Updated April 2026
“Not Like Us” is a diss track in which Kendrick Lamar accuses Drake of cultural colonisation, sexual misconduct, and artistic fraud, and makes it sound so good that everyone from bar mitzvah kids to Kamala Harris ended up quoting it.
A YouTube link dropped on a Saturday evening in May 2024. No press release, and no radio campaign. Within hours it was everywhere. Within two weeks it was number one. By February 2025 it was the centrepiece of a Super Bowl halftime show watched by tens of millions, and Drake was suing the record label that released it for defamation. It rearranged what the word “diss track” can mean.
The Kendrick Lamar and Drake rivalry had been running underground for over a decade, surfacing in cryptic verses and sidelong references before anyone would formally name it. In “King Kunta” (2015), Kendrick took a pointed shot at rappers who use ghostwriters. Drake took the hint but didn’t answer directly.
The tension ran on low heat for years, a dig here, a loaded feature there, until October 2023, when J. Cole referred to himself, Drake and Kendrick as rap’s “big three,” on First Person Shooter. Kendrick rejected the premise immediately. On Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That,” he stated plainly there was no big three, only a “big me.”
Drake responded with “Push Ups,” mocking Kendrick’s pop collaborations. Kendrick hit back with “Euphoria,” a six-minute dissection of Drake’s identity, race, and industry positioning. Drake dropped “Taylor Made Freestyle,” which used an AI-generated Tupac Shakur as a weapon against Kendrick.
Kendrick replied with “6:16 in LA,” then “Meet the Grahams,” which targeted Drake’s family directly. Drake countered with “Family Matters.” Kendrick had “Not Like Us” ready before Drake finished recording.
It dropped the same night.
Produced by Mustard (Dijon McFarlane, one of the West Coast’s most commercially reliable beatmakers) the instrumental reportedly came together in about 30 minutes. It sounds like it. Not in a cheap way: in the way that genuine instinct moves faster than calculation.
The beat blends West Coast hyphy with contemporary bounce, something between a Lil Jon and a Dr. Dre session run through a 2024 filter. It’s aggressive and genuinely fun, which is precisely the problem for Drake. A standard diss track plays in interviews and YouTube breakdowns. This one plays at parties. Critics had long questioned whether Kendrick could make something with club-floor energy without sacrificing his lyrical precision. This track ended that debate by refusing to acknowledge it existed.
Mustard’s tag, “Mustard on the beat, ho,” lands as the first line after the intro whisper, and Kendrick keeps it in, letting the producer take his bow before the demolition begins. It’s a small thing that signals the larger point: the whole song is a demonstration of what a solid collaboration looks like, an artist embedded in a scene rather than visiting it for a features quota.
The track opens before the beat drops. Kendrick whispers: “Psst. I see dead people.”
The Sixth Sense reference doubles back to “Euphoria,” where Kendrick paired the film with A.I., the Haley Joel Osment movie, as a two-pronged reference to ghostwriters and artificial intelligence, both of which he’d been leveling at Drake’s creative process. By opening “Not Like Us” with the same image, he’s not quoting a film. He’s repeating a charge he’s already made and intends to prove again in the verses that follow.
The dead people are the credits on Drake’s discography. Songwriters who don’t appear on the sleeve. Verses that arrive too clean, too fast, too perfectly fitted to topical moments. The whisper before the beat is a verdict delivered before the evidence is even presented.
“Deebo any rap n*gga, he a free throw.”
Deebo is the bully from Friday, Tom Lister Jr.’s character, massive and unhurried, who takes what he wants and dares anyone to object. Kendrick is saying dominance over Drake is effortless. Free throw: an uncontested shot. The bar is both accurate and deliberately small, he’s not even treating this as a competitive situation.
“Man down, call an amberlamps, tell him, ‘Breathe, bro.'”
Amber Lamps became a viral internet meme in 2010, a woman filmed during a bus fight in Oakland who became a symbol of composure amid chaos. Kendrick borrows it as slang for ambulance (Drake is going to need one) while the Oakland geography signals West Coast turf.
“Nail a n*gga to the cross, he walk around like Teezo.”
Teezo Touchdown, the Houston-based artist known for wearing nails through his clothes as an aesthetic choice, appears here as a metaphor for Drake’s performed suffering. Drake positions himself as persecuted; Kendrick says the wounds are decorative.
“I’m finna pass on this body, I’m John Stockton.”
Most breakdowns read this as a simple sports reference. Stockton played 19 seasons for the Utah Jazz as the league’s all-time assists leader, feeding scoring opportunities to Karl Malone. Malone’s legacy has since been complicated by separate controversies around his personal conduct. Kendrick isn’t just citing the assists record; he’s bringing Malone’s shadow into the room, gesturing at the type of company Drake keeps without naming names directly. Nothing in this verse is isolated. Every reference pulls in something adjacent and uncomfortable.
“Say, Drake, I hear you like ’em young / You better not ever go to cell block one.”
