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Drake’s lawsuit against Kendrick Lamar also puts artistic freedom on trial

Drake is understandably vexed about lyrics framing him as a ‘certified paedophile’ – but diss tracks are a deliberately lurid part of rap

In 2005, a case brought by record producer Armen Boladian over lyrics on rapper Warren G’s 2001 track Speed Dreamin’ – which called him “a disgrace to the species” and a “big nose motherfucker”, and suggested he should have “faeces” thrown at him – was dismissed, with the offending lines judged to be “rhetorical hyperbole”. No one is ever going to hold up Ether, Nas’s 2001 evisceration of Jay-Z, as a model of decorum, but it still feels like it’s made of different stuff to Pusha T’s stakes-raising The Story of Adidon, an all-out 2018 assault on Drake’s personal life and mental health that one critic described as “bringing a gun to a knife fight”. Even if you think the said area could do with cooling down a few degrees, the notion of using the courts to do it is a deeply peculiar one at best; the idea that rappers making diss tracks will be forced to mind their manners or face legal consequences feels somehow antithetical to the whole business, and you could easily depict it as a form of censorship.

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