In the evening of the 9th of February 2025, more than 133 million Americans, in the midst of the yearly ritual of the Super Bowl, could see the joy of hatred in the joyful eyes of the Halftime Show designated performer, rapper Kendrick Lamar. This happened when, towards the end of his show, Lamar performed the song “Not Like Us”, a chart-topping, five Grammy-award winning diss track at rapper and rival Drake. An emotion that, arguably, is not (or, at the very least, should not be) experienced much in a person’s lifetime slipped into dozens of millions of households. What follows is my attempt to explain, from my own perspective, how and why that hatred sparked a feeling of joy, not just in many listeners, but in Kendrick Lamar himself—involving an understanding of the traditions behind rap and Hip Hop as a musical genre; some specific circumstances within Hip Hop culture in 2024; and most saliently, I argue, the way hatred is a feeling involving the exercise of reason.
Hip Hop and rap music originated in the multicultural environment of New York in the late 1970s, gaining a steady place in mainstream culture in the following decades. While the genre’s musical origins can be traced back to disco, jazz, funk, and Latinoamerican and Jamaican music, among others, rap music has a particular significance for African-American culture. According to many literary critics and commentators (including, notably, David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello), rap music has roots into the linguistic practice of “signifyin’”. Signifyin’, according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., entails bantering and boasting by playing with ambiguous language, often in a rhythmic style—a practice exemplified by the figure of griots, musicians, poets and storytellers present in West African tradition dating back to the 13th century. This practice can be seen as essential to rapping, which consists exactly in the rhythmic delivery of rhymes and wordplay over a musical beat.
Rap music’s roots in signifyin’ can highlight another typical feature of the genre, which is its emphasis on competitiveness. Signifyin’ is a form of play that can lead to treachery, as exemplified by the folkloristic figure of the signifying monkey, who often tricks and makes fun of his fellow jungle animals by using language that is easy to misinterpret. In rap music, this is exemplified by the practices of dissing and battle rap, which consist in attacking and criticizing your opponent’s character and authenticity in a way that shows your superiority to them as a rapper or as a person in general. While this practice is quite common within rap music, and many rappers claim to be the best at what they do in spite of others, some rivalries among rap musicians have led to feuds that led to more direct and sometimes violent confrontations.
For rap music and Hip Hop fans, 2024 saw the unfolding of an incredibly significant rivalry: that between Canadian rapper Drake and Compton-based rapper Kendrick Lamar. These two artists reached the peak of the genre’s industry in the preceding fifteen years, and, while they had collaborated in the past, many fans pondered and discussed who of them is the best of their generation. After fellow rapper J. Cole, featuring on Drake’s single “First-Person Shooter” claimed than he, Drake and Lamar were “the big three” of their generation, Lamar rebutted that claim on the track “Like That” by saying “F**k the Big Three, it’s just Big Me”. This led to an intense exchange between Drake and Lamar between April and May, where things, admittedly, got to personal and truly disturbing places. Lamar’s deep hatred towards Drake was made very explicit since the very beginning of the exchange, especially because Drake represented everything wrong with the music industry, in Lamar’s eyes. The most successful of the songs released throughout this feud was Lamar’s “Not Like Us”. In the song, he questions Drake’s authenticity as a rapper by accusing him of parasitizing the work of Atlanta rappers for personal profit, outright calling him a colonizer, and accuses him of being a pedophile, with an especially scathing “A Minor” chord double entendre in the song’s first verse.
Importantly, the core message of “Not Like Us” was not exclusively about Lamar’s feud with Drake. The very title and hook of the track imply an identification of “they” and “us”, where the “us” is recognizable as not like “they”—where the “they” are inauthentic and awful people, alleged predators over Black rap culture and underage women. The “Us” is not merely identified by contraposition to “They”, however. Rather, according to some commentators (and to Lamar himself), there is an affirmative and grounded character to the Us, meaning African American and especially West Coast rap culture. This was especially highlighted following the “Ken & Friends” Concert Lamar headlined on Juneteenth 2024, although this is a persistent theme in Lamar’s music and much rap music in general. In this sense, “Not Like Us”—as well as Lamar’s overall victory in the feud—has been seen to represent a reaffirmation of the values of Hip Hop and rap music as a cultural movement, a form of signifyin’ where the hook reflects the differences between Lamar (and what he represents) and Drake (and what he represents) are both of personal character and cultural significance. Hating Drake, here, would mean to love Hip Hop and the West Coast as an authentic cultural identifier.
