Kendrick Lamar vs Drake: A new rap beef for the streaming era

livemint.com:

For weeks, hip-hop superstars Drake and Kendrick Lamar have been embroiled in a rap “beef," a tradition where rappers duel lyrically in a fight for the throne.This past weekend, it got ugly—so ugly that the reputations of two of music’s biggest names may never be the same. In quick succession, the feuding stars exchanged blows across five tracks with increasingly dark lyrics that had rap fans riveted, shocked and queasy.

Then, around 2 a.m. on Tuesday, a shooting outside Drake’s $100 million mansion in Toronto left his security guard injured, local authorities say.

The shooter was not identified at press time, and it is not clear if or how the incident is related to the beef.“Can you really listen to them again in the same way after this?" says Mano Sundaresan, editor in chief of the underground rap blog No Bells. “This could end up being an end game for these two artists and the era they represent."The escalation of the feud started on Friday morning with Lamar—the only rapper to win the Pulitzer Prize—releasing a song, “6:16 in LA," insinuating that he had a mole in Drake’s camp.

With unusual swiftness, Drake, the most commercially successful rapper of the past decade, fired back that night with “Family Matters," where he alleged that Lamar had physically abused his fiancée. Then jaws in the rap world dropped: Lamar, less than an hour later, uploaded another track, “Meet the Grahams," where he compared Drake to disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein and alleged that Drake both secretly has a daughter and employs sex predators on his team.