Breaking Down All of the Ways Kendrick Lamar Attacked Drake on “Euphoria”

Drake’s racial identity has been at the center of his beefs in the past, like when Pusha-T found a picture of him in blackface and called out his facial features on “The Story of Adidon,” and Kendrick uses a similar tactic here, challenging his Blackness in several ways. As figures like Suge Knight have already pointed out, there are issues with this approach, and some people are calling him out for colorism, but Kendrick goes all in, reciting bars like:

“Cutthroat business, you got shit twisted/ What is it? The braids?”

Kendrick uses “twisted” as a double entendre to say Drake is stupid for messing with him, while calling him out for wearing braids, similar to the time Pusha-T said that he couldn’t grow an afro because his hair “couldn’t nap enough.”

“How many more Black features 'til you finally feel that you Black enough?”

A Drake co-sign is a very valuable asset for rising artists, but Kendrick flips his Midas touch reputation against him, using a double entendre to imply that the rapper actually uses features from rising Black acts to validate his own Blackness.

“I even hate when you say the word ‘Nigga,’ but that's just me, I guess/ Some shit just cringeworthy, it ain't even gotta be deep I guess” & “We don’t wanna hear you say nigga no more.

Dot says it sounds cringe whenever Drake says “nigga,” poking more fun at his half-white ethnicity. Then he closes out the song with the same sentiment, crafting a deviously catchy outro as he croons, “We don’t wanna hear you say nigga no more,” which will definitely be haunting Drake’s dreams over the next few days. 

Similar to attacking his Blackness, Kendrick also uses Drake’s Canadian nationality (and his background as an actor) as a way to say The Boy is an outsider in both rap culture and Black culture. Throughout “Euphoria,” he hits Drake with bars like: 

“Everything they say about me is true”

The beginning of “Euphoria” has reversed dialogue from The Wiz where Richard Pryor’s character is being exposed as a phony. This is Kendrick’s way of saying the same thing about Drake, using this moment to expose him as a fraud.

“Tommy Hilfiger stood out, but FUBU never had been your collection”

There were reports in the late ‘90s that Tommy Hilfiger had made racist remarks about Black people and built a brand that wasn't very accessible to minorities, as opposed to FUBU (For Us, By Us) which was created to combat discriminatory companies. Kendrick is using this parallel to highlight Drake’s lack of cultural currency when it comes to Black people.

I hate when a rapper talk about guns, then somebody die/ They turn into nuns, then hop online, like ‘Pray for my city’/ He fakin' for likes and digital hugs”

Kendrick is highlighting how Drake often plays the role of a mob boss in his music and raps about gang activity, but then calls for gun reform for his city for online sympathy. This could also be a direct response to Drake “faking for likes” when he used AI Tupac and Snoop Dogg in an Instagram diss song, while calling him a fake gangster who has never lived any of the things he’s rapped about.

“Somebody had told me that you got a ring, on God, I'm ready to double the wage/ I rather do that than let a Canadian nigga make Pac turn in his grave”

This is a response to reports that Drake bought Tupac’s crown ring for $1 million at auction, a move that Dot is implying he wants to rectify because a “Canadian nigga” is not deserving of such a hip-hop artifact.

“You know I got language barriers, huh/ There's no accent you can sell me, huh”

Kendrick is saying that he and Drake don’t speak the same language, both in how they rap and how they were raised. He takes the language barrier bar further in the following line by highlighting that they still can’t understand each other, even when Drake adopts different accents, something that he's been known to do when rapping on tracks with artists from different regions. 

“Yeah, OVO niggas is dick riders/ Tell 'em run to America to imitate heritage, they can't imitate this violence”

Kendrick is taking aim at Drake and his entire OVO crew here, saying that the Toronto natives can imitate how Americans act, but they can’t imitate the street violence that they try to project in their songs and music videos.

“Don't speak on the family, crodie/ It can get deep in the family, crodie/ Talk about me and my family, crodie? Someone go bleed in your family, crodie/ I be at New Ho King eatin' fried rice with a dip sauce and blamy, crodie/ Tell me you're cheesin', fam”

This entire string of bars is Kendrick’s way of mocking Toronto slang by sarcastically closing each bar with “Crodie,” which is a word commonly used in Ontario by Crips, and “cheesin’, fam” which Drake included in the intro to “How Bout Now.” 

Drake has been accused of being a misogynist for his degrading lyrics about women over the years, and Kendrick highlights this on “Euphoria.” There have also been rumors about Drake having inappropriate relationships with younger women for years now, and he even tried to get ahead of these allegations by bringing them up on “Taylor Made Freestyle” through AI Pac, but Kendrick still finds ways to subtly address them on "Euphoria."

The song's name itself might be a play on HBO’s Euphoria, a show that’s executive produced by Drake, which has been criticized for sexualizing high school-aged characters. The title might be Dot’s way of addressing the rumors about Drake, without even giving them a direct bar.