This leads us back to the Super Bowl Halftime Show, where Kendrick Lamar performed various songs from his catalogue. Towards the event’s end, Lamar finally played “Not Like Us”, which was welcomed by the stadium’s cheers. Midway towards its performance, in the midst of the song’s complex choreography, Lamar turned to the camera; and with a cheesy and mischievous grin, recited some of the song’s lyrics: “Say Drake, I hear you like ‘em young/ You better never go to cell block one.”
I can only imagine that, if you are simply someone not knowing that song or its context, that very event must have been shocking—if not outright horrifying—to accuse someone of pedophilia that joyfully, on national television. And yet, I cannot help but ask myself: what is it that led the entire New Orleans Ceasar’s Superdome stadium, most of the Grammy Awards attendees, and millions of people across the world to sing along to the song and its infamous double entendre? Is it simply because it is a catchy and humorous line? Even if that smile, and the whole show, simply signifies a victory lap, for him and the musical culture he intends to represent—how is Kendrick Lamar visibly enjoying hating Drake this much? And why am I, a 29 year-old white Italian male living in Germany, feeling that joy through that hate?
That mischievous smile reminded me, when I first saw it, of Jean-Paul Sartre’s distinction between repugnance and hatred. In The Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre spells out the difference in terms of not just our attitude towards the object of our emotion, but in the way we construct that object in our minds. Repugnance is only experienced as an instantaneous, almost bodily reaction to something or someone. In contrast, when we experience hatred, the object of our hatred transcends our immediate experience of the world. Hatred is an almost conceptual repugnance, an emotion that is not exclusively manifest in experience but persists in the very abstraction of the source of hatred—drawing from lived experience but claiming a generalizable and perceivably absolute claim. In this sense (although Sartre does not strictly put it this way), hatred differs from repugnance because it requires articulating and defining the object and motivations behind it in a way that goes beyond the here and now into abstraction. In other words, to truly hate something requires the exercise of reason.
And the exercise of reason, in itself, has been seen as a pleasurable activity dating back to Ancient Greek philosophy. In his Philebus, Plato argues that reasoning (or logismos) exercised in learning and acquiring knowledge often leads to pleasure. Much of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is dedicated to argue that living a virtuous life, which requires the exercise of practical wisdom (or phronesis), is pleasurable—with phronesis being itself a virtue whose cultivation and exercise is a pleasurable endeavor. Reasoning, the articulation and definition of concepts, the acquisition of knowledge and the act of understanding have been seen as a source of pleasure, an enjoyable activity in itself.
This takes us back to signifyin’, and to Lamar’s smile. If a central aspect of signifyin’ as a practice is interaction with another, and to show your superiority in character and practices to them, then it is also, and very clearly, a dialogical and rhetorical exercise of reason. Signifyin’ can be seen as an activity where reasoning and wordplay intertwine, the former to persuade and show your superiority—why you are right and they are wrong—and the latter to make that persuasion more captivating and, arguably, enjoyable. Reason and affect play feely through signifyin’ and, today, through rap. And this, I think, lays at the core of Kendrick Lamar’s hateful smile. Not just the celebration of an overwhelming victory against his opponent; not just the affirmation of an authentic and deeply rooted cultural identity—but the real-time articulation of his feelings, the reasoned conviction and enunciation of his hatred. A hatred turned into reasoning, and turned into art.
Of course, I do not wish for people to experience hatred, let alone to be objects of hatred. However, I can’t help admiring how a man’s hatred turned into art, into millions of people dancing and singing along, and an admirable affirmation of cultural identity. And whenever I run into a clip of Kendrick Lamar’s grin, I can’t help but smile, too.
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