Satire: A Black Feminist Critique of the Drake x Kendrick Beef

“It was the day the sun’s ray had turned pale

with pity for the suffering of his Maker

when I was caught, and I put up no fight,

my lady, for your lovely eyes had bound me.

It seemed no time to be on guard against

Love’s blows; therefore, I went my way

secure and fearless — so, all my misfortunes

began in midst of universal woe.

Love found me all disarmed and found the way

was clear to reach my heart down through the eyes

which have become the halls and doors of tears.

It seems to me it did him little honour

to wound me with his arrow in my state

and to you, armed, not show his bow at all.”

— Pertrarch “Sonnet III”

“They throwin’ dirt on my old name

Only gets worse when you know things

You don't see the perks of this whole thing

But you get real on a pill and I like it

You just like my sidekick, I just wanna ride

Fulfill all your desires

Keep you in the front, never in the back

And never on the side, uh (yeah)

You a real ass woman and I like it

I don’t wanna fight it”

— Drake’s “Fire & Desire”

“You f**kin’ with n***as that's thinkin’ they cuter than you, oh

Say you on your cycle, but he on his period too, oh

The tables been turnin’ so much, I was thinkin' it's foosball

The tenderness of ’em, mistakin’ ’em for some wagyu, oh

Walk, talk like Kenny, like boss

Like Solána, I promise, more buzz, it’s a wasp

It's a crater or a spaceship, shut the fuck up, get lost

No favors, I'll wager whatever you worth, I ball

Somethin' about a conservative, regular girl that still can beat a bitch ass

Thorough as fuck, don’t need your bitch ass”

— Kendrick Lamar & SZA’s “30 For 30”

Drake and Kendrick Lamar do not have beef. They have an impermissible beautiful yearning, creating a tangible tension between the two of them.

Let me explain …

As a society, I think we have moved on far too quickly from the wonderful spectacle of Kendrick Lamar’s 2025 Super Bowl show, which included Black household names such as my favorite fellow delusional liar, SZA, worldwide tennis star with the most wifeguy husband, Serena Williams, Samuel Jackson, whose voice still sends delicious tremors up my spine, and DJ Mustard, whose producer tagline still haunts my soul whenever I listen to trap music.

However, there was one household name missing from the entirety of the show, who I thirsted to see more than SZA, Williams, Jackson, and Mustard exit that shiny clown car of a 1987 Buick GNX, and that name was one Audrey Graham Drake …

There’s always a thin line between love and hate. As a member of a generation proudly raised on the yearnful internet pages of Archive of Our Own, Wattpad, Tumblr, and Fanfiction.net, we grew up hungry for tags of Enemies to Lovers. Or Friends to Enemies to Lovers. Or Friends to Strangers to Friends to Lovers to Enemies to Friends to Lovers. Or so on and so on. And so on. We expect there to be tension between ourselves and our prospective romantic partners, which might be the reason why we gravitate so heavily to the unknown, to the toxic, to the situationship. And what rivalry in modern-day history compares to the one between Lamar and Drake?

Drake has been known for many different things: recently, it’s been for being a culture vulture, but the Canadian rapper used to be known as a finder and discoverer of new talent.

In November 2011, Lamar was featured on Drake’s “Take Care” album, singing alongside him on “Buried Alive”.

Now, keep in mind, young scholars who are quick to Drake hate, just as you are quick to ignore the burgeoning love story between Drake and Lamar, “Take Care” featured many certified lover-loser boy classics like “Shot For Me,” “Crew Love,” “The Motto,” and my secret favorite, “Marvin’s Room.” That album was a favorite in many Black households until The Great Shift happened, and it became corny to like the always-forever-corny-Drake because he turned 38 and was still making songs about the grand fumbles he did with many baddies.

In February 2012, Drake invited Lamar and A$AP Rocky to open on his Club Paradise Tour.

All of you Generation Z-ers forget yourself and your roots and don’t understand how powerful Drake was at this time and how nugu Lamar was. In Drake’s song “4 PM in Calabasas,” he writes a diary entry on his decision to bring Rocky and Lamar on tour with him, stating, “When they told me to take an R&B n — a / And I told ‘em no and drew for Kendrick and Rocky.”

In this statement, Drake alludes to many classics in modern-day romance. He places himself, Rocky, and Lamar in the same lineage as their intellectual ancestors, Bella Swan, Edward Cullen, and Jacob Black. There is a torrid affair happening in this paradise, much like what James Baldwin describes in the seminal queer literature text “Giovanni’s Room” (1956).

In “Giovanni’s Room,” James Baldwin writes of a narrator forced by society to choose between desire and image. After the titular Giovanni’s trial, the narrator remembers the Garden of Eden: a love represented by a debilitating, suffocating, and crumbling apartment. As the narrator reaches a choice, he remarks: “ It takes a hero to do both. People who remember [their Garden of Eden] court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.”

Drake, in 2011, is a madman. He chooses desire and rejects the idea of picking an R&B artist like The Weeknd or Majid Jordan to protect his masculine, prolific lover rap persona. Instead, he chooses desire and paradise, remembering the Garden of Eden: A$AP Rocky and Kendrick Lamar.

Additionally, Drake’s usage of the term “drew,” forces the listener to associate his relationship with Lamar and Rocky with Titanic (1997), an epic romantic disaster film. What does it mean when Jack and Rose, people from two different backgrounds — like Drake and Lamar, who come from two different rap traditions — fall in love and archive their love in paintings and portraits, just as Drake and Lamar did in October 2012, in their beautiful song, “Poetic Justice”?

And don’t even get me started on the Sula and Nel parallels from Toni Morrison’s “Sula” between Drake and Rocky. Rihanna exists as how Nel’s husband exists to fracture the budding bond of platonic-romantic between the two characters with a bond so deep that they were Sula-level “girl, girl, girlgirlgirl” together … with “circles and circles of sorrow” in Drake’s Marvin’s Room “cups of rosé.”

During his Super Bowl show, Lamar postured with Drake’s exes — SZA and Williams — that Drake publicly wrote love songs to. Drake, as he wrote love songs for them, engaging in the modern-day equivalent of Petrarch’s sonnets to his unseen but deeply yearned after Laura. However, Drake didn’t return these grand gestures of affection to Lamar.

Instead, Lamar had to engage in a tumultuous relationship with Drake in the background of silences. This detail makes Lamar’s public cry of “Say Drake” at the 2025 Super Bowl show even more petty and heartbreaking.

Lamar’s pettiness just teaches and absolves us girls (and gays) of any guilt that we have when people tell us to get over that loser that loved us so terribly in private but broke our heart into shards that we still try to piece together publicly.

We are just girls, girls, girls in the end being heartbroken over the one person who got away, taking our deserved poetic justice with them.