Canada gets roped into Drake’s beef with Kendrick Lamar

Drake’s beef may have become Canada’s burden.

Kendrick Lamar’s smash hit Not Like Us, a pointed diss track aimed at the Toronto rap superstar, was used after Canadian losses at two major sporting events this month, and has some worried it’s becoming a theme.

When Argentina’s soccer team defeated Canada at the Copa America tournament on July 9, the team appeared to mock the rapper — who had placed a $300,000 bet on Canada winning — by posting a graphic on social media with the words “Not Like Us.”

The next night, the U.S. national basketball team blared the song over the speakers at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas after beating Canada in an Olympic exhibition game.

Sports blogger Jacolby Hart posted on social media platform X that the track “will get played any time Canada loses in anything for the foreseeable future.” Reddit users have suggested Not Like Us has become an anti-Canada anthem and compared it to Blame Canada, referencing a satirical song from the 1999 South Park movie. 

The sentiment seems to have been simmering for a while — one X user posted a video of Florida Panthers fans singing the song as they celebrated their June 24 Stanley Cup victory over the Edmonton Oilers. 

With the Paris Olympics kicking off next week, Canadians might be hearing more of it. 

Canadian associations are ‘uninformed’

Del Cowie, a Toronto-based music journalist with expertise in hip-hop, says he’s noticed people making the associations between Drake and Canada at large, which he says are coming partly from a lack of knowledge about the hip-hop scene and history here.

While Not Like Us has a competitive element by nature of it being a diss track, which fits well with sporting events, Cowie says Lamar has made some moves to feed into Canada-versus-U.S. tropes — like marking American holidays by performing it five times at a Juneteenth show in Los Angeles and releasing the video on Independence Day. 

He says some fans are picking up on Lamar’s implications that Drake is piggybacking on other scenes and not having his own sound, based on the line where Lamar raps, “You not a colleague, you a f–kin’ colonizer.”

“There is definitely a faction or a section of people that seem to think that there isn’t anything that Black Canadians could probably contribute to hip-hop without it seen as being colonized,” Cowie said. 

He said this attitude is coming from people for whom Drake is the be-all, end-all of their knowledge about the Toronto hip-hop scene. 

“Toronto is closer geographically than most American cities to New York, where hip-hop was born. And because of that proximity, it has a long history with hip-hop, and that has spanned decades. And then on top of that, there is a history of Black people living in Canada and making music and contributing culturally to the scene that is not well known outside of Canada,” Cowie said. 

“There’s an uninformed … perspective that anything that Drake in this particular instance is taking from others’ styles and everything, when a lot of those styles are endemic, quite honestly, to Toronto’s music.”

Canada’s hip-hop contributions are ‘undeniable’

Rollie Pemberton, a Toronto-based rapper who performs as Cadence Weapon, wrote in a May essay that Black Canadians who benefited from Drake’s success “will probably now have to dig out from under the tag of being seen as colonizers of African American culture.”

He continued, “Americans online are already pretending that there was never a Toronto sound in the first place. The idea that we’re just tourists and fans with a tenuous and precarious position in hip-hop culture will be hard to shake.”

The Red Hot Chili Peppers even joined in on the gag after playing two shows in Toronto last week, posting their set lists on Instagram with photos of famous Canadians — and then a photo of Lamar smiling and waving. 

The track, which twice topped the U.S. Billboard charts, seems to have cemented Lamar as the victor in his long-standing beef with Drake. The two exchanged jabs for weeks, but Drake has not responded since Not Like Us came out in May.

While Drake was the obvious target, some lines could be interpreted as shots at Toronto at large.

For example, Lamar raps, “I’m glad DeRoz came home, y’all didn’t deserve him neither,” referencing former Toronto Raptors basketball star DeMar DeRozan, who was born in Lamar’s home city of Compton. 

Lamar recruited DeRozan for the Not Like Us video to further jab at Drake, a noted Raptors super fan.

Lamar also took aim at the city in his previous diss track Euphoria, in which he seems to mock Toronto slang. 

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Despite all the trolling, Cowie says big-time American rappers value and understand Canada’s — and particularly Toronto’s — contributions to the genre. He notes even Lamar’s song Swimming Pools (Drank), the first big single from his 2012 debut album good kid, m.A.A.d. city, was produced by T-minus, who is from Pickering, Ont. 

Listing off Toronto-based producers like Boi-1da and WondaGurl, Cowie says he doesn’t think this beef will ultimately change any big-time rappers’ views of Canada.

“In the strategy of the battle, I think Kendrick knew that maybe this is something he could maybe get Drake on. But it’s not like he doesn’t know himself that there’s good music in Canada. Of course he knows,” Cowie said. 

“A lot of Toronto producers are working with A-list rappers in the U.S. all the time. And I don’t see that changing, [to] be honest with you, because it’s undeniable.”