Breaking Down the Ridiculousness of Drake’s “Taylor Made” Kendrick Diss With AI Tupac and Snoop Dogg

Kendrick has a well-documented admiration for Tupac Shakur (he even used audio from an unreleased Pac interview to make it sound like they were talking to each other at the end of “Mortal Man”) which makes it even more devious for Drake to create a sarcastic AI Pac verse aimed at Dot. 

AI Pac opens the song by pleading for Kendrick to respond to “Push Ups” and implying that the lights might be too bright for Dot: “Kendrick we need ya, the West Coast savior/ Engraving your name in some hip-hop history/ If you deal with this viciously/ You seem a little nervous about all the publicity.” 

Then AI Pac gives Kendrick some advice for his impending response track to Drake: “Talk about him liking young girls as a gift from me/ Heard it on the Budden Podcast, it's gotta be true.” This is a reference to comments that Joe Budden made on a recent podcast where he called Drake out for predatory behavior and played an old clip of the Toronto rapper interacting with a 17-year-old fan at a show. This seems to be Drake’s way of getting ahead of whatever potential ammo Kendrick might try to use against him in a reply track.   

Drake then takes another jab at Kendrick’s stature through AI Pac with bars like, “They told me the spirit of Makaveli is alive/ In the nigga under five-foot-five, so it's gotta be you.” He goes on to reference Dot’s line about “burning tattoos” on “Like That” and says that Drake “is not amused,” before sarcastically questioning why Dot “asked for the smoke” but now seems “too busy for the smoke.” 

Through AI Pac, Drake says people are “confused” about why he hasn’t dropped a reply yet, and implies that Kendrick is being forced to wait because Taylor Swift (who is also signed under Universal Music Group) had already planned to release her big album this week: “'Bout to give this shit another week/ And fall back to homegirl who runnin' numbers up/ I woulda refused/ Fuck these industry relationships, she not in your shoes.”

Drake closes AI Pac’s verse by questioning Kendrick’s “boogeyman” persona (a reputation he’s earned for leaving other artists in fear of stepping to him) before passing the verse to AI Snoop. 

AI Snoop Dogg opens his verse by rapping, “Nephew, what the fuck you really 'bout to do?/ We passed you the torch in the House of Blues,” which references the infamous moment in 2011 when Snoop, Dr. Dre, and The Game passed the symbolic west coast rap torch to Kendrick in front of a live audience. Drake then uses AI Snoop to imply that Kendrick isn’t capable of doing the “dirty work” of shooting back at him because he’s “never been to jail or wore jumpsuits and shower shoes/ Never shot nobody, never stabbed nobody/ Never did nothing violent and know when it's the homies that empower you.” AI Snoop (and Drake) are basically saying that Kendrick is not “like that,” despite all of his tough talk in verses.

After making some very basic owl analogies (probably on purpose), AI Snoop raps, “Now's a time to really make a power move/ 'Cause right now it's looking like you writing out the game plan on how to lose/ How to bark up the wrong tree and then get your head popped in a crowded room.” The tail-end of that bar is Drake’s way of calling back Kendrick’s canine/K-9 double entendre on “Like That” and using it against him, saying that he “[barked] up the wrong tree.” Later, AI Snoop raps that the “world is watching this chess game, but oh, you out of moves,” evoking imagery from the “First Person Shooter” music video where Drake and Cole recreated the photo of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo playing chess. Drake closes AI Snoop’s verse by poking fun at Kendrick’s status as a rappers’ rapper, saying, “Dot, you know that the OG never fucking doubted you/ But right now it seem like you posted up without a clue/ Of what the fuck you 'bout to do.” Then he passes the song back to himself.

On the third verse, Drake finally takes the AI effects off and raps in his own voice. After agreeing with AI Uncle Snoop’s lyrics, he raps, “I'm definitely about to come around the Lang gang and let my fucking bowel move/ Shitting on you niggas from a whole different altitude/ High up in the sky like I'm Howard Hughes.” This is a self-explanatory bar about Drake shitting on Kendrick’s pgLang label, as he compares himself to aerospace engineer, pilot, and business mogul Howard Hughes, who was known in his lifetime as being one of the richest people in the world. 

