Courts

Drake’s Defamation Suit Assigns Blame To UMG And Popular Streamers. Does He Know We All Have The Same Internet?

...we saw you egg everyone on the whole time.

on January 17, 2025
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Kendrick Lamar. Universal Music Group. Drake. His defamation lawsuit has some big names, big accusations, and big money in the balance. With things this heavy, it may help to take a moment to step back and appreciate all of the posturing going on. For that, let’s take a quick aside.

You ever see kids play fight until it becomes an actual fight because a crowd shows up? One kid eggs on that he can punch harder than his friend. His friend defends his honor and tells the challenger to squabble up. They go at it for a bit with light jabs. The kid who started it yells out “That’s all you got?!” and laughs with the crowd. The other kid lands a haymaker — first kid runs off and grabs an adult. Or, put differently:

 

Back to the grownups playing. Kendrick Lamar’s number of tweets during and after the beef was only 5-6 above Pauline Newman’s:

Links to finished songs and that’s it. Drake’s twitter fingers on the other hand were full blown events filled with surprise snippets of songs, some fake, inside jokes, and threats to drop the one track that would end the entire thing jokingly referred to as the “Red Button”:

Clear provocation, but it goes further: Drake went out of his way to tell Kai Cenat — one of the most popular streamers in the world — to stay online so that his track Family Matters could get extra coverage. Now that the rap battle didn’t go Drake’s way, Cenat’s now being named in the defamation lawsuit:

And he’s not just stopping there. Several huge streamers are caught up in the blowback:

Being mad at UMG for not enforcing copyright claims after Drake wanted them to post reaction videos to Family Matters to help his numbers is the adult version of being mad at the teacher for not stopping the fight you started. One of the interesting this about this particular rap beef is that some of the tracks dropped within minutes of each other. That’s why RDC are wearing the same clothes in this video when they reacted to Family Matters by Drake and Meet The Grahams by Kendrick Lamar: Both songs functionally got the same amount of coverage:

This is what happens when you egg on Pulitzer Prize winners in a word fight and fail to factor in the crowd you created. Best of luck to whatever is left of Drake’s career after this suit. Even if he wins the suit, the RDC skits that will make fun of him running to the courts over prose will be legendary.

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at [email protected] and by tweet at @WritesForRent.