Kendrick Lamar’s feud with Drake heated up today as the Compton rapper dropped “Euphoria,” a fiery diss track loaded with spicy takedowns of the Canadian hitmaker. The song has become an instant fan favorite, as Twitter users spent the afternoon dissecting its best bars and laughing at Kendrick’s accidental(?) confusion between two similarly-named celebrities. Even the State of New York joined the discourse, using the song to troll rival NBA star Joel Embiid ahead of a possible closeout game in the playoffs.
One part of the song sparking curiosity is its intro, which is a reversed vocal sample. According to the Dissect Podcast account, the sample comes from The Wiz, the 1978 musical film adaptation of the stage reimagining of The Wizard Of Oz. Toward the end of the film, after the Wiz (Richard Pryor) is exposed as a washed-up politician from Atlantic City, he exclaims, “Everything they say about me is true! I’m a phony!”
Obviously, Kendrick’s use of the sample is meant to imply that Drake is the hip-hop equivalent of the Wiz: a fraud who has gotten by on mystique and a false persona for years. This, of course, would make Kendrick… Dorothy? Toto? In any event, he sees himself as the chaos agent revealing the truth behind Drake’s facade.
With the New York Knicks looking to close out the first round of the NBA playoffs against the Philadelphia 76ers tonight, Sixers all-star Joel Embiid has been declared the “Most Hated Man in NY,” as declared by no less an authority than The New York Post’s front page. This hatred was confirmed by New York’s State Twitter page (I will NEVER call it “X”), which not only reposted the cover from a Knickerbockers fan page, but added some spice of its own courtesy of Kendrick Lamar’s new Drake diss, “Euphoria.”
The new song has no shortage of salt for the Compton rapper’s Canadian foe, but at one point, he dispenses with the fancy wordplay and heady metaphors to distill his argument down to its bare bones: “Now let me say I’m the biggest hater / I hate the way that you walk, the way that you talk / I hate the way that you dress / I hate the way that you sneak diss, if I catch flight, it’s gon’ be direct,” he snarls in the snippet posted by @NYGov. If the Sixers win, Embiid might need the National Guard to provide security (maybe they can take a break from beating up 20-year-olds at Columbia for exercising their First Amendment rights). Which just goes to show how serious it is — do you know how bad it has to be for the GOVERNMENT of the state of New York to quote a Los Angeles-bred rapper’s diss track?
Sports rivalries aside, it looks like Kendrick Lamar has given the world the best new way to tell somebody you dislike them: just send them a “Euphoria” snippet, and they’ll get the message, guaranteed.
Earlier today, Kendrick Lamar dropped an absolute bomb when he shared “euphoria.” The 6 minute song was a response track to Drake’s disses “Push Ups” and “Taylor Made Freestyle.” Kendrick was nothing if not thorough in his response, taking aim at just about any facet of Drake’s life and career you can imagine. It’s given fans a lot to pour over throughout the day and the revelations are coming in waves. Eagle-eyed fans on Twitter spotted a lyric a few hours after the song dropped that they’ve got a bold theory to try and explain.
The lyric initially doesn’t make a whole ton of sense within the context of the song. “Have you ever paid five-hundred thousand to like an open case,” it reads. But fans think they figured out what Kendrick was referring to. A tweet with nearly 60k linked the song to an old story about Drake from back in 2019. As the story goes, Drake was accused of sexually assaulting a woman while on his Boy Meets World tour in 2017. He eventually admitted to having consensual sex with the woman while denying all the allegations of anything nonconsensual having occurred. The two parties eventually settled the suit out of court for an alleged $350k. Whether that’s specifically what Kendrick was referencing or not isn’t clear yet. Check out the tweet making the connection below.
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Kendrick Lamar Fans Think They Found The Meaning Of A “Euphoria” Lyric
Do you agree with the Kendrick fans theorizing that the open case bar is about Drake settling a sexual assault allegation? What’s your favorite lyrics from his new Drake diss track “euphoria?” Let us know in the comment section below.
