It’s Not a Rap Beef. It’s a Cultural Reckoning.

Scapegoating is one of humankind’s primal rituals, dating back to the Book of Leviticus, in which God commanded the prophet Aaron to lay hands on a goat, confess the sins of his tribe, and then send the animal into the desert. Throughout centuries and across cultures, the historian René Girard once argued, warring factions have settled disputes by agreeing upon a figure to collectively blame—a resolution that is ugly and unfair but, more than anything, cathartic.

Perhaps this tradition helps explain what’s been so satisfying about watching two of the 21st century’s most important musicians, Drake and Kendrick Lamar, try to destroy each other. The rap feud that has engulfed public attention in recent weeks has been litigated in breathtaking, twisty-turny songs packed with very 2020s references—to Ozempic, disinformation, AI, Taylor Swift, and elite pedophile rings. These two superstars have leveled accusations so nasty that cancellation, today’s standard punishment for celebrity wrongdoing, hardly seems sufficient. Thus far, the consensus is that Lamar has “won” the war—but in that case, Drake’s defeat is really what’s significant. We’re witnessing the modern implementation of an ancient rite, the desecration of an individual for the moral cleansing of the masses.

The conflict was sparked by what now seems like a quaint dispute: Who’s the greatest rapper? A verse by J. Cole on a Drake song last fall postulated himself, Drake, and Lamar as hip-hop’s “big three.” Earlier this year, Lamar replied with a correction: “It’s just big me,” he rapped in a tone of seething hostility. Cole issued and quickly retracted a reply, but Drake took Lamar’s bait, and the two men began volleying diss tracks. Over eight songs—plus one interlude!—in less than a month, the question of who’s a better rapper has given way to a more profound debate about hip-hop, masculinity, and nothing less than the nature of evil.

Beef is older than rap, but this showdown is new in its scale and velocity. When Jay-Z and Nas scrapped in the early 2000s, they did so at a time when rap was not quite yet synonymous with pop. But in today’s fractured musical ecosystem, the 37-year-old Drake, who has had 13 No. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, and the 36-year-old Lamar, the only rapper to ever win a Pulitzer, have achieved a rare level of name recognition. The most consequential rap beef ever, between Biggie and Tupac, simmered for months and unfolded via physical releases, local radio, and in-person dustups. By contrast, Drake and Lamar are using fast-twitch digital technologies to record tracks at whim, circulate them around the planet instantly, and feed a teeming ecosystem of commentators, remixers, fans, haters, and voyeurs.

This global audience has long been primed for the showdown. Since the early 2010s, Drake and Lamar have reigned as the yin and yang of popular rap: the entertainer and the artist, the hedonist and the monk. Drake has flooded the marketplace with hits, collaborations, and tie-in products. His sound is chameleonic, borrowing unapologetically from far-flung subgenres and scenes, and his lyrical outlook is pettily, proudly self-interested. Lamar, by contrast, expresses himself in carefully honed albums exploring how to live ethically in a fallen world. The Compton native’s music, for all its experimental edge, roots itself in the bounce and attitude of West Coast hip-hop. These two men have long been in a cold war, trading covert lyrical insults that fit with the ideological and aesthetic clash they both seem to represent.

So when Lamar rapped, “I hate the way that you walk, the way that you talk, I hate the way that you dress” on last week’s diss track “Euphoria,” he was harvesting from richly tilled soil. The hatred he spoke of was both visceral and intellectual; the song argued that the mixed-race Drake was insufficiently Black, or at least exploitative and cringey in his performance of Blackness. “It’s not just me,” Lamar rapped, referring to his distaste for Drake and the people he surrounds himself with. “I’m what the culture feelin’.” He was, by this logic, unleashing the pent-up resentment of true rap fans against a man he later labeled a “colonizer.”

Others can debate Lamar’s racial claims, but on some level the attack represents a desperate wish: for Drake, along with all he represents, to be cleanly excised from modern hip-hop culture. The maddening truth for Drake’s critics is that he, in a fundamental way, is modern hip-hop culture—the genre’s sound and social cachet over the past 15 years are inextricable from his success. On the diss track “Not Like Us,” Lamar rapped a list of well-respected artists such as 21 Savage and Young Thug who have lent Drake “false street cred.” This attack cut Drake, but it also called attention to how many rappers have mingled their brands with his. Even for Lamar, the relationship between realness and commercialism isn’t neat: As Drake pointed out in his own diss tracks, Lamar has worked with Maroon 5, Swift, and Drake himself.

