Seth Rogen is among the millions who have been invested in the beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar, and he has now offered his own take on the drama.
On Tuesday (May 7), the comedian headlined the Netflix Is A Joke festival in Los Angeles, California. During his set at the Hollywood Bowl, he took a moment to address the feud that has been at the center of the Hip Hop circuit over the past few weeks.
“If you’re not a rap fan, allow me to explain,” he began. “There are two very famous rappers in Drake and Kendrick Lamar, and they’re in a fight right now. They are in a big fight with each other, and the way rappers fight with each other is they write mean rhymes about each other, which is an objectively funny way to fight with another person.
“I’ll walk you through the whole thing. It started with Drake, and he made a song about the other guy, where he was like, ‘You’re not as successful as I am.’ Started slow, started slow, and everyone’s like, ‘What’s the other guy going to say? What’s his retort going to be?’
“Kendrick, the other guy, he came back and he was like, ‘I hate the way you dress, man.’ That was his thing, he was like, ‘I don’t like the way you dress, dude,’ which would suck — I wouldn’t like that! I once had Joan Rivers‘ daughter tweet that she didn’t like my outfit and it hurt, so I can only image. But still, pretty tame on the grand scale of things you can say about another person in rhyme form.”
The 42-year-old continued: “It did not stop there. After that, things got pretty mean. Kendrick, he came back and he said to Drake, ‘You’re a bad father and you should be a registered sex offender.’ You could see Drake was not expecting that either! That changed the tone of the conversation pretty dramatically.
“Drake was caught off guard, and he started writing raps, and his raps were like defensive now, all of a sudden, which is a funny thing to hear — you don’t hear defensive rapping that often; it’s usually pretty aggressive.
“You don’t hear rap that’s like, ‘I am a good father … I should not be a registered sex offender.’ I would say as soon as you’re asserting in a rap song that you should not be a registered sex offender, you’ve lost the rap battle.”
Seth Rogen hilariously explains why Drake lost rap battle to Kendrick Lamar pic.twitter.com/LbmywHDQ5L
— HipHopDX (@HipHopDX) May 8, 2024
Contrary to the Pineapple Express actor’s humorous take on the feud, Questlove is far from impressed by the whole ordeal.
The Roots drummer sternly criticized the hotly-contested rap battle on social media earlier this week, calling both MCs out for dragging each other’s family members into the drama through scandalous and unsubstantiated allegations on their respective diss songs.
“Nobody won the war,” he wrote. “This wasn’t about skill. This was a wrestling match level mudslinging and takedown by any means necessary — women & children (& actual facts) be damned.
“Same audience wanting blood will soon put up ‘rip’ posts like they weren’t part of the problem. Hip Hop truly is dead.”
Challenging both rappers to step their game up morally, he added in the caption: “Here We Are Now…Entertain us?”
