Jay-Z has weighed in on the Kendrick Lamar and Drake beef, saying he doesn’t know if “battling needs to be a part of the culture anymore”.
The high-profile duel dominated headlines in 2024 and 2025, spinning out from a back-and-forth trade of diss tracks to become a heated defamation lawsuit and a complex feud that impacted their personal lives.
Jay-Z had a remote part to play in the beef as it is his Roc Nation company that ultimately selects the Super Bowl halftime show headliners and Lamar’s show in 2025 saw him lead a singalong of the contentious lines in ‘Not Like Us’.
Now, in an extensive interview with GQ, Jay has spoken for the first time about the feud. He said his point of view is based on the current status of the “four pillars of hip-hop”, namely “breakdancing, graffiti, DJing and battling”.
He said breakdancing is “not at the forefront of rap anymore”, graffiti is now “not part of hip-hop” and “you don’t even know the DJ for half of the artists anymore”.
“And the last pillar is battling,” he added. “We love the excitement and I love the sparring, but in this day and age there’s so much negative stuff that comes with it that you almost wish it didn’t happen.”
“Now, people that like Kendrick hate Drake, no matter what he makes. It’s like an attack on his character. I don’t know if I love that. I don’t know if it’s helpful to our growth where the fallout lands, especially on social media,” he said.
“It’s too far. It’s bringing people’s kids in it. I don’t like that. I sound like the old guy wagging his finger, but I think we can achieve the same thing, as far as sparring with music, with collaborations more so than breaking the whole thing apart. It could stand it before because there was no social media. You had the battle and it was fun and then you moved on. Right now, I don’t know if it could stand it with the technology that we have.”
He concluded by saying he doesn’t know “if it’s worth it at this point”.
“I don’t know if battling needs to be part of the culture anymore. We grew from breakdancing. We love graffiti. Before, the MC’s job was to bring attention to the DJ…. I want to hear what the rapper is saying. Now the last pillar is battling, and these are all the things that come with it. I hate that I have this point of view on it. I do. Because I know what it sounds like. It’s just how I feel about it.”
He went on to clarify his position, adding: “There is clearly an agenda to silence voices in our community, a heavy right-wing agenda. And the culture is happily playing along in the name of this insane thirst of Stan culture to have something on the other side. We are in a strange time. I’m curious as to how this plays out!”
In October, Drake filed an appeal to revive his defamation lawsuit against Universal Music Group over Lamar’s diss track ‘Not Like Us’, after a federal judge ruled that the allegedly defamatory statements made in the hit song – among them that Drake was a “certified paedophile” (Drake has continually denied any wrongdoing) – qualified as “nonactionable opinion” and dismissed the suit.
Shortly after the ruling was thrown out, stats emerged showing that ‘Not Like Us’ had re-entered the iTunes and Apple Music Top 100 song charts. In the latter streamers’ case, this was across multiple countries. Similarly, the day of the ruling, the track was said to have received upwards of 1 million streams on Spotify.
As for Jay-Z, he has announced a pair of stadium shows in New York to celebrate his classic albums ‘Reasonable Doubt’ and ‘The Blueprint’. The Yankee Stadium shows will mark the 30th and 25th anniversaries respectively of the two records, on July 10 and 11.
Jay-Z is also set to co-headline the Philadelphia festival Roots Picnic with The Roots on Saturday May 30.
His most recent full headline performance was a 2019 show at New York’s Webster Hall, while he was last on stage in July 2025, when he joined his wife, Beyoncé, during her final ‘Cowboy Carter’ tour date in Las Vegas.