“How I make music that electrify 'em, you make music that pacify 'em/ I can double down on that line, but spare you this time, that's random acts of kindness”

Kendrick says he's offering Drake a “random act of kindness” by not flipping the word “pacifying" into “pacifier” in the previous bar, which would have gone even deeper into the rumors of liking younger women. 

“Have you ever paid five-hundred thou' like to an open case?”

Kendrick didn’t go the salacious route in most of his verse, but fans think this bar is his way of subtly bringing up a report from 2019 about how Drake allegedly paid a woman $530,000 after she accused him of assaulting her in 2017 during the European leg of his Boy Meets World tour.

“When I see you stand by Sexyy Red, I believe you see two bad bitches/ I believe you don't like women, that's real competition, you might pop ass with 'em”

This bar is…weird. One interpretation is that Kendrick is saying Drake hates women in a misogynistic way, and that’s why he’s had more smoke for artists like Megan Thee Stallion on“Circo Loco” and Rihanna on “Fear of Heights” than his male counterparts. The other interpretation is that he’s lazily insinuating that Drake is gay and using that as an insult. The latter is super wack, so hopefully that’s not where he was going with this bar.

Drake’s decision to use AI in his “Taylor Made Freestyle” (and all of the trolling he’s been doing on social media) has been very divisive, and in general, he has a reputation of sending more subliminal shots than direct ones. Kendrick takes aim at Drake’s beef tactics and how he “hate[s] the way [he] sneak diss,” among other things, as he recites bars like:

“Everybody wanna be demon 'til they get chipped by your throwaway”

Kendrick is calling Drake’s bluff from “Push Ups” (“This ain’t even everything I know, don’t wake the demon up”) while also dismissing his own “Like That” verse a throwaway that still caused a lot of damage to Drake’s ego.

“I don't like you poppin' shit at Pharrell, for him, I inherit the beef/ Yeah, fuck all that pushin' P, let me see you push a T/ You better off spinnin' again on him, you think about pushin' me?/ He's Terrence Thornton, I'm Terence Crawford, yeah, I'm whoopin' feet”

Kendrick brings up Drake’s shots at Pharrell on “Meltdown” and asks for “all the curses,” saying he’s inheriting the beef from Pusha-T. Dot also compares himself to boxer Terence Crawford and says he’s “whoopin feet,” which is slang for beating someone’s ass.

“Try cease and desist on the "Like That" record/ Ho, what? You ain't like that record?”

Kendrick cracks a joke about Drake trying to use lawyers to remove “Like That” someday, as a way to poke fun at rumors that the Toronto rapper sent a cease and desist letter to French Montana to bury a verse.

“There's three GOATs left, and I see two of them kissin' and huggin' on stage/ I love 'em to death, and in eight bars, I'll explain that phrase, huh”

This could be a reference to Drake and J. Cole showing each other love while on tour together, and besides the lame gay joke in the middle of the bar, it’s interesting that Kendrick is still recognizing that “there’s three GOATs left,” implying that he still respects Cole and Drake’s status in rap to some degree. Then eight bars later, he says:

“Yeah, Cole and Aubrey know I'm a selfish nigga/ The crown is heavy, huh/ I pray they my real friends, if not, I'm YNW Melly”

YNW Melly was arrested for allegedly killing two of his friends, so Dot is implying that if Drake and Cole violate his trust, they will meet the same fate.

This is arguably the most exhausted jab in the playbook when it comes to dissing Drake, but Kendrick tailors his shot to invalidate The Boy’s attempt to gain sympathy about getting teamed up on by half the rap game in this beef.  

“I'm allergic to the lame shit, only you like bein' famous/ Yachty can't give you no swag neither, I don't give a fuck 'bout who you hang with”

Two weeks ago, an alleged Lil Yachty reference track for Drake’s “Jumbotron Shit Poppin” leaked online, so Kendrick brings those rumors up directly right after shitting on how much Drake loves being Drake and all of the fame that comes with it.  

“Ain't twenty-v-one, it's one-v-twenty if I gotta smack niggas that write with you/ Yeah, bring 'em out too, I clean 'em out too/ Tell BEAM that he better stay right with you/ Am I battlin' ghost or AI? Nigga feelin' like Joel Osteen/Funny, he was in a film called "AI"/ And my sixth sense tellin' me to off him”

Dot cleverly flips the “20 v 1” bar on “Push Ups” against Drake, saying that he’s actually the one who is up against 20 people (ghostwriters, to be exact). He namedropping rapper and singer Beam, specifically, who worked with Drake and 21 Savage on Her Loss. Then Kendrick delivers some of the best wordplay on the whole song, equating the ghostwriting and AI stunts as weak tactics to use in a rap beef, before using corrupt televangelist Joel Osteen (whose name is similar to actor Hayley Joel Osment) to get off a crazy double entendre about the movie The Sixth Sense (which is about Osment being able to see ghosts).