses a regulation basketball court, which leads me to believe that real estate there has an extremely favorable dollar-to-square foot ratio relative to the places where any other rapper of his stature files taxes except possibly Eminem if he still lives in Detroit. I also know that “Drake” is neither the man’s surname nor given name.
Kendrick Lamar, on the other hand, is in a video with The Lonely Island in which he wears a visor. I can’t name any of his songs, unfortunately. He seems to me to be below average height for an American male. I know he is not Canadian -- if I had to guess I would say he is from Philadelphia, Boston or California, but not Northern California because as a Northern Californian, I am sure I would have heard someone mention it by now. I know this is not much compared to the information at my disposal about his hip-hop rival, but I do know that he does have a Pulitzer Prize, which seems to me to be a bigger deal than all the Drake facts combined, minus maybe the basketball court.
This marginal intel seemed to have served me perfectly well for years until a long-simmering rap feud exploded between the two last week, and my knowledge expanded substantially as I dove into explainers from Time, The Washington Post, New York Times, Variety, USA Today and even Forbes. While early polling of those in the know suggested that Kendrick had seized a decisive lead (“drake is getting slaughtered,” my niece updated in a text on Sunday), the pundits weren’t so sure. “In the beef between Drake and Kendrick, no one’s a winner,” asserted Canada’s Globe and Mail. “The Most Miserable Spectacle in Rap History” went Pitchfork’s headline. With the exception of sole UK journalist who tried to make the case that all our differences should be settled with “poetry,” it seems that the music establishment has spoken: it is NOT Okay to Record Diss Tracks. But why?
From Dre’s homie, Dre’s ace to “Will Rap For Food.”
The diss track is certainly not new, and I am pretty sure without bothering to do any research whatsoever that bears some kinship to the time-honored tradition of the dozens (aka “yo mama” jokes), where ribbing one’s opponent into submission with broad and hyperbolic insults is the entire point – and most of the fun. But “fun” hardly seems to be the tone here. The creative escalation between these two titans of rap has seemingly left no accusation off the table: so many age-old secrets, lies and crimes have been alleged here that it seems fair to assume that if either could implicate the other in the unsolved murders that issued from the most consequential rap feud of all time (Biggie vs. Tupac) they surely would.
So as I registered the takes of the music and culture critics, I admit I was surprised that they were so down on content that not only upholds a tradition, but the public tends to absolutely love. Instead of two former friends or lovers quietly unfollowing each other on Instagram while their publicists dodge phone calls or release statements “asking for privacy at this difficult time,” two of the biggest names took it to the mat, swapping blows and waving receipts — sort of — for all of us to see. This is the way we like it: authenticity. Transparency. And yes, blood. I took it as a flukey added bonus that the mess was unwinding so close to the Met Gala: amidst a festival of the public pandering to celebrities as they pander to each other, seeing and hearing these two go fully gloves off felt like a blast of reality that only gets harder to come by with each new hostile takeover a famous person launches for the world’s attention. Not one qualified person felt that elevating pedestal-shattering to a form of art might be the way back to our collective sanity? Or could acknowledge that these lyrical provocations are just the musical embodiment of our times?
For we live in peak diss culture, do we not? Sure, our words are not always matched with beats, but Twitter feuds, comment sections and takedown accounts are so ubiquitous and heavily subscribed that their ascent up the “charts” — in the form of follows, influence and engagement — would quickly certify them gold and multi-platinum. But it’s not merely size of their audiences or the breathless anticipation of each new post that they share: like the sonic transmissions of battling artists, this type of content is meant to expose behavior its creators believe has violated codes so egregiously that the only recourse is to let the everybody know. This seems to be the overarching sentiment of most public beefs — including the “cancellation,” which is really just the repudiation of the collective: live by our standards, or pay the price. If you are on social media at all, some articulation of this sentiment probably constitutes a good deal of your feed and has for some time. While I don’t know for a fact what it has done for the streams of either artist, it has certainly kept their names in the press. And in a music industry that is alternately diagnosed as ailing or ruled by female artists, it would seem that this formula is at the very least pretty good for the business of these two men — one of whom has sport-complex level bills to pay.
However, this does not mean I think it is too late to extract from this conflagration a far less cynical lesson, a different reminder; we can always push back against things as they are in favor of agitating for how we want them to be. So while it is possible that Drake and Kendrick’s mutual ire has generated some great music — I wouldn’t know; ask me in about ten years, when I get around to downloading the best single — we can simultaneously acknowledge that this type of art is fruit of a poison tree. Furthermore, I have found that this genre tends not to age very well: as years nibble away at context, these feuds end up seeming overblown and the MCs just look petty; most (reasonable) people who have ever put withering barbs to paper probably know the sense of cringe that comes with rediscovering them years later. This is not necessarily because we have changed our minds about the perceived offender or offense – though that happens too – but because we must acknowledge that we lost our heads, ultimately bringing to life then squarely personalizing the prophesy of Dr. Dre in his iconic lyrical bodyslam of Eazy-E “Dre Day”: when I diss you, I diss myself.
So my conclusion is this: may Graham v. Lamar serve to remind us that no matter how entertaining these dust-ups may be at the start, they eventually obfuscate whatever righteousness may belong to either party, if only because direct insults or slurs are the laziest, most ignoble way of pursuing “justice.” In a time of war abroad and of rights constantly in conflict here at home, it bears repeating that incivility breeds more incivility, violence more violence. We can never forget that attack/counterattack is a cycle that’s devastatingly hard to break.
As individuals, we live in a world that’s set up to make it easy for us to respond and respond quickly, but as I think we have learned by now, this has done surprisingly little to enhance our ability to persuade or correct. In the end, being seen as the “bigger person” takes at least a modicum of character, but is a position not likely to flourish without two things that may be much easier to come by, if we work for them: patience — in the form of willingness to sit out the impulse to have the “final word” — and the wisdom that it’s much harder seize a moral victory when your laurels are buried deep in the mud.