Sunday Pages: "Meet the Grahams"

A dis track by Kendrick Lamar

Dear Reader,

“Dis” is short for “disrespect.” I was scolded, years ago, about adding the second “s” to the word; while satisfying to spell it like “kiss” and “miss,” its etymology makes it clear that there is no double “s.” Spell it like “this,” I was told. And yet, in the intervening years, users have given in to temptation and doubled the last letter. So be it.

A dis track—or diss track, in the popular formation—is a song that overtly disrespects, or disparages, a specific target. In music, that target is typically another musician with whom the dis track author has “beef.”

People have been insulting other people in creative ways since the dawn of language, so this concept is nothing new. There are plenty of Shakespeare snippets that, if intoned rhythmically over a sick beat, would make fine dis tracks. But the dis track didn’t become a staple of popular music until the hip hop era. To the best of my knowledge, Cole Porter didn’t write a showtune mocking Irving Berlin, nor did renegade members of the Rat Pack pen anti-Sinatra ballads.

“Sweet Home Alabama,” the FM radio staple by Lynyrd Skynyrd, is an early dis track—a musical response to Neil Young’s “Southern Man,” which is itself a critique of the racism of the former slave states. Young sings:

I saw cotton and I saw black,
Tall white mansions and little shacks.
Southern man, when will you pay them back?
I heard screamin’ and bullwhips crackin’
How long? How long? How?

Whereupon the resident Southern rock band wrote a (much better, musically and commercially) song extolling the virtues of Alabama that contains this verse:

Well, I heard Mr. Young sing about her,
Well, I heard ol’ Neil put her down,
Well, I hope Neil Young will remember:
A Southern man don’t need him around, anyhow.

There was reconciliation after this. Young admitted his song was condescending; when Skynyrd’s Ronnie van Zandt died, he was supposedly buried in a Neil Young t-shirt.

A more recent example is “Don’t,” the 2014 Ed Sheeran hit that dishes on his failed relationship with Ellie Goulding, who broke his heart by sleeping with another guy while staying on the same hotel floor as Sheeran:

Until you disappeared with him to have sex, of course.
It’s not like we were both on tour.
We were staying on the same fucking hotel floor…

Don’t fuck with my love,
That heart is so cold,
All over my home.
I don’t wanna know that, babe.

Goulding subsequently released “On My Mind,” a dis-track response to “Don’t”:

Next thing that I know I’m in the hotel with you,
You were talking deep like it was mad love to you.
You wanted my heart, but I just liked your tattoos…
And now I don’t understand it.
You don’t mess with love, you mess with the truth.

Justin Bieber’s “Love Yourself,” similarly, is a dis track about his former girlfriend Selena Gomez:

My mama don’t like you, and she likes everyone,
And I never like to admit that I was wrong…
But now I know, I’m better sleeping on my own.
Cuz if you like the way you look that much,
Oh, baby, you should go and love yourself.

(“Love” as a stand-in for “fuck” in the last line is quite clever.)

But this is all tame, PG-rated dreck compared to what goes on in the hip hop world. There is a long tradition of rap battles, where aspiring rappers take the stage and spit out clever disses. Eminem got his start this way, as dramatized in the film 8 Mile.

Dis tracks can be brutal: personal, cruel, clever—and often, it must be said, homophobic. Here is Nas, rapping about Jay-Z in “Ether,” a dis track so notoriously devastating that the word “ether” is now slang for slaying somebody in song:

You seem to be only concerned with dissing women
Were you abused as a child, scared to smile, they called you ugly?

And:

What you think, you getting girls now cuz of your looks?
Negro please.
You no mustache having, with whiskers like a rat…

That was in response to a dis track by Jay-Z, “Takeover,” in which he disparages Nas.

A lot of hip hop dis tracks are about career moves, rap talent, legitimacy of the artist, and so forth. There is much bashing of record labels and crews, and so much inside baseball and palace intrigue that the listener has to be very read in to know what they’re talking about half the time. Most of it goes right over my head. Dis tracks are typically some variation of “You think you’re the best? You are wrong, sir! I’m the best! I remember when you were nothing! How dare you insinuate otherwise!”

In 1994, Biggie Smalls—the Notorious B.I.G.—released a single called “Who Shot Ya?” This was right around the time that Tupac Shakur was shot in a botched robbery. Tupac believed that Biggie was responsible for the assault. As rap beefs go, this was, ahem, a biggie. So after recovering, Tupac released the Mona Lisa of dis tracks, “Hit ‘Em Up,” in which he positively eviscerates Smalls. He begins by announcing, “I fucked your [girlfriend], you fat motherfucker,” and it just gets worse from there. Here’s the chorus:

Grab ya Glocks when you see Tupac.
Call the cops when you see Tupac, uh
Who shot me? But ya punks didn’t finish.
Now ya 'bout to feel the wrath of a menace.

“Call the cops” is the ultimate sign of cowardice. And part of the last verse:

You better back the fuck up ‘fore you get smacked the fuck up.
This is how we do it on our side.
Any of you n—s from New York that wanna bring it, bring it,
But we ain’t singin’, we bringin’ drama—
Fuck you and your motherfuckin’ mama.

In a related story, Tupac was gunned down nine Scaramuccis after “Hit ‘Em Up” dropped. If your dis track results in the target of your venom having you murdered, you pretty much own the dis track crown.

Why am I writing about dis tracks and rap murders on a rainy Sunday morning? Yesterday, I woke to a text from my son:

Kendrick Lamar murdered Drake’s career at approximately 11:30 last night. Long story short: Drake has 2 kids. And is a pedophile [alleged]. And a [alleged] sex trafficker. It’s over for Drake, dude. I literally cannot sleep, I cannot stop thinking about that diss track. It is the greatest diss track ever made. I saw a tweet saying it made “Hit ‘Em Up” look like “Good Vibrations.”

