“euphoria.”

Okay I know that this beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar (and also J. Cole though he very respectfully and perhaps admirably has bowed out) is getting a bit out of hand. I know there are some pretty serious allegations flung in both people’s direction—that if true render complicated if not null some of the positive things I have to say—and that if we keep egging this beef on maybe it will become a Tupac and Biggie situation. As fascinating as it is to follow, I don’t know if any of us really want that. We don’t want these guys—both talented, both with long-lasting consistent careers—to die for the cause of a diss track. I guess I’m not even someone who thinks a diss track, essentially bullying somebody to a beat, is necessarily a good thing, but I do think it has been really interesting to follow this one for the simple fact that Kendrick Lamar, Drake and J. Cole are all wildly talented individuals. It’s intriguing to see what they come up with in the moment when everybody is looking at them, waiting, very impatiently, to see what they’re going to say. (I wrote most of this before I heard the latest of what they had to say, which is pretty damning.)

I remember liking J. Cole’s diss track when my boyfriend showed it to me—thinking J. Cole is good at being thoughtful in his lyrics and that when he is mean he does it almost reluctantly, like his hand was forced, which seems even more evident when he got on stage and said he regrets what he said and then asks the huge crowd of people in front of him if they like Kendrick Lamar. When they scream that they do, he seems satisfied, like he’s made up for any harm he’s caused. He tells them, “As do I.”

I remember liking Drake’s diss track “Push Ups” when it was leaked on the Internet and thinking that it’s wild that he too can just pull this up when called to, that he can just create a bop out of thin air. We take this for granted maybe, the ability for these artists, especially hip hop artists, especially the ones who’ve been around for a decade or more, to make music that we can relate to. It takes talent and it takes a poet’s kind of ease with language to sit down and write lyrics and then to make them sound good to music, to make work that is something people can understand, even in the heat of the moment, even in response to something mean someone’s said about you. (What I like about Drake feels especially complicated now considering all that’s being said against him, things maybe we’ve been thinking about for some time, things that if true might mean stepping away from his music, regardless of his talent.)

I liked J. Cole’s diss track and I liked Drake’s diss track, but Kendrick Lamar’s “euphoria” was another gesture toward the notion I’ve held for a while (that a lot us have held for a while), the feeling that he’s in a league of his own. It’s in three parts (and as of now “euphoria” is Part 1 of who knows how many). He changes voices, he changes beats, he changes the angle, has conversations with himself, digs deeper and deeper into what he’s saying, which is about Drake and isn’t about Drake—is about, too, how Lamar is an artist, and how, when summoned, if given enough time, he will deliver. (Even this is complicated—his genius vs. his lifestyle — if what’s being said about him is true.) To be fair, Kendrick Lamar started this whole thing in part when he said fuck the Big 3 (him, Drake, J. Cole) and then suggested that he’s in a league of his own (maybe he is but he didn’t have to say that). Because of this, Lamar was maybe winding up to respond to the pushback of the others this whole time, had more time to prepare than J. Cole or Drake did. But he also is maybe more precise in how he disses and more precise in how he writes in general, something that makes him—when we zoom out, when we look back on this in fifty years or so—the kind of great artist that say Whitney Houston is or Prince. 

Something that I like about “euphoria,” about this whole diss saga in general—despite the pettiness and the maybe mean-spiritedness of it (and the crushing allegations, which if true, change everything)—is how it gestures toward, as Kevin Quashie really gorgeously puts it in his book Black Aliveness—“a black world.” Quashie talks about this gesture inward in Black culture, how Black people—Black artists— have never and should never see themselves always and only in relation to Whiteness. While Whiteness (via racism) informs Black existence, it is not all of what it means to be Black. Within Blackness, there is nuance and there is specificity and there is Drake and there is Kendrick Lamar and there is J. Cole, who’s sorry he said anything. Part of their disses are how they think the others have catered to the White world looking on, part of their argument in these tracks is who is the deepest into Blackness: who is the most representative of the culture and who is a joke for trying to be. While it’s maybe especially mean to tell a biracial person (as Kendrick Lamar tells Drake) that they’re not Black enough, it is important to note how Blackness and not Whiteness is what every one of these artists is aspiring to. And while that’s a slippery slope, considering that what Blackness means, when we try to define it, gets more and more limited, the intention is maybe productive. Like Quashie says, we should aim for a Blackness—“a black world”—that’s expansive, that is not Greatest Common Denominator Black (What do most of us like? Everything else makes you less Black) but a Black open enough to include all of it, “a black world” that gets bigger and bigger with all of our quirks and eccentricities, with all of our toxic traits and interests, with all of our talents and loves and with all of our damning secrets laid bare. I like that this beef is orbiting “a black world,” and my hope is that in the future instead of cutting each other down to be the king of it (queen, ruler, etc.), we might look inward, create “a black world” that is open, inclusive of everything we are, euphoric and buzzing with its own complications. 

Image: Webster Dictionary / Kendrick Lamar