Drake goes on to say that “Push Ups” only took him “an hour or two” to make and hints that his next diss track will “bring out the coward” in Kendrick. Then Drake digs deeper into his belief that Dot didn’t drop his reply this weekend because he was forced to stay out of Taylor Swift’s way. “But now we gotta wait a fucking week 'cause Taylor Swift is your new Top/ And if you 'bout to drop, she gotta approve/ This girl really 'bout to make you act like you not in a feud/ She tailor-made your schedule with Ant, you out of the loop,” Drake raps, insinuating that Swift is Kendrick’s new boss. More specifically, he compares her to Kendrick’s old Top Dog Entertainment boss (Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith), who he also rapped about on “Push Ups,” and implies that she and Top dictate Dot’s release schedule.

After calling Kendrick a “corporate industry puppet” for getting out of the way of Taylor’s release, Drake questions why Dot hasn’t maintained the energy he had on “Like That” over these last few weeks, rapping, “Since ‘Like That’ your tone changed a little, you not as enthused/ How are you not in the booth?/ It feel like you kinda removed/You tryna let this shit die down/Nah, nah, nah, not this time nigga, you followin' through.” Drake is dead set on the idea that Dot is trying to duck him because he hasn’t responded within a week, despite the fact that it took him three weeks to respond to “Like That” with “Push Ups.” 

Drake closes his verse by continuing to taunt Kendrick about not responding immediately, rapping, “I guess you need another week to figure out how to improve/ What the fuck is taking so long? We waitin' on you.” Then he makes sure that the rest of his opposition know that he still has more bars for them whenever they decide to drop, too: “The rest of y'all are definitely involved, y'all gettin it too/ Soon as you get the courage to drop, I'm out on the loose.”

Then he sends even more shots in the outro, calling Taylor Swift the “biggest gangster in the music game right now” (possibly a sub at Rick Ross, who called her song titles “gangsta” on Friday), before referencing his own lyrics on “Red Button” about her being the only artist who can make him move his album release dates. Drake says Swift has pgLang “on mute,” like the viral Beyonce challenge, and calls out Kendrick one more time, saying he’s “in that NY apartment, you strugglin right now.” (Kendrick bought a penthouse in Brooklyn late last year.)

Drake’s decision to use artificial intelligence in a diss track is a polarizing development in this feud. Assuming that Akademiks is correct and Drake did in fact write and rap the first two verses himself (before applying AI Tupac and Snoop filters to his voice), it was a very clever chess move to use Kendrick’s idols against him. It further dramatizes an already theatrical beef, and it’s a way for Drake to try and remove potential disses from the board that Kendrick could’ve used against him. After weeks of discussion about AI in rap, thanks to all of the fake diss tracks popping up, Drake leaned into his internet-savvy ways and figured out how to use the technology as a weapon in his own diss song. 

It was a clever move, but let’s not pretend it’s all positive, though. All is fair in love and rap war, so it’s hard to argue the moral permissibility of Drake evoking the voice of a deceased artist like Pac, especially when Dot also used deepfake AI technology in his “The Heart Part 5” music video to look like Kobe Bryant and Nipsey Hussle. But there’s a difference. Dot got the approval of Nip’s family and was using the tech to pay homage to the late icons, and Drake is using it in a much different context. We also have to take into account the potentially dangerous symbolism of a massive artist like Drake embracing AI technology, and he shouldn’t be lauded as a creative mastermind for it. 200 high-profile artists just signed a petition to protect music from shit like this. With disinformation already running rampant on the internet, the last thing rap needs is the voices of the dead popping up on diss tracks. 

Drake questioning Kendrick’s “boogeyman” persona through AI Tupac hit harder than if he had just rapped it himself, and there is something very Lex Luthor about him even thinking of this in the first place, but seeing the biggest artist in the genre championing this cheap gimmick (especially while evoking the voice of a deceased legend to get a one-up on someone in a petty diss track) is pretty lame to me. I don’t think it’s necessarily a precursor for things to come that aren’t already happening, but AI in hip-hop is too new (and the lines are still too muddy) for it to be used in this way without taking a minute to think of potentially nasty applications in the future.

“Taylor Made Freestyle” is no “Back to Back,” but Drake has made it clear that he desperately wants Kendrick to respond to his jabs and keep the rap war going. He isn’t ducking any smoke from the rest of his opposition, either, so it sounds like the ball is in everyone else’s court now. 

Make no mistake, Kendrick Lamar will respond to Drake—it’s just a matter of when. Drake is trying to rush him, but it took the OVO artist three weeks to “leak” his initial response to “Like That” on April 13, and Mal said on the New Rory and Mal podcast that he’s heard whispers of Kendrick preparing to drop an album in May, so that might be when we hear a response. It’s important to remember that good rap responses can take time. Nas waited three months after Jay-Z dropped “Takeover” in Sept. 2001 before he released “Ether” in December of that year. Let Dot cook.