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CONTENT WARNING: CONTAINS REFERENCES TO GROOMING, SEX TRAFFICKING, AND DISCRIMINATION.

Kendrick Lamar’s ‘euphoria’ in response to Drake.

Kendrick Lamar, the West Coast architect behind one of hip hop’s most important records in 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly, had just dropped a bomb on Aubrey Drake Graham a few days ago. ‘euphoria’, named after the teen drama show that Drake was an executive producer of, slanders the pop rapper like napalm. Criticisms surrounding his inappropriate interactions with underaged fans, his bad parenting skills, and the ticking clock over his genetics are all but the surface layer that Lamar is willing to nuke down upon his rival. True to one of his biggest idols in Tupac Shakur, he aims to spare no prisoner and even less if a response were to come soon. Most of the community are already calling it; Kendrick might have well ethered Drake.

Hype as it is, it does make me think – are there any diss tracks that don’t aim for the personal? Tupac and Lamar are both the most respected emcees in the West Coast thanks to their more socially aware lyricisms on the plight of the black American community. Pac rose to fame with ‘Brenda’s Got a Baby’ and ‘Dear Mama’ which makes him a voice of his generation. Outside of TBAP, Lamar’s intersectional look into black double standards add a layer for his fanbase to grow and become better which is key for social movements like Black Lives Matter. Yet, when it comes to beefing with other rappers, the two stepped away from their conscious-minded breakthroughs for more personal insults or thug-style threats even. This tonal shift would spark accusations of hypocrisy over gatekeeping or compromising on the values that they seek to promote. We can see that already when writer Ben Beaumont-Thomas, their piece published under the Guardian, implies that some of Lamar’s disses run contrary to what he preaches.

This begs the question: is it possible for there to be a diss track that erred more towards political or social subtext? Hip hop has long been a staple of music as the means to spread critiques on police brutality, impoverishment, and other socio-political issues. Certain personalities like Professor Skye did stipulate that Lamar’s diss does pose a subtext around Drake’s appropriation of black culture to make up for his insecurity as a biracial person. The problem is that it’s a kind of reading that could be cast aside with Hanlon’s Razor; Kendrick’s reason for making ‘euphoria’ is to just obliterate Drake. He has nothing explicit to say about why Drake is the plague upon black entertainment or the long-term consequences of his music. To me at least, this leaves one interesting thought – could you make a diss track that’s conscious? A tirade against a foe who is desecrating the values you hold dear to yourself in pushing for civil rights or social equality?

To understand about the absence of conscious themes in diss tracks, we could try to make a connection to the genre’s founding years. 1988 saw East Coast-based Public Enemy release It Takes a Million of Million to Hold Us Back which condemns systemic racism and media bias while a pan-African advocacy was used to rally up black Americans. While gangsta rap was on the rise as well with Boogie Down Productions and N.W.A., they are more so used to highlight the issues with the law enforcement. Elements like drug dealing, promiscuity, or gang violence tend to be secondary to the cyclical damage felt within the community and emcees like Ice Cube would make comments on how a black person could easily be charged on forged accusations. 

It was until the rise of G-Funk with the likes of Snoop Dogg and Mafioso Rap with Jay-Z when the representation of gangsterism, if not romanticised, is made more light-hearted with greater focus on hedonism and wealth. The likes of Common, Digable Planets, and Ras Kass who won acclaim for their charged lyrics that resonate with their community have either flipped tune towards a more commercially appealing tune or relegated their rap career. Most of the well-known records, even including Tupac’s albums, would need to include at least a couple of tales about gangbangers and the problems in the black community to be individualised.

As hip hop caught on as one of the defining pillars of popular music and record labels started to cater towards it more, the intent of conscious awareness is left just under the surface layer. What we now regard as classics like ‘I Used to Love H.E.R’ by Common was then mere underground gems that might be fuelled by its critical outlook on rap music’s loss of direction from its commercialisation. Rappers, like many music artists, are repurposed into icons akin to a brand where they represent the trend where they reach their peak in popularity. We have Kanye West with his middle-class ambitions in pop rap, Lauryn Hill’s fusion with RnB, and Nas’s Biblical allusions as a “street disciple”. 

It is through this formation of that icon identity that means that it is easy for many rappers to make a diss track if it undermines the very image that their target has made for themselves. We can see with Lamar that Drake’s entire brand as an everyman is torn to shreds. His Canadian nationality is spurred over how he’s incapable of repping his community, he’s been called out for his negligence over his son, and he can’t seem to beat how dull his whole aesthetic is. Actually, come to think of it, didn’t Kendrick accuse him of appropriating socially progressive themes for his image even if he doesn’t believe in it? He does flip-flop between being anti-gun violence and rapping about being willing to cap his haters with an actual gun.

In turn, the emphasis over how the target is a bad role model or a disgrace to all the attempts made to better the conditions of their group is a generally untapped gold mine. Too many tracks are made to discredit the artist over their success with the critics, their fanbase, or their personal life and not with their success over advocacy and social awareness. Hip hop’s tool for political change remains sturdy in the amount of rappers who specialise in it over the course of under 40 years and it’s most certainly not going anywhere now. As we witness the growing polarisation in the United States or the United Kingdom where discrimination and authoritarianism becomes more commonplace, our messaging matters a lot more now. I’m not so much thinking about rapping politics to demean the government as I am about how the target imagines an ideal society would look like. There might not be a one-to-one track that sums the target up as being exemplary of everything that’s wrong with society, but there are a handful of examples that could be considered as prototypical.

