Kendrick Lamar, Rick Ross, A.I. Madness: Breaking Down the Drake vs. the World Beef

With a few lines in a guest verse on Future and Metro Boomin‘s chart-topping hit “Like That,” Kendrick Lamar ignited his long-simmering cold war with Drake into what’s become the widest-reaching rap beef in years. Since then, it’s all gotten incredibly messy, starting with J. Cole recording an entire diss track about his erstwhile friend Lamar and then deciding to retract it and apologize — a fairly unprecedented move in hip-hop. We trace the whole saga on the latest episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast —  go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play below.

From there, Drake’s “Push Ups” leaked last weekend — sparking some initial confusion about whether the song was real or A.I. — and officially hit streaming services today. Incredibly, within two hours or so of the leak, Rick Ross struck back with a brutal Drake diss, “Champagne Moments,” that he claimed to have recorded that very day. And Lamar will presumably come back with his own full track sometime soon. In the episode, Andre Gee joins host Brian Hiatt to trace the threads of all the drama, look at its roots, and predict what might be coming next.

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