‘Great Rap War’ Inspires Questions of Race, Identity — and Jewishness

May 16, 2024 JTA

Rap superstars Drake (left) and Kendrick Lamar have been trading insults in a series of songs that have aroused commentary far beyond the music world. (Prince Williams/Wireimage; Erika Goldring/FilmMagic; via Getty Images via JTA)

By Jonathan Branfman

Recent headlines have tracked the “Great Rap War” between Drake, a biracial Jewish Canadian rap superstar, and Kendrick Lamar, a Black non-Jewish American rap superstar.

In recent weeks, Drake and Lamar have bashed each other with unusually scathing, high-profile and rapid-fire diss tracks, garnering coverage even from such flagship newspapers as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

As a scholar of Jewish identity, race and gender in popular culture, I’ve followed those headlines to continue my research on Drake, one of the key performers in my forthcoming book, “Millennial Jewish Stars: Navigating Racial Antisemitism, Masculinity, and White Supremacy” (New York University Press).

While it’s tempting to dismiss the feud as a marketing ploy or frivolous distraction from weightier issues, the Drake-Kendrick Lamar beef also illuminates broader patterns in the way American society envisions rap authenticity, race, class, masculinity and Jewishness.

Lamar’s tracks have leveled two core accusations against Drake. First, Lamar references allegations that Drake may prey upon underaged girls — for example, the 2018 revelation that Drake (then 32) initiated a close texting relationship with actress Millie Bobby Brown (then 14). Kendrick’s rap calls Drake a “pervert” and “pedophile” who “should be placed on neighborhood watch.”

Despite the seriousness of this allegation, a great deal of public reaction has focused on Lamar’s second key accusation: that Drake — biracial, Canadian, Jewish and a former teen soap actor who grew up middle-class — is inauthentic as a representation of rap’s essential African-American culture.

Lamar’s tracks extend the long-running and commonplace view that Drake isn’t Black enough and steal from Black culture, and Drake’s attempts to perform Black masculinity are offensive or pathetic counterfeit imitations.

Lamar conveys these accusations through lyrics that call Drake “off-white” rather than Black, order Drake to stop saying the N-word, and inform Drake that “you not a colleague, you a f—ing colonizer” within the rap industry.

This type of invective about Drake’s Blackness and masculinity has circulated nearly since he first broke into the U.S. rap industry, and it has continued to coexist with his spectacular musical success. For example, when Drake was named Artist of the Decade by the 2021 Billboard Music Awards, a staggering number of online “Drake memes” mock him as “not really Black,” “not a real man” and “not a real rapper.”

The rap industry has often predicated authenticity on specific notions of Black American hypermasculinity. This archetype titillates white suburban audiences with racist fantasies about hypersexual and criminal Black men, while also offering models of power and dignity.

But whether conveying racism or Black dignity, this model of masculinity often requires dark skin, which popular stereotypes equate with harder masculinity, and an impoverished upbringing in ghettoized Black neighborhoods of American cities, such as Kendrick Lamar’s hometown of Compton, California.

In contrast to this industry norm, Drake — born Aubrey Drake Graham — is a light-skinned biracial man raised more or less middle-class by his Canadian Ashkenazi Jewish mother within an affluent neighborhood of Toronto.

Drake, now 37, was also a teen actor from 2001 to 2008 on the schmaltzy Canadian soap opera “Degrassi: The Next Generation,” in which he played an artistic and gentle middle-class student.

In the context of American rap, these traits position Drake as an inauthentic Black man and rapper. Early in his rap career, he told Heeb magazine, “I went to a Jewish school, where nobody understood what it was like to be black and Jewish.” While this miscomprehension led some of Drake’s classmates to question his Jewishness, it motivates some audiences today to question his Blackness.

But if Drake’s skin tone, class upbringing, Jewish identity and acting resume distance him from rap norms, his efforts to close that distance have often just marked him as even more inauthentic, and even as exploitative. Over time, Drake has striven to better align his image with the industry’s model of Black hypermasculinity. For example, he revealed new muscles after a regimen of bodybuilding in 2015 and he revealed his hair in new cornrows in March 2022.

Likewise, Drake has shifted toward fashion choices that evoke ghettoized Black communities and has begun to speak more consistently in African American vernacular English in performances and in public appearances.

Indeed, a long line of critics, including the 36-year-old Lamar, have disdained these changes as proof that Drake is stealing from Black culture or caricaturing Blackness to shore up his marketability. In the recent track “Euphoria,” Lamar raps, “I hate the way that you walk, the way that you talk/I hate the way that you dress.” In the track “Meet the Grahams,” Lamar raps, “The skin that you livin’ in is compromised in personas.”

Time will tell how Drake may continue to modulate his relationship to rap industry conventions, and how his future self-stylings will be received. However his image evolves, Drake will likely remain a high-profile barometer for the wider debates over cultural authenticity, ownership, and theft that all performers (both Jewish and non-Jewish) must navigate onscreen.

Jonathan Branfman is a postdoctoral fellow in the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford University.