I would like to start first and foremost with Black Star’s ‘Children’s Story’ which adapts Slick Rick’s classic single into 1998. Mos Def (now known as Yasiin Bey) and Talib Kweli, maestros of being awake about the plights of black lives, were inspired by Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’ production style that copies over a recognisable instrumental from a previous hit single. This undermines the reusing of obscure soul records to rep other black artists and it breaks away the tradition of most hip hop artists to develop their own culture that’s far-removed from the white-dominated environments. 

‘Children’s Story’ parodies such a process by going into detail about the protagonist’s descent into greed and insanity as he rips off more artists to earn more money in the process. While Diddy’s name hasn’t been mentioned in any way possible, the narrative’s depiction of an everyman abandoning his ordinary life to pursue “jacking” which culminates in gunfights sounds similar to how Diddy’s career saw him cash in on gangsta rap. By proxy, the message is to discredit Combs’s Bad Boy Records for its tasteless use of samples and advocate for greater artistic creativity to build better relations between black Americans even if that eschews wealth.

A second song with a conscious theme that feels similar to a diss is Tupac’s ‘Bombs First (My Second Reply)’ from his final studio record The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory. The album itself was split between Pac’s Makaveli persona discrediting the whole of the East Coast rap scene for their slights and his most emotionally intense commentaries on anti-black prejudices. He previously does have songs in his discography that feel as if he might have distanced too much from his feminist, Afrocentric sense of unity which might have been more apparent in All Eyez on Me in 1996. The next year after, it looks as if Tupac finally found a way to credibly balance his thug-lyfe presentation and his highly conscious breakthrough.

In ‘Bombs First’, he splices his return as Makavelli whose Messiah-like purpose was under threat from Mobb Deep, Jay-Z, Nas, and so on. What makes the selected track fascinating isn’t simply due to Pac’s heightened importance as the spokesman of black Americans. It’s due to the way he frames himself and his rivals in a binary way. He willingly aligned himself with the “road dogs” and one of his Outlawz clique members, Rufus ‘Young Noble’ Cooper III, has implied that he is deserving of the ‘King of New York’ title. These comments are references to the Black Panthers whose provocations have earned newfound attention to black power. Much like his peers, he is willing to use violence. Unlike the East Coast emcees who might shoot for their self-interests, he sees it as a necessity to bring about better living standards for black people.

Lastly, there is actually a more famous example of what could be seen as a conscious diss track in its own way. Lauryn Hill’s ‘Lost Ones’ from The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill in 1998. Many like to see it as a personal attack on her ex-lover Wyclef Jean, yet so much of the accusations rely on the unequal power dynamic set between a man and a woman alongside the greed that comes from the music industry. The hook of “You might win some but you lost one” is a perfectly apt summary of the whole song. 

Hill not only calls Jean out for being a snake, but saw in him the excesses of being a superstar. Falling into infidelity with groupies, obsessed with material extravagance, half-assed apologies, Wyclef embodies the stereotype of a music artist who’s corrupted beyond relief. Lauryn Hill at least stood firm in her spiritual beliefs and asserted herself as one of the best female rappers of her time. Only a few years after the track was released with the rest of the album, Hill steps away from making music on a full-time basis with her reputation as sturdy as ever. Wyclef might have won some perks of hitting the jackpot in a competitive industry, but he lost one relationship that matters more than the hedonistic excesses he indulged in.

Conscious diss tracks have a lot of potential in keeping in touch with the rapper’s socially aware background while stressing out the societal ills that the target embodies. It serves two ways in entertaining the listeners with the snide comebacks while informing them of the systemic issues that the target was allegedly perpetuating. It marks a very effective instance of activism by providing the means for many to cancel the target over their actions. Lastly, it challenges the tropes of hip hop with its relationship with gangsterism and material fame.

Funnily enough, at the time of writing, Kendrick had just dropped what amounted to a Tsar Bomba on Drake in ‘Meet the Grahams’. It’s a scathing dissection over Drake’s sex addiction, predatory attitudes, negligence as a father, and his allegations of being a part of an underground sex trafficking circle with his employees being linked to it. This might actually be one of the closest instances we might get to a bona-fide diss track with social consciousness in mind. Lamar condemns Audrey not only for being a terrible person, but he is implying that he’s emblematic of the music industry’s problem with objectifying women and underground prostitution. Kendrick draws comparison between him and Harvey Weinstein, raps about his sex trafficking business in relation to the shady side of the music industry, and highlights the damaging effect he has on his family. 

In other words, Drake is the anti-role model and if you ever do feel that you are a liability to your community, at least you are not him. Moralising your target as being innately bad with their destructiveness is a clear-cut way of showing why their actions are bad to the community. As the artist behind last year’s Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, Drake’s representation as being the monster to not admire links up with therapy’s role as being a tool to look into deep-rooted prejudices into the black community. It’s a smart way to highlight the ways that we could hold ourselves accountable by not falling into Drake’s vices. This style might well pave the way for conscious diss tracks to take root in the next few years…