The people have been waiting. A couple weeks ago, Drake decided to diss Kendrick Lamar with “First Person Shooter,” and onlookers have been anticipating how Lamar would fire back. Finally, Lamar did today (April 30) with “Euphoria,” in which he goes all out on Drake for six minutes.
There’s so much about this song to dissect, but there’s one lyric fans have been looking at that prompts the following question:
Was Kendrick Lamar Supposed To Be On Drake And J. Cole’s “First Person Shooter?”
“Euphoria” certainly has some believing that’s the case. On the track, Lamar raps:
“I hate the way that you walk, the way that you talk
I hate the way that you dress
Surprised you wanted that feature request
You know that we got some sh*t to address.”
This comes after earlier this month, Joe Budden indicated that he heard Lamar was originally supposed to be on the song.
Meanwhile, the song is full of other barbs, including, “You not a rap artist, you a scam artist with the hopes of bеing accepted / Tommy Hilfiger stood out, but FUBU nеver had been your collection,” and, “My first one like my last one: it’s a classic, you don’t have one / Let your core audience stomach that; didn’t tell ’em where you get your abs from.” Uproxx’s Aaron Williams breaks down some of the best ones here.
Kendrick Lamar’s new song “Euphoria” has rap fans on social media buzzing, but not just for its inventive Drake disses. While the song’s references to Drake’s foibles and flaws have fans dissecting their favorite lines, one in particular has them scratching their heads instead.
Although pop culture references have never been Kendrick’s strong suit, he name-checks the child actor from the films The Sixth Sense and AI: Artificial Intelligence to undercut Drake’s use of AI to utilize deceased rapper Tupac’s voice in his “Taylor Made Freestyle.” At least, he thinks he does — because the name Kendrick actually checked is Joel Osteen, the controversial televangelist whose Texas megachurch drew negative headlines for how it handled its Hurricane Harvey response in 2017. The name he apparently meant to say is Haley Joel Osment, who achieved cultural ubiquity for his reading of the iconic line “I see dead people” in the 1999 thriller The Sixth Sense.
Did this man confuse Joel Olsteen with Haley Joel Osment
i just wish i was in the room as a movie expert to let Kendrick know that he mixed up Joel Osteen (the televangelist preacher) with Haley Joel Osment (the child actor who starred in A.I. and The 6th Sense) other than that though? no notes. 9/10. madness.
As fans remark on the hilarious mix-up, one joke that keeps recurring is the similarity to Abbott Elementary character Barbara Howard. One of the show’s teachers played by Sheryl Lee Ralph, Mrs. Howard is the center of a running gag in which she regularly confuses white celebrities’ names, but everyone else can usually figure out who she really means. Examples include Brian Austin Green (Bryan Tyree Henry), Carrie Underwood (Keri Washington), and Tommy Lee Jones (James Earl Jones). Check out some more responses below:
— a.s.f. aint doin shit (@asfaintdoinshit) April 30, 2024
Kendrick confusing Haley Joel Osment with Joel Osteen is so fucking funny, he didn’t even Google shit, just walked into the booth mad as hell lmaooo https://t.co/ibu9xq3FvR
Today, Kendrick Lamar escalated his rap war with Drake in a huge way, launching an intercontinental ballistic missile with “Euphoria,” his response to Drake’s paired sallies, “Push-Ups” and “Taylor Made Freestyle.” After Kendrick initially threw down the gauntlet with his verse on Future and Metro Boomin’s We Don’t Trust You track “Like That,” fans were disappointed that it took him so long to clap back at Drake, especially after Drake made the critical error of employing AI reproductions of West Coast icons Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur on his latter response to “Like That.”
