You may not be aware, but, right now, the world is divided in two halves: those completely obsessed by “rap’s civil war” - the beef between hip hop stars Drake and Kendrick Lamar – and those who have no freakin’ clue. Utterly, blissfully, oblivious. I was the latter , but following an impassioned and highly informative thread on my favourite WhatsApp group – the one associated with my boxing class – and an extended chat with my favourite local baristas, George and Alex, I’m now basically hundred per cent half one.
The bones of it (NB, read this, then surprise and impress teenagers with the extent of your knowledge):
It’s the biggest row in hip hop since the 1990s, when beef raged mad and bad and unchecked in the form of lyrical scorn - diss tracks - issued by one artist against another, some of which resulted in murderous drive by shootings, (I’m informed this one won’t - the hip hop critic Alphonse Pierre said it was “a lot of rich guys arguing” – although one security guard has been shot, outside Drake’s house. Police aren’t yet commenting on motives.) Beef practices petered out largely in the late aughts, it’s all been p-retty quiet on that front for the last decade… Until the two biggest hip hop stars off the moment – Drake, and Kendrick Lamar - kicked off this March, with lyrical spite of the most varied, imaginative, hilarious, but also: dark, but also: just profoundly petty sort. Word shots have been fired over everything from Lamar’s diminutive height (5’5”) and association with Taylor Swift / fear of releasing music at the same time as her lest he be overshadowed; to, Lamar suggesting Drake had used the diet drug Ozempic, perpetuating rumours of him having a secret daughter / association with noted sexual predator Harvey Weinstein, the expression of his wish Drake’s grandfather had worn a condom, and so forth. J Cole, Future, the Weeknd, Rick Ross and Kanye West have all got involved, Taylor’s been dragged into it too. clearly:
…and to understand the full nuances of it all, you’d need a forensic room type endeavour with whiteboards and a network of pinned pictures linked by bits of red string.
“Not to be all English student about it” says Barista Alex (who finished his English degree last year) “but the intertextuality on it is intense.”
“I don’t even know why Drake’s bothering,” says Barista George. “Kendrick’s good. Drake’s… you know: Drake. This is only going to make that… difference more obvious.” It would appear that, while both stars are commercially successful, Kendrick is infinitely more critically revered, the first rapper to have ever won a Pulitzer prize, for example. “It’s tricky,” says S, on the WhatsApp group, “Kendrick called out Drake’s entire family… You can’t not respond to that level of disrespect… But if he does, he's going up against the greatest rapper of this generation.”
I listen, nod, take all the info in – then come to a dazzling conclusion:
“It’s just like me and WELL-KNOWN CAFE CHAIN” I say to George and Alex.
“It’s really not,” says George, who knows all about me and WELL-KNOWN CAFE CHAIN already.
You, however, do not.
Come closer:
Right, so I have raging beef with WELL-KNOWN CAFE CHAIN rn. You know it - or at least, you know its kind: charges close to a fiver for a loaf of sourdough, draws all the private school kids to it at breaktime, cinnamon-swirl -seeking moths to a flame. Oh it’s got a lovely font. And honestly? It’s brownies are like crack.
I digress.
The last time I sat in, on one of its creamy smooth well-appointed benches, nursing a long black, whiling away the interminable hours it takes for my dog to get groomed, The Man Behind The Counter – get this - wouldn’t let me use one of his behind-the-counter power sockets to recharge my rapidly fading phone battery, even though the socket was empty, and clearly visible from where I was standing. Really, I’d barely have to stretch to reach it at all, and also? I’d already plugged my very own charger in, ready and waiting, its prongs almost quivering in expectation of leccy! And: why would anyone be so mean?
“Use that one,” The Man said, nodding at the single publicly available socket in the branch – already in heavy use by Laptop Guy With a Beard.
I could do nothing but watch my phone die, wondering how the groomers would get in touch with me to tell me dog’s interminable groom was finally nearing completion.
