Kendrick Lamar and Drake, arguably hip hop's two biggest artists, have been embroiled in an intensifying feud that's consumed the world of rap and dominated headlines for weeks.
Lamar, the critically revered, Pulitzer-prize-winning rapper, and Drake, the most commercially successful hip-hop artist of his generation, have been engaged in a back-and-forth volley of 'diss tracks' (as in disrespect).
Things started off somewhat humorously, with jabs at shoe size and lyrical prowess, but the music has gotten increasingly nasty, including allegations of domestic violence, paedophilia, secret children and much more.
The toxic war of words has lit up social media and rocketed up the charts.
Lamar's four diss tracks are all featured in the Top 10 on Spotify and Apple Music's streaming charts, while his back catalogue has enjoyed a 49 per cent boost, according to Billboard.
He's also likely to debut atop the US Charts next week — his fourth ever number one single — with 'Not Like Us'.
The track doubles down on accusations Drake is an alleged sexual predator and "certified paedophile" over a bouncy West Coast beat. It's already a hit across American clubs.
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But is the rap battle over? And who truly emerged victorious?
According to A.D. Carson, associate professor of hip hop at University of Virginia, the real winners aren't Lamar, Drake, or their sizeable fanbases.
It's the media outlets and streaming platforms that have benefited most from this musical grudge match.
"If we had to choose winners, it would be YouTube, Spotify, and every platform that was able to run a story after every [diss track] dropped," Dr Carson tells triple j's Hack.
"Every social media platform where folks argued about who was winning."
Rap beef is nothing new
Beefing is deeply rooted in the genre's history, from hip hop's earliest days of DJs and MCs bragging about their skills in The Bronx, through to the public feud between 90s titans Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls that turned fatal.
However, the nature of social media and the extreme parasocial relationships fans now have with rappers has meant the speed and intensity of the Kendrick and Drake beef is unlike any we've seen before.
Dr Carson says, in this instance, spectators have been caught up in the "gossip, character assassination, blatant misogyny and hom*ophobia" rather than the genre's time-honoured traditions of showmanship and lyrical dexterity.
"I don't believe that the voyeuristic spectacle of rap beef is a space where folks are really assessing skill and talent with regard to who's a better rapper," he says.
He points to two examples of how media outlets have glorified the spectacle: Spotify running billboards reading "Hip hop is a competitive sport" and a Vogue article 'Taylor Swift's Alleged Kim Kardashian Takedown Confirms It: This Is the Year of the Diss Track'.
"When Spotify and Vogue erect the colosseum to see folks engage in the blood sport that audiences are gathering around for? Yeah, I think we're way past the mark where the cultural imperative to see who is better or more skilled isn't the thing that's going on," he says.
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"We got folks who are rubber-necking, folks who are absolutely just looking for blood because we know, history tells us, black death sells.
"Deaths of rappers have been ways that people have been able to make a whole lot of money.
"So, I think when rappers lives and their bodies are destroyed, a whole lot of folks stand to gain. Most often it's not the rappers."
Dr Carson says spectators commodify and objectify black people
The hip-hop academic is concerned with how the conflict between two of the genre's biggest A-listers could have wider implications for the rap world.
"It's something I think about because of the artists who are not millionaires, who are not famous, and how it might affect regular rappers all across the world," Dr Carson says.
"I imagine there are some people with no concern at all for the rappers themselves. They're just interested in these characters [that] entertain them. These bodies."
The objectification of rappers is "something we should all think on a lot more", Dr Carson adds.
The clash between Lamar and Drake isn't just personal but philosophical.
Canadian star Drake, real name Aubrey Graham, is a former TV actor turned rap's biggest pop star. He's sold over 170 million records and has had more chart success than The Beatles and Michael Jackson.
On the other hand, Kendrick Lamar grew up in Compton, California – the spiritual birthplace of West Coast rap — and was slinging mixtapes and dodging gang violence in the streets as a teen.
He's aPulitzer-prize-winning,critically revered wordsmith known for his artsy, intricate raps, who became the first African-American artist to top triple j's Hottest 100 (with 'HUMBLE.' in 2017).
Lamar views Drake as everything that's wrong with rap culture.
On 'Not Like Us', he declares Drake as a "coloniser" using his mixed-race heritage to justify wearing his Blackness to his advantage, but who doesn't really understand or appreciate the culture.
Drake sees Lamar as inferior competition, jealous of his blinding commercial success, household-name fame, and estimated US$250-million net worth.
The two also came up together and collaborated in the early 2010s before things shifted into icy relations that simmered for more than a decade before recently reigniting.
Their long-awaited musical face-off is what fans have been dreaming of. But now the fight has turned ugly and deeply personal, there's concerns among hip hop fans and scholars that things could go too far.
Dr Carson likens the feud to the concept of kayfabe — a term used in the pro-wrestling world to describe the portrayal of staged rivalries between heroes and villains (or 'faces' and 'heels').
"Everybody knows that it's fake. That's [been] turned all the way up and it's only fake until it's not anymore, and nobody knows where that line is going to get drawn."
A security guard at Drake's Toronto home was seriously injured in a shooting earlier this week. Police officials said it was too early in the investigation to assign motive and declined to comment further.
But plenty are speculating on it being linked to Lamar amid his and Drake's feud.
"There are people reading [those] headlines saying: 'Well, of course, that's what happens to people who are rappers'," says Dr Carson, who cautions how the wider public tend to pigeonhole rap artists.
"We should take that to heart as well and keep in mind that language we use to describe these things is also really important.
"Folks have already associated violence with the name, with the category they've put them into.
"In the 90s we know where that kind of thing got us because we had the deaths of Biggie and Tupac," notes Dr Carson.
Tupac Shakur was shot dead in 1996, Biggie Smalls met the same fate a year after.
"That probably created not just the worry that folks could actually die or might actually be killed, but a promotional logic that went along with it because folks were looking at the benefits…" Dr Carson says.
"Everything that was being done become newsworthy, and headline news sells records, headlines news gets you on the charts."
Dr Carson says there's lots of modern parallels in the ways media and news outlets leverage "clickbait and controversy". And this isn't happening exclusively in the world of rap.
"I think there are lots of lessons we get from the sphere of our larger political and social lives by looking at the things that entertain us. They're not a sideshow, they're actually indicative of things we can — and should — learn from."
"What it does is maybe give us an opportunity culturally to pause for a moment and say 'do we, as the audience, truly value this?'"
So, has the dust settled on the clash between Kendrick Lamar and Drake? And what could happen next?
"I can imagine any number of ways that it might go," Dr Carson says.
"We know that going to jail doesn't stop the popularity of an artist. Going to trial doesn't stop their popularity. Being killed doesn't stop their popularity.
"And so, I still worry that there are folks who have so much to gain for it going to the furthest extent.
"That worry is not something I am going to easily put to bed because history … indicates there are further extremes for this to go to."
Ironically, it seems few have heeded the cautionary closing lyrics from Euphoria — the first of Lamar's recent diss tracks that is currently sitting at a whopping 65.6 million Spotify streams and expected to move higher in the US Top 10 next week.
"If you take it there, I'm takin it' further
Psst, that's something you don't wanna do"
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