“You wanna see a dead body?”
That 2013 Kendrick Lamar line, a Stand By Me/Boyz In the Hood reference he uses to kick off his verse on Pusha T’s “Nosetalgia”, was what I kept coming back to while watching as Lamar, peacocking to a sold out audience of 20,000 fans, ran his titanic Drake diss “Not Like Us” back for a fourth time to close out The Pop Out, one of the biggest shows in the history of LA rap—and maybe hip-hop history, period.
Last night, Inglewood’s Kia Forum theater was a Roman coliseum. The chants of victory were furiously bellowed wop wop wops and Compton’s own Maximus stood center stage, hat cocked under a red hoodie, more chains dangling than he’s ever worn in his career, the cocky conqueror daring anyone else to fuck with him. One of the biggest beefs the genre has ever seen had firmly concluded in his favor, and this was the celebration.
There are decisive wins, and then there’s the hometown victory lap that Lamar took in the arena not far from where he grew up, where he invited nearly every Angeleno of note—famous and infamous, legend and new jack, Blood and Crip, Steve Lacy and Russell Westbrook—to do their best West Coast jig on the metaphorical grave that he put Drake in almost two months ago. But more importantly, with a lineup that included LA staples DJ Hed and superproducer Mustard before him, the Pop Out became an event that placed Kendrick Lamar within the wider tapestry of Los Angeles rap mythology.
“Y’all ain’t gon let anyone disrespect the West Coast, huh? Y’all ain’t gon’ let anyone mock and imitate our legends?” Lamar asked the crowd after his first run of “Not Like Us.” It was the only time he addressed the beef directly outside of the actual bars, but it served as a mission statement for the entire event: a moment of unity, not quite against Drake, but in support of the rich LA culture that Kendrick is inextricably a part of. A win for Kendrick is a win for the west.
On “Euphoria,” early in what would become a five-song beef pack, Lamar cast their confrontation as being bigger than him—that his weariness and disdain for Drake was “what the culture feelin.” By the time he reached his grand conclusion with “Not Like Us,” he’d sharpened that angle, accusing Drake of having no cultural northstar—the kind of outsider who would wantonly mimic Tupac and comment on which rappers bang which sets while squabbling with the city’s prodigal son. It was a grave misread on Drake’s part, and last night we saw the result: YG, one of the very same rappers Drake tried to shout out, proudly twisting his fingers on an Amazon-sponsored stream to the tune of a song calling Drake a sex pest. Drake mocked Lamar's music for “trying to get the slaves freed;" Kendrick responded by calling him a colonizer and performing that song five times in a row on Juneteenth.
On “Not Like Us,” Lamar declares “the city is back up, it’s a must, we outside” and the Pop Out was the payoff to those words, a night that didn’t sidestep or diminish the beef but instead worked it into the narrative of something bigger. The show was billed as “Ken & Friends,” and through Hed and Mustard, Lamar was able to shrewdly extend the invite far and wide, with Hed putting on a powerfully regional set before Mustard brought out the city’s homegrown stars. It’s a night that saw multiple generations of South Central legends, Tommy the Clown to G Perico, touch the same stage as Dr. Dre. That saw 20,000 people show Blog Era darling Dom Kennedy the same rapturous reaction that they gave Tyler, The Creator. Steve Lacy alterna-crooning about his bad habits shortly before YG tap danced across the stage in his signature hard-bottoms to the raucous “BPT.” Black Hippy—the collective consisting of Kendrick, ScHoolboy Q, Ab-Soul and Jay Rock—set every day one TDE fan’s heart aflutter with their first reunion in something like eighty years. In a conflict that saw Lamar’s bona fides within his city challenged, The Pop Out was a thrilling rebuke, a love letter to the environment that birthed him. (The hometown theme was strict: megastars like The Weeknd watched dutifully from the sidelines, and Kendrick passed up on not one but two surefire arena-shaking Future cameos with “King’s Dead” and “Like That.”)
Still, the beef was very much in the foreground as a parallel theme. “Not Like Us” may be the song of the summer, but “Euphoria” is arguably the better record, and it proved to be one hell of an opener, with the crowd going bar for bar on all six minutes and thirty-eight seconds of unadulterated hate. The setlist that followed was a not-so-stealthy reminder that Kendrick’s held that hate for Drake longer than the casual fan may realize—sure, songs like “Element” and “King Kunta” were obvious subliminals, but refracted through the prism of this year’s events, innocuous jams like “DNA” and “King’s Dead” played like crafty sneak disses, too. The connective tissue from “You not a gang member, you a tourist” to “Not Like Us” looks that much clearer in retrospect. Slick counters to Drake’s various attacks were everywhere you looked, like the inclusion of “Gin & Juice” on the between-sets playlist. The Black Hippy reunion was cemented with Ab-Soul joining the stage so Kendrick could rap the most underrated song in this whole back and forth—“6:16 in LA”—directly to him.
With talk of a new Drake song on the horizon, Drake affiliates posting about revenge, and Drake himself throwing up a caption implying he’s about to run this summer, rumors persist that the beef isn’t over. Last night, Kendrick sneakily let it be known that he’s more than ready to get back in the ring—he amended his line in “Euphoria” about beefing on a “three-hour time difference” to two hours, an acknowledgment that Drake has been spending a lot of time at his Houston ranch as of late. (He also added the line: “Give me Pac’s ring back and I might give you a little respect.”)
It all inevitably crescendoed with the finale we all knew was coming, but still hit like a tidal wave nonetheless. The first time “Not Like Us” played, Lamar cut it off at “A-minor,” letting the crowd hold the note for what felt like forever, the taunt ringing that much harder. He did the same on take two, only Lamar barely rapped a word leading up to it because the crowd held him down bar for bar. But anybody can play a hit song twice—which is what made queuing it up a third time the real flex. But that fourth run? That’s when Kendrick brought the song’s producer, Mustard, on stage and soon after what seemed like every LA rapper, member, basketball player, of note. It looked like the rideout scene in Fury Road, with Mustard playing the role of Guitar Guy.
And in that fourth playback, a strange thing happened—the specter of beef disappeared. Lamar got visibly emotional, noting LA’s two fallen titans—Kobe Bryant and Nipsey Hussle, the latter of which got a stirring tribute with Mustard’s “Perfect Ten” earlier in the evening. The night was never really about Drake, but at that moment it really wasn’t. In the face of tragedy—those that make headlines, and those that only the homies know about—the path to perseverance is paved with unity. What started as a taunt became a rallying cry. The city is back up—it’s a must.