I decided that, in this instance, the issuing of the Commensurate Curse (in which, you ask the universe to ensure the individual who just screwed up your day, will themselves have their own day screwed up, to precisely the same extent, not a jot more) was insufficient. So I issued beef against le tout WELL-KNOWN CAFE CHAIN instead.
“See? It’s the same!” I tell George.
“It’s not! Where’s the diss track?” he asks.
“I’ll write a SubStack! That’ll be my diss track!” I say.
And here we are.
I should probably mention: my WELL-KNOWN CAFE CHAIN beef is merely the latest in a lengthy history of beefs – most of which are admittedly aimed against largely oblivious eating establishments. Think of me as the Eminem of middle-class restaurant beef. OK, so: there’s the independent sandwich shop with which I badly fell out mid-Covid ‘cos it massively short-changed me on salmon in my bagel – really, it was like they’d sort of… showed the fish to the cream cheese, let it have a sniff, perhaps, but stopped short of actually popping any in – and when I complained? They’d not even seem sorry!
There was the tea shop that once booted me out unceremoniously because my friend hadn’t turned up yet - 10 brief minutes late if that, she was - but they didn’t believe she was coming at all, it was lunchtime, my ‘imaginary’ friend and I were taking up valuable tea shop table real estate: could I please just go? Which, I did - but then? The following Monday? When I was back in the newspaper office where I was based at the time - I compiled a substantial physical, print-out dossier of all the food and drink-related journalism I’d ever done, included a photocopy of the bill for the (not cheap) lunch my (not actually imaginary) friend and I had gone on to enjoy somewhere else entirely, and sent it to that tea shop by courier.
There’s also the pizza joint next to the cinema with which my friend M and I are beefing, though we can’t remember why. Never mind! Beef’s beef and must be respected.
Sometimes my beefs are with humans. I once pursued a leading light in contemp feminism across the foyer of a theatre, because she’d been mean to me online and in print (issued a diss track of her own against me, if you like), and I’d seen her, and a red mist had fully descended! Leading Light was saved by the PA system telling us to take our seats for the press preview of an experimental work on women’s trauma (or something); lucky, cos who knows what I’d have done had I caught up with her? Probably given her a very hard stare. And when a bunch of fully grown adults I did not know, quite visibly and elaborately took the p*ss out of me for doing some selfies by the side of my local lido on my birthday (they sneered and giggled and did mocking version of my posing directly in my eyeline) why! I wrote a whole column about it for Grazia, filled with vengeance and fury, and now they can’t meet my eyes should our lido-paths cross.
And I know that thing Nelson Mandela said about resentment being like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die, but apparently: I am no Nelson Mandela. I also know that thing Michelle Obama said about, when they go low, we go high! But I am no Michelle Obama, either. My entire instinct, honestly, is to go lower, yet.
I just think it’s quite fun. To nurture and indulge some fundamentally inconsequential rage at someone or some thing? To allow yourself to feel piqued by them or it, pleasurably riled up – alive, in that very specific way. I think my beef might actually be a kind of catharsis, a pressure release on the epic tensions which rule our world currently. By definition, beef is small. Petty is the whole point! It doesn’t really matter, and I know that, even as I allow myself to be consumed by it briefly. It’s not actual war, not tragic, bloody, pitiless. It’s not even a culture war, with all the tender sensitivities and potential for intractable fall-outs that entails.
It’s just old school rowing.
I explain my theory to George and Alex and everyone in my WhatsApp group: that all beef is catharsis, ergo, my beef with WELL-KNOWN CAFÉ CHAIN is the same as Kendrick Lamar and Drake’s beef.
“Yeah, no,” says George and Alex and everyone in my WhatsApp group. “It’s not.”
“It is! Beef’s beef!” I argue.
“You can’t even call yours ‘beef’, though. It’s Carpaccio, at best,” says someone. I find I can’t really argue with that.
You beefy broad 😝
Now reading a newspaper article on drake v Kendrick beef. You’re such a fountain of knowledge Polls