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The Long Wave: The Lamar v Drake beef has gone legal – what does it say about today’s hip-hop industry?

In this week’s newsletter: Lawyers are now involved in the most explosive rap feud of the century. A look at the potential cultural and commercial impact, and how hip-hop became big business

This week I spoke with Nels Abbey, Guardian contributor and author of The Hip-Hop MBA: Lessons in Cut-Throat Capitalism from Rap’s Moguls,for his take on Drake’s legal action against Universal Music Group (UMG) and Spotify. For Abbey, hip-hop artists’ backgrounds of economic deprivation, gang wars and rivalry, both local and continent-wide, mean that “something that should be a business competition becomes intensely personal, almost as if they try to destroy each other as people”. They approached and signed rappers such as Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer, who “sold massive records, but lacked cultural credibility – meaning that if you’re trying to create an empire in this business, when you find one person, you want to be able to attract more talent,” Abbey says.

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