Drake is one of the most successful artists of all time. In 2023, his music was streamed over 11 billion times on Spotify. He holds all kinds of records for commercial success. His impact on music and pop culture is indisputable. But Drake also gets into a lot of beefs with other rappers; he punches down. He is an easy target, because he is 1) extraordinarily successful, 2) Canadian, and 3) a former child actor who starred in Degrassi: The Next Generation. He did not come straight outta Compton.

The genesis of the Drake/Kendrick Lamar beef is hard to pinpoint. Best as I can tell, Lamar started it. But it escalated over the years and has achieved Hatfield/McCoy status. The two have now exchanged dis tracks, each more vicious than the last, for a while. It’s all standard-issue stuff: clever, cruel, angry, aggressive, one trying to top the other.

Unlike in past eras, there is an immediacy to current rap battles. While Tupac and Nas had to record in a studio and then wait the requisite time before releasing their tracks, Drake and Lamar can drop a song on YouTube whenever they want. Revenge can now be served piping hot.

That’s what happened this weekend.

After Lamar released the dis tracks “Euphoria” and then “6:16 in L.A.” earlier in the week, Drake responded with “Family Matters,” a seven-minute, highly personal, possibly libelous dis track. Stereogum explains:

Like “Euphoria,” “Family Matters” is long — well over seven minutes, with multiple beat switches. In the first section, over video of the van from the good kid, m.A.A.d. city art getting crushed, he name-checks YG and other gang bangers he knows on the West Coast. He takes shots at Kendrick’s marriage, insinuating that his longtime fiancée Whitney Alford is not happy and that one of his kids was actually fathered by his business partner Dave Free. Drake also references Alford having lighter skin after Kendrick questioned his Blackness on “Euphoria.” There’s a reference to Metro Boomin’s partner cheating on him in there too, and Drake’s tour-mate J. Cole — who notoriously entered into and then immediately bowed out of the current rap civil war — catches a stray.

And then, minutes later, Kendrick Lamar dropped the song my son texted me about, “Meet the Grahams.” It has a TV-sitcom-esque title, and the family in question is Drake’s own; his full name is Aubrey Drake Graham.

After my son’s review, I expected something along the lines of “Hit ‘Em Up.” But that’s not what “Meet the Grahams” is—not at all. It’s a slow song, quiet. Each of the first three verses addresses one of Drake’s relatives: his illegitimate son, his illegitimate daughter (whose existence, if real, was heretofore unknown), and his parents. The last verse is addressed to “Aubrey” himself.

It begins:

Dear Adonis, I’m sorry that that man is your father, let me be honest,
It takes a man to be a man, your dad is not responsive.
I look at him and wish your grandpa woulda wore a condom.
I’m sorry that you gotta grow up and then stand behind him.
Life is hard, I know, the challenges always gon’ be this home.
Sometimes our parents make mistakes that affect us until we grown.
And you a good kid that need good leadership.

This is novel. Lamar is hitting at Drake by showing his son—whose existence was revealed in a previous dis track—empathy and compassion. There is even more compassion for Drake’s daughter, in the third verse:

Dear baby girl, I’m sorry that your father not active inside your world.
He don’t commit to much but his music—yeah, that’s for sure.
He a narcissist, misogynist, livin’ inside his songs.
Try to destroy families rather than takin’ care of his own.
Should be teachin’ you timetables or watchin’ Frozen with you,
Or at your 11th birthday, singin’ poems with you.
Instead, he be in Turks, payin’ for sex and poppin’ Percs,
Examples that you don’t deserve.
I wanna tell you that you’re loved, you’re brave, you’re kind,
You got a gift to change the world and could change your father’s mind.

I mean, if the allegation is true about the daughter he fathered but doesn’t engage with, how can Drake possibly respond to that? “How dare you show love for my kids!” For Lamar, it’s a brilliant tack to take, because there’s no real rebuttal.

The last line is mic-drop devastating:

You lied about the only artist that can offer you some help—
Fuck a rap battle, this a long-life battle with yourself.

Kendrick Lamar is expressing empathy for his rival. It is sincere? Maybe not, but it sure comes off that way. Listening to the song, I marveled at this angle. And I decided to write about it today because there’s a lesson here somewhere, for me, for all of us who have our own political conflicts and Twitter battles. The way Kendrick Lamar handles Drake here is, perhaps, how we should handle our MAGA rivals: with empathy, with compassion, with appeals to the innocent in their camp, and with bracing bombs of truth. How exactly we can do this, I’m not sure. I’m still mulling it over. But there’s some wisdom there, hiding in the, ahem, ether.

No sooner did I formulate these thoughts than Kendrick Lamar was at it again. Last night, he released another dis track, a more traditional one, “Not Like Us.” This one is a banger, and it has a number of killer lines—so much so that HE’S ALREADY DEAD was trending on Twitter all night.

But all “Not Like Us” will do is escalate a conflict that Lamar himself started—and was so close to ending with “Meet the Grahams.” There’s a lesson there, too: that the human urge for vengeance is too often greater than the desire for reconciliation, and that to stop a seemingly-endless cycle of violence, whether in Compton or Toronto or Palestine, it is necessary to own our own complicity in the feud—or, as Lamar puts it, to win the lifelong battle with ourselves.

In “Hit ‘Em Up,” Tupac Shakur said: “Fuck peace.” A hundred and one days later, he was shot dead.

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ICYMI

Our guest on The Five 8 was Jen Taub. We had an engaging discussion about the campus protests.

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Photo credit: original YouTube artwork for “Meet the Grahams.”