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How Drake Is Winning The War

Analyzing the 2024 hip-hop civil war

Stanley C.
The Riff
8 min readJan 20, 2025

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Source: October’s Very Own via Hypebeast

The Rap Song Heard Round The World

Like the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the song “Like That” sparked the hot war that would consume hip-hop music and media for 2024. In the hot-headed song, Future and Metro Boomin are flaunting their money and taunting their opponents. To complement their message and set rap music ablaze, Kendrick Lamar leaped onto the track with a ferocious verse aimed point blank at the craniums of his fellow blog-era peers, J. Cole and Drake.

Playing off the phrase “Big Three,” which J Cole referenced in his collaboration with Drake, “First Person Shooter,” Lamar made it clear that he took offense to the line. For Lamar, the Big Three is a misnomer because he considers himself far greater than any sum of the two. Neither Drake nor J. Cole took those words kindly and quickly pounced back with their rebuttals to the tide-shifting tune.

Within a month of Like That’s release, all parties attacked the other, claiming their position at the top of the Hip-Hop hierarchy. Things of course, get more complex when Cole bows out of the battle during his set at the Fayetteville festival. Further, new additions to the beef, such as Rick Ross, entered the fray, dropping his own string of diss tracks toward Drake.

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Stanley C.
Stanley C.

Written by Stanley C.

Hi there 👋🏾 I'm a music writer that posts weekly essays about albums, genres, songs, and other novel topics in the music world that span across time.

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