Super Bowl Highlights Drake and Kendrick Lamar Rap Rivalry

NEW ORLEANS -- If the Super Bowl figures to be a toss-up between the Eagles and Chiefs at the Superdome, there's one result that seems wholly predictable: Sunday's big game is going to be another tough moment for Drake.

Whether or not Kendrick Lamar's Super Bowl halftime show includes another shot at the Toronto artist, there's no sugar coating the score in the epic Kendrick-Drake rap battle. The Raptors ambassador lost about as badly you can lose one of those things without being dead.

Even one of the nicest guys in Raptors history, DeMar DeRozan, chose a side -- spoiler alert: it wasn't Drake's -- and Sunday's halftime show figures to be yet another victory lap for Lamar, the Pulitzer Prize-winning artist from L.A. Just last week, Lamar's global hit song "Not Like Us," a Drake diss track that's been widely seen as the metaphorical knockout punch in the squabble, copped five Grammys, including song of the year. On Sunday, Lamar is expected to play that song, among others, for an expected TV audience in excess of 100 million people.

Speaking Thursday here in the leadup to his performance, Lamar said his intention in the musical quarrel with Drake was to "keep the nature of it as a sport."

"I love when artists grit their teeth ... This has always been the core definition of who I am," Lamar said. "I think a lot of people were putting rap to the back, and you didn't see that grit, you didn't see that bite anymore. So I always took that into consideration."

That's precisely how DeRozan framed it when he was asked last summer about appearing in the "Not Like Us" video.

"Two of the biggest rappers in the world went at it from a competitive standpoint and they battled it out," DeRozan told the Sacramento Bee. "That's what you want to see as a fan: Kobe (Bryant) playing (Michael) Jordan one-on-one and see who wins, see the trash talking, and whoever wins out of that you're still going to have the debate, so that's all that is."

DeRozan also pointed out that "Not Like Us," the most popular of a flurry of tit-for-tat offerings from the rappers, was more than a diss track. It meant something to DeRozan that the song was a unifying force in hometown Los Angeles, with Lamar successfully bringing together members of rival gangs with a message of unity. In the same interview, DeRozan insisted: "Drake's still my man, still my man, none of it changed."

That was July. When DeRozan's Sacramento Kings played in Toronto in November, Drake, guesting on the broadcast with Matt Devlin and Jack Armstrong, said apropos of nothing: "If you ever put a DeRozan banner up, I'll go up there and pull it down myself." To which DeRozan replied in a post-game press conference: "He's going to have a long way to climb to take it down ... Tell him good luck."

So if it's sport, it's blood sport for sure. The tilt between Lamar and Drake has gone from verbal to legal, with Drake last month suing Universal Music Group for promoting "Not Like Us" even though the lyrics "advance the false and malicious narrative that Drake is a pedophile." The defamation suit also accuses the company of inciting the public to resort to "vigilante justice in response," noting that the cover art includes a satellite photo of Drake's Bridle Path mansion dotted with markers used to indicate the presence of a registered sex offender, and pointing to the shooting of a security guard at the property days after the song's release. Whether or not the case amounts to sound civil-court strategy -- UMG, which represents both artists, has called Drake's argument "illogical" -- it's hard to imagine it'll bolster Drake's hip-hop credibility.

Here during Super Bowl week, "Not Like Us" has been ubiquitous. The Chiefs blasted it at practice the other day. It's seemingly on loop on the NFL Network. And it's expected to be a showpiece of Sunday's halftime show, although given how Super Bowl performances often require songs to be edited for length and other concerns, questions remain about which Drake disses Lamar may or may not utter.

Not that Drake, an enthusiastic sports fan and NFL bettor, has been completely frozen out of the NFL-related musical rotation this season. More than a few Chiefs and Eagles have been asked about their preference in the Kendrick-Drake tete-a-tete here this week, and the easily the most common answer has been some version of: I'm a fan of both. To that end, after the Chiefs beat the Buffalo Bills to advance to the Super Bowl, Kansas City quarterback Patrick Mahomes blasted another global hit in the winners' locker room. The song was "God's Plan," the 2018 track by Drake.

It was a welcome bit of positive product placement, but nobody's starting a GoFundMe for Drake. He kicked off a tour of Australia this week by announcing himself "very much alive," this while working about as far away from New Orleans as possible. Drake still ranks second behind only Taylor Swift on Spotify's all-time most-streamed list (Lamar ranks 20th). As the rapper Too Short is quoted as saying in a soon-to-be-released Hulu program on the Kendrick-Drake feud: "(The feud) is still the equivalent of Bill Gates and Elon Musk fist fighting. Two billionaires, who cares who gets knocked the (bleep) out? They're going home to billionaire lifestyles. It's still the same thing."

In other words, it's fitting "Not Like Us" will be played on the occasion of the championship game of the world's richest league. If the nature of a rap battle is sport, at its crux is an awfully lucrative business.