No more metaphors. No more wordplay scaffolding. A direct accusation, stated plainly. Kendrick has been playing, and then he stops playing.
“Certified Lover Boy? Certified pedophile.”
Drake’s 2021 album title repurposed as a charge. The reframing is surgical: Kendrick doesn’t invent the language, he takes Drake’s own branding and redirects it. Drake has denied all allegations. His defamation lawsuit against Universal Music Group, the label behind both rappers, accuses UMG of manufacturing a viral hit from false accusations. Kendrick is not a named defendant.
“Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A minor.”
The wordplay is clean: A minor as a musical key, as an adjective for something small, and as a noun for someone underage. Three readings collapse into one line. The exaggerated drawn-out delivery (minoooorrrrr) mimics Drake’s own extended “Dave Freeeeee” from “Family Matters,” which dropped hours earlier. Kendrick heard it, flipped it back before the night was out.
“They not like us / They not like us / They not like us.”
Simple. Repeated. Almost childlike in its rhythm. A traditional diss track hook invites analysis. This one invites participation. By the time Kendrick performed it at the Kia Forum on Juneteenth, five consecutive times, to an arena that knew every word, the repetition had stopped being a chorus and become something closer to a crowd ritual.
At Super Bowl LIX, performing to the most-watched television audience in American history, Kendrick censored his own lyrics. He left the gap where the most incendiary word should be, and 65,000 people filled it in without being asked. The song had been inside enough people that the performance didn’t need him to complete it.
Verse two broadens the target. Kendrick goes after Drake’s OVO Sound associates, referencing specific names and specific allegations.
Chubbs, OVO’s head of security, is described as the only person Drake actually looks after. Baka Not Nice, formerly OVO-affiliated, faced a sex trafficking lawsuit in 2014 that was ultimately dismissed. “Party” (PARTYNEXTDOOR) and nose references point to well-circulated rumours in the industry. The verse is a charge sheet against an entire circle, not a single target.
“What OVO for? The ‘Other Vaginal Option’?”
Kendrick reduces the label’s entire brand to a punchline. OVO Sound has defined Drake’s cultural reach for years, a platform that extended his influence across producers, artists, and markets. Kendrick isn’t just dismissing Drake; he’s dismissing the infrastructure Drake built.
“Freaky-ass nigga, he a 69 God.”
The “69 God” tag, repeated throughout the bridge, layers 6ix9ine, the rapper convicted of using a child in a sexual performance, over the “God” branding Lil Wayne popularised. Putting those two names in the same phrase is the point.
“I’m glad DeRoz’ came home, y’all didn’t deserve him neither.”
DeMar DeRozan, drafted by Toronto, spent a decade building the city’s NBA identity before being traded to San Antonio without warning in 2018. The move was broadly seen as a betrayal. Kendrick uses it as evidence: Toronto doesn’t honour its own. Drake, the city’s most prominent cultural export, is cast in the same light.
“Once upon a time, all of us was in chains / Homie still doubled down callin’ us some slaves.”
Kendrick opens with Atlanta’s history, a city built partly on the labour of enslaved people, the Mecca of Black American culture and the birthplace of the modern hip-hop industry’s commercial infrastructure. Then he maps Drake’s relationship to Atlanta artists directly onto that history:
“You called Future when you didn’t see the club / Lil Baby helped you get your lingo up / 21 gave you false street cred / Thug made you feel like you a slime in your head.”
Every collaboration Kendrick names gets reframed as extraction: Drake arrived when he needed cultural credibility, took what worked, and left. The debt ran one direction.
“You run to Atlanta when you need a few dollars / No, you not a colleague, you a f**ing coloniser.”*
Kendrick has spent two verses building toward this, mapping Drake’s career moves onto the same pattern as settlers using townspeople to generate wealth. Drake, who is biracial and Canadian, has spent his career navigating questions about his proximity to Black American culture. Kendrick isn’t relitigating identity here. He’s talking about conduct, and the coloniser word does it in one syllable.
Every piece about “Not Like Us” eventually comes back to the same framing: a rap beef that got out of hand, two massive egos, industry drama.
What Kendrick built across these seven minutes is an argument about authenticity as infrastructure. The coloniser framing is the most debatable part of it. Hip-hop has always moved across regional lines; artists borrow aesthetics, lingo, and production styles constantly, Kendrick included. The charge against Drake isn’t unique to Drake, which is probably why Kendrick frames it the way he does: not as cultural borrowing, which nobody could make stick, but as a pattern of instrumental relationships. You called Future when you needed the club to open. Lil Baby gave you the cadence. You took what each city had to offer and returned a feature credit. Whether that crosses a line most rappers don’t is a question the song doesn’t answer and doesn’t need to, because the framing landed before anyone had time to argue with it.
Drake has denied all of the personal allegations. The lawsuit is ongoing. None of that changes what the song did to his standing, or what it took to do it.
The question the song leaves open is what accountability looks like when the only court that matters is public opinion, and the verdict is delivered on a beat you can’t stop moving to.
