21 Savage has said that he warned Drake not to get involved in his now-highly publicised feud with Kendrick Lamar.
In a new interview on the Perspektives With Bank podcast, the rapper said he believed Drake came out of the infamous battle with Lamar relatively unscathed, but revealed that he had told him not to get involved.
21 Savage told hosts that he had warned Drake “not to do all that shit” and “leave that shit alone” as the feud was getting underway. “But goddamn,” Savage added, “he felt like he was challenged lyrically, so he wanted to respond.”
He went on to recall a conversation he had with Drake early into the feud, telling him: “You finna go into a battle that you can’t win. There’s no way you can win.”
The rapper then explained that he meant there were some situations where, “even if you win, you still don’t win.”
He then said that both Lamar and Drake dropped good songs during the feud, before summarising: “The only difference is, when you’re at the top… where does winning put you? You can’t go Number One-Point-One. So how the fuck could you win, anyway?”
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In October, Drake filed an appeal to revive his defamation lawsuit against Universal Music Group over Lamar’s diss track ‘Not Like Us’, after a federal judge ruled that the allegedly defamatory statements made in the hit song – among them that Drake was a “certified paedophile” (Drake has continually denied any wrongdoing) – qualified as “nonactionable opinion” and dismissed the suit.
Shortly after the ruling was thrown out, stats emerged showing that ‘Not Like Us’ had re-entered the iTunes and Apple Music Top 100 song charts. In the latter streamers’ case, this was across multiple countries. Similarly, the day of the ruling, the track was said to have received upwards of 1 million streams on Spotify.
The legal battle kicked off last year, when the ‘Hotline Bling’ hitmaker filed a dispute against Universal Music Group (UMG) in New York, alleging that the publisher and label had “artificially inflated” streams for ‘Not Like Us’, among other allegations.
In the filing – which can be viewed here – Drake’s Frozen Moments LLC accused UMG and Spotify of “illegally” aiding and boosting ‘Not Like Us’ streams in favour of Lamar – who entered a viral rap feud with Drake last year.
The, back in March, UMG filed a motion to dismiss the Canadian rapper’s suit, stating that he had sued the corporation because he “lost a rap battle”. They went on to say that “instead of accepting the loss like the unbothered rap artist he often claims to be”, Drake had “sued his own record label in a misguided attempt to salve his wounds”.
Drake’s team later hit back at UMG’s central argument: that most listeners wouldn’t take “outrageous insults”, which are naturally par for the course in diss tracks, as fact.
Per Billboard, the ‘Legend’ rapper’s lawyers said that line of argument was “doomed to fail” because people had taken Lamar’s words seriously.
“UMG completely ignores the complaint’s allegations that millions of people, all over the world, did understand the defamatory material as a factual assertion that plaintiff is a pedophile,” his attorneys wrote.
Indeed, Lamar played the biggest 13-minute gig in music when he headlined the Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show back in February. Boasting guest appearances from SZA, Serena Williams and Samuel L. Jackson, it was later named the most-watched Super Bowl performance in history, and saw a performance of the contentious track.
You can check out NME’s full run down of Kendrick and Drake’s longstanding beef here.