Kendrick Lamar has a significant hit on his hands with “Not Like Us,” as the Drake diss track ended up debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It’s one of the year’s defining songs so far, so people might be wondering about its chances at the 2025 Grammy Awards.
Can Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” Win A Grammy Award?
There are some requirements for a song to be eligible for Grammy nomination, and one of the most immediately important ones is the release window. In order to be eligible for the 2025 awards, a work needs to have been released between September 16, 2023 to August 30, 2024. “Not Like Us” come out on May 4, so it’s well within the window.
Another noteworthy consideration is the use of AI. As established for the 2024 awards, work created using AI tools is actually eligible for Grammy nomination if, among other criteria, “the human authorship component of the work submitted must be meaningful and more than de minimis.” There has been no word of AI usage in the song’s creation, so “Not Like Us” is alright on that front, too.
So, it appears there’s no reason why the song can’t be considered, and Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. just backed that up. In a recent TMZ interview, he was asked about if the song could be nominated and he said he doesn’t “see any reason why it couldn’t be.”