When Drake and Kanye West (now Ye) buried the hatchet, some saw it as the moment hell froze over. Others were just downright confused. Kendrick Lamar falls in the latter camp.
At the stroke of midnight, Lamar dropped his latest studio album Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, the followup to 2017’s Damn.
On album track “Father Time,” featuring Sampha, the Los Angeles native takes a good hard look at himself and explores the long-ingrained “daddy issues” that’ve both fueled him and held him back.
How so? “When Kanye got back with Drake, I was slightly confused,” he raps. “Guess I’m not as mature as I think, got some healin’ to do.”
He wasn’t the only one confused by it all. Drizzy and Ye kept hip-hop’s heavyweight feud simmering for more than a decade when, like a bolt of lightning, the pair caught up last year, broke bread and posed for photos. It was the moment of reconciliation no one saw coming.
West and Drake’s beef even sizzled in the lead-up to their respective albums Donda and Certified Lover Boy. After ‘Ye briefly leaked Drake’s address, the OVO MC appeared to put him on blast with the song “7am on Bridle Path,” and later leaked ‘Ye and André 3000’s “Life of the Party” collab that didn’t make the cut on Donda.
It’s not the first time the Pulitzer Prize winner has called out one of the two rap stars in song. Famously, in “King Kunta,” from Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, he rapped “I can dig rapping, but a rapper with a ghost writer?/ What the fuck happened?,” a lyric that hit our ears when the Drake vs. Quentin Miller ghostwriting drama was in full swing.
Lamar emerged as a hip-hop star-in-waiting with 2012’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D City, which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 chart. He blew the doors off with To Pimp a Butterfly, a critical and commercial hit which went to No. 1, as did Damn and the compilation album Untitled, Unmastered.