But any lingering disappointment was blown away — along with all expectations of plausible deniability — when Kendrick dropped “Euphoria,” the most scathing anti-Drake track from one of the Canadian competitor’s foes since “The Story Of Adidon.” In fact, that dust-up is one of the many points of contention Kendrick addresses in “Euphoria,” sneering, “F*ck all that pushin’ P, let me see you push-a-T / You better off spinnin’ again on him, you think about pushin’ me / He’s Terrance Thornton, I’m Terrance Crawford, I’m whoopin’ feet.” And that’s just one of the many, many haymakers Kendrick unloads on his opponent. Here are the 10 best lines from Kendrick’s latest Drake diss and what we think they mean.
“Cole and Aubrey know I’m a selfish n***; the crown is heavy / I pray they my real friends, if not, I’m YNW Melly”
Gifford, Florida rapper YNW Melly is currently on trial for allegedly plotting the murder of two members of his rap crew, YNW Sakchaser and YNW Juvy, and staging the scene to look like the result of a drive-by by rivals. K. Dot likens himself to Melly and Drake and J. Cole to Melly’s victims, pointing out how they couldn’t have been friends if Melly actually did set them up. In the same way, Kendrick doesn’t see Drake or Cole as friends in the rap business, only rivals.
“I hate the way that you walk, the way that you talk, I hate the way that you dress / I hate the way you sneak diss, if I catch flight, it’s gon’ be direct”
Self-explanatory, but it’s rare you see rappers state their emotions so plainly in rap battles. Kendrick doesn’t dress it up in any fancy metaphors, he just tells it like it is (although, on a personal note, I feel like if he REALLY didn’t like him this much, just fight it out. Let’s get all the way negative, as Vince Staples would say).
“My first one like my last one: it’s a classic, you don’t have one / Let your core audience stomach that; didn’t tell ’em where you get your abs from”
In “Push-Ups,” Drake taunts Kendrick over the lukewarm reception of his 2022 album Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers. “Your last one bricked, you really not on sh*t,” he mocked. “They make excuses for you ’cause they hate to see me lit.” Here, Kendrick stands up for his misunderstood album, and in a bit of a non-sequitur, redirects attention to the longstanding rumor that Drake got liposuction in order to cut a more impressive figure.
“Surprised you wanted that feature request / You know that we got some shit to address”
Not much of a diss, but more of a surprising reveal, this line dishes some behind-the-scenes dirt: That despite the tension between the two rappers, Drake still wants to work with Kendrick, who would rather air out dirty laundry than collaborate with Drake again. According to some internet rumors, the song K. Dot turned down? “First Person Shooter,” on which Drake allegedly began the latest round of “sneak-dissing.”
“When I see you stand by Sexyy Red, I believe you see two bad bitches / I believe you don’t like women, that’s real competition, you might pop ass with ’em”
On a personal level, I have to say, I’m disappointed. Rap’s love for casual misogyny rears its ugly head yet again. Kendrick isn’t quite as evolved as he made out on his last album, and yet, there’s something to the idea that Drake engages in just as much misogyny as any rapper, he just dresses it up in “nice guy” rhetoric.
“Let’s speak on percentage, show me your splits, I make sure I double back with you / You was signed to a n**** that’s signed to a n**** that said he was signed to that n****”
Here’s some inside baseball, but also a deft reminder that those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. When Drake baited Kendrick over his recording contract on “Push-Ups” (“The way you doin’ splits, bitch, your pants might rip”), he conveniently overlooked how bad his own first deal was. Now that Drake’s licensing his publishing to Republic, he’s in a better position, but it wasn’t too long ago he was in the same corner as a lot of rappers (and doing very little to improve conditions overall in the music biz).
“Why would I call around tryna get dirt on n****s? Y’all think all of my life is rap? / That’s ho sh*t, I got a son to raise, but I can see you know nothin’ ’bout that”
Another callback to “The Story Of Adidon,” Kendrick reminds listeners and Drake that rap gossip doesn’t dominate his waking hours — and that Drake had to be “bullied into being a father” (not to be a wet blanket, but I also hate this narrative for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that all this started on a record from Future, of all people).
