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What Are We to Do With All This Nastiness?
Kendrick versus Drake was a race to design the most insulting sentence — until the rappers and their admirers redefined what “too far” means.
But Drake’s “Family Matters” and “The Heart Part 6” — and Lamar’s “Meet the Grahams” and “Not Like Us” — were each calculated acts of reputational damage and self-repair whose speed, density, and discursiveness bore a closer resemblance to a quick and rugged social-media dustup than rap beeves of the past, disagreements which cooked on a much lower simmer. The sense that cataloguing potential violence toward women and girls won’t put a dent in anyone’s business machine is depressing.It was a public-relations coup getting Drake to say any of this, to grace his signature sound — gooey vocal samples, understated drums, watery synths, enveloping reverb — with point-by-point rejections of grim accusations: “I’m your baby mama’s screen saver / Only fuckin’ with Whitneys, not Millie Bobby Browns, I’d never look twice at no teenager.” Detached cool is his cachet and he has had to deliver truly ghastly lines dismissing allegations of pedophilia in the usual icily domineering manner. The press that barely pushed back on Mr. Morale ’s glaring foibles — not deadnaming and gay slurs, not juxtaposing the tender “Mother I Sober” and Kodak, not boosting the self-help quack — is probably not holding anyone’s feet to the fire about this flurry of partner abuse and grooming allegations.
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