Rap Just Erupted Into Its Own Infinity War. There’s Nothing “Enlightened” About Sitting It Out. (2024)

On Friday at midnight, an already historic rap beef metastasized into an all-out hip-hop Infinity War—with Drake playing a Thanos who has yet to throw down his gauntlet. Slate’s Chris Molanphy made a valiant effort to summarize the multipronged origins of Kendrick Lamar’s decision to bludgeon Drake last month, but Future and Metro Boomin’s release last night of We Still Don’t Trust You, a sequel to March’s album We Don’t Trust You, further ensconced them as willing instigators for anyone who doesn’t like Aubrey Graham. On it, ASAP Rocky mocks Drake’s last album and seems to drag him for still being “in his feelings” over Rihanna, the mother of Rocky’s child, and even Drizzy’s longtime Toronto collaborator the Weeknd cackles and croons in relief at not signing under Drake’s label. So far, nothing but silence from Drake’s side, outside of some onstage huffing and puffing, though Joe Budden has claimed on his podcast that the wars are about to go “nuclear.”

This leaves J. Cole as the only person to respond to Kendrick in any substance, though even he tried to retroactively pull his punch. His Might Delete Later, last week’s midnight surprise, is punctuated by the clearest answer to Lamar’s “Like That”: “7 Minute Drill,” a diss track that is mercifully not seven minutes. Yet, at Cole’s Dreamville Fest on Sunday, the Fayetteville, North Carolina, rapper paused his performance to backtrack from the diss track, calling it “the lamest sh*t I ever did in my f*cking life” and adding that “that sh*t don’t sit right with my spirit.” Fulfilling the passive-aggressive promise of the title, he promised that the thing he might delete would soon be scraped from streaming platforms.

Few people who don’t pay for X blue checks to share their favorite J. Cole lyrics felt the diss track was particularly strong. In fact, Cole’s obvious envy of Kendrick’s brilliance—even when downplaying Lamar’s catalog, he acknowledges two of his albums, Good Kid, M.A.A.D City and DAMN, as classics—showed in the middling execution. As Alphonse Pierre of Pitchfork wrote, “Who the f*ck wants to hear this extremely measured and level-headed assessment of Kendrick’s albums in a diss track?”

But in the days since Cole’s retreat, another parallel discourse among the hip-hop commentariat gained steam: The idea that his decision to opt out of the beef was a product of his enlightenment, a refusal to participate in a “toxic” masculine cycle of rap-on-rap crime. Prolific music writer and Passion of the Weiss founder Jeff Weiss and Genius alum Rob Markman were disappointed with Cole’s moonwalk, but both dipped into Pinterestic platitudes when commending the rapper for being “emotionally attuned” and “prioritizing his peace.” (At least Weiss tacked on, “This is also why I never wanted to listen to his music.”) Other defenses have come from those who are, themselves, less enlightened. Charlamagne tha God, who has a history of, more than once, seemingly admitting to rape before claiming he’s misspoken, had the gall to run for the high ground and pathologize “unhealed” rap fans, who, he rants, “want a man to attack a man for your entertainment because we are a culture that feeds off conflict.” Matt Rife—the stand-up who recently attempted to pivot to anti-woke by joking about beating women and then followed it by whining that not enough people laughed—similarly bashed all the rap fans clamoring for more as people with “with no lives and nothing to lose, egging on negativity.”

J. Cole bears some responsibility for manifesting the framework for how his listeners reacted. In the track, he laments receiving “texts flooded with the hunger for a toxic reply” in between references to guns he may or may not carry. The track itself is self-serving, anxious, and passive-aggressive.

These takes curdled faster than Cole’s fortitude. Not a week removed from his Dreamville Fest mea culpa, Cole, in his own J. Cole way, rejoined the fray by continuing to apologize … on We Still Don’t Trust You—an album that, I will remind you, appears specifically constructed to topple Drake, a man he not months ago celebrated on the hit single “First Person Shooter.” Like Mac from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Cole played both sides so he always comes out on top.

But there’s a deeper problem with this line of argument. To praise Cole’s retraction and apology as signs of emotional maturity while the rest of us are just “toxic” isn’t just to resort to therapy clichés, it’s borderline culturally illiterate and even anti-Black. This line of analysis falls prey to the trap of interpreting a genre built on bombasticism, brags, and competitive fire with fearmongering literalism, as if these rappers are not artists waging war with metaphor but men on the verge of pulling an actual weapon. It shows how even longtime rap aficionados can carry regressive baggage.