“Am I battlin’ ghosts or AI? N**** feelin’ like Joel Osteen / Funny, he was in a film called AI and my sixth sense tellin’ me to off him”
Off the wordplay alone, this might be the best bar in the whole damn song, although Kendrick accidentally (?) pulls a Mrs. Howard from Abbott Elementary (and like Sheryl Lee Ralph’s iconic character, we all know what he means). For all you kids whose birth year starts with a “2,” Haley Joel Osment (the person he meant to reference, not mega-church televangelist Joel Osteen) was a child actor best known for two roles: The Sixth Sense and AI: Artificial Intelligence. In the first, he played a traumatized child who could “see dead people” and in the latter, he portrayed an abandoned android hoping to become a real boy a la Pinocchio.
Kendrick name-checks Osment to take another dig at Drake for using an AI Tupac voice on “Taylor Made,” and the perceived disrespect of using a deceased rap legend to make his point for him using technology — i.e. “ghost or AI.” Dot’s play on “sixth sense” ties the metaphor together but also underscores his natural instinct for battle.
“Whoever that’s f*ckin’ with him, f*ck you n****s, and f*ck the industry too / If you takin’ it there, I’m takin’ it further; psst, that’s somethin’ that you don’t wanna do”
Kendrick ends with a familiar refrain, calling back to his longstanding distaste for industry politics and cold regard for fame. However, he also ends on a warning to Drake — his reprisal could well be even more vicious and revelatory if Drake decides to continue the game.
It’s been more than a month since Future & Metro Boomin’s “Like That” sparked the biggest rap beef of 2024. Kendrick Lamar’s verse took shots at both J. Cole and Drake and it’s been an avalanche of developments ever since. That started when Cole hit back with a diss track of his own slipped into the tracklist of a mixtape called Might Delete Later. The project lived up to its name when Cole apologized for the diss and removed it from streaming services just a few days later. That was followed by Drake’s own response “Push Ups” which just hit the top 20 of the Hot 100 earlier today.
Now Kendrick Lamar has given everyone a big reason to keep talking about the beef. That came when he dropped his new song “euphoria” earlier today. It came as a midweek surprise to fans that had begun to think he may not be responding at all. The song is over 6 minutes long and fans immediately began dissecting what it had to offer. That included roping Sexyy Red into the equation and calling out Drake’s parenting directly. But another detail grabbing people’s attention has to do with the original song that started the entire affair, “Like That.” Check out what Kendrick had to say about it below.
In the new track, Kendrick delivers a lyric about Drake filing a cease & desist order over “Like That.” Fans have interpreted that he’s talking about the “Like That” remix made by Kanye West. The remix leaked onto the internet earlier this month and featured West becoming the most recent rapper to take shots at the “Rich Baby Daddy” hitmaker. If Kendrick is to be believed, it seems like Drake may have tried to shut this remix down as soon as possible.
What do you think of Kendrick Lamar claiming Drake sent a cease & desist order over “Like That” and Kanye West’s remix of it? Do you think “euphoria” firmly won the beef for Kendrick Lamar? Let us know in the comment section below.
We back in the beef streets. Kendrick Lamar has disturbed everybody’s Tuesday working morning to fire of “Euphoria.”
The track opens with Lamar rapping over the Teddy Pendergrass classic “You’re My Latest, My Greatest Inspriation,” calling out “the famous actor we once knew” as spiraling. He also stated Drake was a “pathetic master manipulator” created a fake story about Lamar’s family in “Push Ups.” Another early job is “you make music that pacify them, I can double down on that line but spare you this time, that’s random act of kindness,” hinting at rumors of Drake’s involvement with underage girls.
The track then hits a new level, calling out Drake for dodging Pusha T, calling into question his contracts, bieng a poor father and more. All the while, leaving the belief he has more on the way. One of which, “
The wait is over. Kendrick Lamar finally claps back at Drake with “Euphoria,” the latest volley in the rap titans’ ongoing back-and-forth. Listen to it above.