[Read: How the Pulitzers chose Kendrick Lamar, according to a juror]

As the feud between the men escalated, a more explosive issue came to the fore: Which of these men is worse to women and children? Lamar’s attacks were blunt, labeling Drake a deadbeat father and a “predator.” He addressed pitying verses to Drake’s young son (whose existence was first publicized in a 2018 diss track by Drake’s rival Pusha T) and to an 11-year-old daughter, whom Drake allegedly has been keeping secret. He also said that Drake leads a crew of “certified pedophiles” that is systematically luring “victims all inside of they home.” Drake, meanwhile, has called attention to rumors that Lamar beat the mother of his child.

None of these claims is verifiable. Drake has denied Lamar’s accusations: “Just for clarity, I feel disgusted, I’m too respected / If I was fucking young girls, I promise I’d have been arrested,” he rapped on “The Heart Part 6.” He also claimed that his camp intentionally leaked the lie that Drake was hiding a daughter in order to cause confusion. As for the claim that Lamar committed domestic violence, the rapper denied it years ago in a radio interview—and, in his recent diss tracks, repeatedly (albeit vaguely) said that Drake is lying about Lamar’s family.

Truth, however, doesn’t really matter in this battle. The PR narrative is clear-cut, classic, and irresistible. People like Drake are “not like us,” as Lamar put it in a track that will have listeners singing along and dancing to lyrics about child trafficking all summer. Lamar has spun a populist narrative in which cultural elites are vampiric abusers from whom regular folks need to hide their daughters. The power of that kind of rhetoric has been well demonstrated in national politics—and has crowd-pleasing appeal at a time when hip-hop titans such as Diddy are facing legal trouble in connection with alleged sex crimes (allegations that he denies). It is easier to say “not like us” than to dwell on the reality that predation happens everywhere in American life, in unfamous communities, workplaces, and homes.

Drake has turned in some of the best rapping of his career over the past few weeks, but the substance of his disses isn’t landing. Many of his attacks draw from Lamar’s own catalog—which is all about how society’s moral corruption is perpetuated not by far-off villains but by our own selves. Lamar’s most recent album, 2022’s Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, told of his own infidelity, brutality, misogyny, pride, and a bucket of other sins. Drake’s lyrics have invoked those admissions to show that Lamar isn’t a saint, but the problem with this logic is not simply that Lamar has already confessed. It’s that Drake, the more popular artist, is just a more appealing vessel upon which to project communal shame.

Indeed, Drake’s shunning has been a group activity. The feud really kicked off in March when Drake’s frequent collaborators Future and Metro Boomin released two albums full of Drake disses. (The first album featured Lamar’s “it’s just big me” verse.) Rick Ross, A$AP Rocky, and Kanye West have jumped in with their own digs. Each of these figures has his own reasons for beef, but the gist of their attacks has been tonally similar, laced with disgust. Most hilariously—and tellingly—Metro Boomin made a beat with a sped-up chorus about Drake’s alleged plastic surgery, and invited anyone to remix it. Amateurs on TikTok, YouTube, and other platforms have used that beat to recap the very same talking points that Lamar has been using.

“This shit was some good exercise,” Drake muttered, resignedly, in his most recent salvo. If he now retreats from the spotlight for a period, what has been accomplished? Lamar has proved himself to be an even savvier operator than once thought, and the breakneck rudeness of “Euphoria,” “Not Like Us,” and Drake’s “Family Matters” are going to remain a guilty thrill to listen to—but the meat of the dispute between these rappers has hardly been addressed. Surely misogyny and abuse will not disappear from society. Hip-hop probably won’t revert to some purer, more righteous form of itself. Some people may even use this war of words to try to perpetuate the bloodiest tendencies of the genre’s history; yesterday, a drive-by shooter injured one of Drake’s bodyguards, for as-yet-unknown reasons.

The most likely legacy of this battle will be in accelerating the record industry’s strategic use of gossip and metanarrative. Music was once a social, local art form that fostered cultural cohesion; now it’s an on-demand utility that insulates people in their headphones. Commanding mass attention in this era is a difficult task, but the artists who are able to do so—Drake and Lamar, yes, as well as storytellers such as Swift and Olivia Rodrigo—make the internet feel like a village from our distant past. We can send strangers into the desert and feel some absolution, whether we’ve earned it or not.