This could have been avoided with a more critical eye toward Cole’s maneuvering, and a less reactionary approach to rap beef, but there’s no point in denying rap can succumb to toxicity. Future, the man co-curating the coup d’etat, has infamously spent the better part of a decade unable to get over his ex, Ciara, for linking up with professional square Russell Wilson. That’s on the milder end. One of Slate’s most celebrated projects, Joel Anderson’s Biggie and Tupac entry into the Slow Burn podcast series, examines the origins and tragic aftermath of a rap beef that went too far. While the motive for Drakeo the Ruler’s fatal stabbing still hasn’t been adjudicated in the courts, the aforementioned Weiss witnessed it himself backstage. In Harlem, where I live, it wasn’t even two years ago that a drill video dance mimicking the stabbing of a 14-year-old rapper became a viral sensation.

At the same time, not all disses are created equal, and there’s a big difference between identifying toxic dynamics in hip-hop and attributing dysfunction to the genre’s nature. This attitude toward them is reminiscent of the overly literal treatment they receive in the American criminal justice system, which, as Erik Nielson writes in Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America, distorts a “hallmark of rap music … the larger-than-life persona that many rappers adopt.” With this in mind, nothing Cole said to Kendrick in “7 Minute Drill,” or vice versa, should be understood as a legitimate threat to either person. Cole’s body-bag sound effects are just that, FX added in a studio to immerse listeners in the moment without recruiting them into felonies. Kendrick’s warning to Drake and Cole to back off “’fore all your dogs gettin’ buried” is wordplay from a Pulitzer Prize winner. I could not be more confident that Kendrick is too busy planning the rollout of his bizarre musical with the co-creators of South Park to pick out the pet cemeteries he referenced in the song. Would a continued back-and-forth be confrontational and hyperbolic? Sure. And yes please. But “toxic”? “Unhealed”?

In his foreword for Rap on Trial, Killer Mike—not an actual murderer, so we’re all clear!—wrote that rap “offered us a kind of therapy as well, a place to express even our rawest feelings.” Knowing that we exist in a country that metronomically criminalizes and condemns Black male aggression, all of us can try to train our minds to give some benefit of the doubt, appreciating these artists and their poetic license. None of these rappers have advocated for actual material violence, but instead were conveying a simple truth: They were willing to defend themselves and their body of work. This has been normal in hip-hop since the beginning, a feature and not a bug. Hip-hop was born out of early emcee, DJ, and b-boy battles done in front of a crowd of onlookers. It is no wonder that rap and sports cross-pollinate so frequently. As Rap Dad author Juan Vidal noted in his Esquire compilation of metaphors in rap lyrics, hip-hop contains a “fierce, sports-like nature.”

We shouldn’t accept Cole’s reasoning for leaving the beef without remembering what we lose by it. Kendrick’s verse on Big Sean’s “Control” is one of the most invigorating moments in 21^st-century music, and no amount of Good Kid, M.A.A.D City sales or To Pimp a Butterfly critical acclaim could prove his musical dominance as efficiently as a Compton-born rapper proclaiming himself to be the King of New York.* The hype from “Control” was only possibly exceeded by Drake’s “Back to Back” slams of Meek Mill, full of lunch-line worthy jabs at his rival, meme-rap at its finest that even drew the Fresh Prince, not exactly rap’s most notorious killer, in to participate in the fun. Brutal as Pusha T’s Drake diss “The Story of Adidon” was, it works as rap beef and psychological analysis—identifying fissures in Drake’s multiracial identity I’m not sure Drake knew himself. Who says rap can’t be therapeutic?

And who says a diss track can’t be progressive? Maybe the most righteous diss of recent vintage was Megan Thee Stallion’s “Hiss,” a scintillating clapback born out of self-defense and a reclamation of her autonomy after the Houstonian rapper was shot by Tory Lanez. Through it, she cleverly disarmed Nicki Minaj’s attempt at Gamergating the truly toxic response emanating from Lanez’s criminal trial and eventual conviction. Aren’t you glad nobody told Meg to back down?

If anything was off-base on Might Delete Later, besides that Cole saw fit to be so mild toward his peer, it was a convoluted punchline (possibly directed at Kendrick) involving the word “puss*” that was needlessly harsh to trans people. Kendrick doesn’t deserve an apology. It’s rap music. But Kendrick’s trans relatives, whom he raps about on “Auntie Diaries,” probably do.
Maybe a more enlightened person would have done the inner work to uproot their own misogyny and come to that realization, but that’s for Cole and his therapist to work out. There’s no reason to drag trans people into this game, but there’s nothing wrong with playing it.

Correction, April 15, 2024: This article originally identified “Control” as Jay Electronica’s. Although Jay Electronica did feature on the track, the lead artist was Big Sean.