Rapper Drake, pictured in 2019, is seeking a trial by jury on allegations that Universal Music Group defamed him by promoting and distributing Kendrick Lamar’s diss track, Not Like Us.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
Barbara Streisand owns a mansion on a cliff in Malibu.
We know this less-than-interesting tidbit because in 2003, Streisand sued a photographer who snapped a picture of her home as part of his project on coastal erosion, which she argued constituted a violation of her privacy. The lawsuit, which freely offered information about the house’s layout and entryways, only drew attention to what would have otherwise remained unknown, birthing what has since been called the Streisand Effect.
More than two decades later, it appears celebrities still haven’t figured out the main lesson of that affair.
On Wednesday, after a year of brutal beef with L.A.’s Pulitzer Prize-winning emcee Kendrick Lamar, the Toronto-and-Texas rapper Drake launched a lawsuit against Universal Music Group, the record company behind both superstars. He is seeking a trial by jury on allegations that the label defamed him by promoting and distributing Lamar’s blistering diss track, Not Like Us.
Unlike Streisand’s house, the accusations against Drake in the song are already widely known; Not Like Us became a Billboard No. 1 hit for more than 20 weeks. The song’s shocking allegations – including accusing Drake and his camp of pedophilia – became a strange kind of anthem. The song was even referred to by Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris on the campaign trail.
But by effectively moving this beef from the court of public opinion to the actual courts, the legal broadside just serves to remind the world, both now and as the case moves ahead, about those allegations – a huge risk on Drake’s part.
The statement of claim says that “this lawsuit is not about the artist who created ‘Not Like Us’” – emphasis theirs – and repeatedly states that the “Recording says” the lyrics, rather than Lamar. But that is simply not how it will be seen in the court of public opinion. Maybe that doesn’t matter any more to Drake’s camp. But fans and curious onlookers will likely see and position the case as Drake v. Kendrick Lamar, and ultimately hinge on Lamar’s words.
The trial will need to determine if the lyrics were defamatory and would be interpreted that way, and as a public figure, Drake will have to prove that the lyrics were published with the knowledge they were false. That’s a tall enough order on its own, and the complicated proceedings and evidence submissions to come will only bring the beef back to cultural attention.
But this isn’t even the first time Drake forgot about the Streisand Effect in the past year. It’s easy to forget that, in the heat of the rapid-fire back-and-forth diss tracks between them last spring, that it was Drake himself who first brought up the sexual predation allegations against him in Taylor Made Freestyle. That provided an opening for Lamar to amplify claims that had, to that point, been simmering quietly in the more fanatical fringes of the internet.
A legal conflict over rap lyrics feels somehow inevitable. Hip-hop is big business now, and the reputational blows and incitements to violence that are table stakes in beefs, for better or for worse, mean something different today than they did a couple decades ago.
In 2001, when Nas went after Jay Z’s reputation by musing about whether he had been abused as a child and making accusations about his sexuality in Ether, another infamous beef-ending track, it would have been even more reputationally damaging for Jay Z to go after Columbia Records for putting it out.
But times have changed, and rap is more than art and entertainment now – a message that was recently sent by an Atlanta judge who accepted rapper Young Thug’s lyrics as evidence in a racketeering case against him, despite the argument that they constituted protected speech.
But by electing, on his own, to become the first superstar rapper to go the legal route to settle a lyrical beef, Drake only risks tarnishing his brand more. If anything, it may only affirm to fans the broader message that was at the very heart of the conflict: that Drake doesn’t belong, that he’s an appropriator of the culture. For someone who once boasted that “we never help” police in solving a crime, appealing to a judge to protect his interests only helps prove what Kendrick was arguing in the first place: that Drake can’t be trusted, that he’s a sellout without street cred.
“I study rap battles for a living,” Drake once said, discussing his beef with Pusha T in a 2018 interview with Lebron James. They were talking about Pusha T’s The Story of Adidon, a long, embittered track that exposed Drake for having an illegitimate child. He dismissed the song as “trash,” but with the spirit of an armchair general, he acknowledged that “it was a hell of a chess move.”
Whether Drake’s claims are true is now up to New York’s Southern District Court to decide. But the lawsuit itself will change no minds. What it will do, instead, is remind people of a beef he is widely seen to have lost, and the accusations that emerged from it – and inconveniently, less than a month before Lamar takes the stage at the Super Bowl, the pinnacle showcase of American culture.
If it’s chess that Drake thinks he’s playing, he just moved himself closer to checkmate.
