Rapper Drake's Toronto home was surrounded by a police cordon after officers received reports of a pre-dawn shooting in the area. A bodyguard of the singer was hospitalized with serious injuries, but she will be okay – the doctors say – while a suspicious individual fled in a car. It is not clear whether Drake was at home at the time of the shooting that started from a moving car nor whether the episode can in any way be traced back to the ongoing clash between the world-beating rapper and another high-profile rapper, the Pulitzer Prize winner Kendrick Lamar. Drake is “cooperating with police,” Canadian media reported.
Drake – whose real name is Aubrey Graham, 37 – was last year's top-grossing rapper in the world. The “God's Plan” and “Hotline Blin” musician is currently at the center of a heated controversy with Kendrick Lamar, which is causing confusion in the music world.
A series of dissing between two rap heavyweights like Kendrick Lamar and Drake hadn't been seen for a long time. A beef which has been going on for a few weeks with an escalation of mutual accusations, not surprisingly renamed “Civil War”, which Kendrick started by attacking Drake and J. Cole a few days ago. And if J. Cole withdrew from the contest after an initial response, Kendrick, after Drake's responses, continues with increasingly heavier songs. “Say Drake, I hear you prefer them to minors,” Lamar fired back in “Not Like U”s, in which he also talks about “certified pedophiles” and accuses his Canadian rival of being a “colonizer” of African-American culture being son of a white mother. In another song released this weekend, “Meet The Grahams,” Lamar claims that Drake has a secret daughter.
Drake in turn did not hold back from the accusations. In the song “Family Matters”, the Canadian suggested that infidelity or even abuse had affected the relationship between Lamar and girlfriend Whitney Alford. In “The Heart Part 6”, Drake denied any inappropriate relationships with minors: “I would never give a teenager a second look.”
The barbs, much more cutting than usual, this time reached the audience of the satirical show Saturday Night Live, while detailed chronicles of the dispute appeared in the American media. Drake and Lamar became famous about ten years ago. They were friends at first, collaborating on each other's albums and even touring together. But then the paths took separate paths. And so since March the two have been launching blows at each other from a distance and in April Drake used artificial intelligence to recreate the voices of rap legends such as Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg, attracting legal threats (the song was later withdrawn). Lamar responded with the six-minute “Euphoria”, in which he accused his rival of being a swindler and a fugitive father.
The arguments and battles between rappers date back to the origins of hip-hop in the 70s and have even led, in extreme cases, to real feuds with violent epilogues involving the use of firearms. Among the best-known dialectical clashes are those between Jay-Z and Nas, Tupac and The Notorious Big, LL Cool J and Kool Moe Dee, or more recently Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
