Two years after the release of Grammy-winning Kendrick Lamar’s single “Not Like Us,” Michael Eric Dyson is scolding the rapper for trying to revoke Drake’s Black card on the track.
The author and academic appeared on the Tuesday (Feb. 24) episode of podcast Mohr Stories and reflected on the chart-topping “Not Like Us,” plus the beef between Kendrick and Drizzy.
In his argument, Dyson compared K.Dot questioning Drake’s Blackness to President Donald Trump profiling immigrants.
Around the 12-minute mark of the episode, Dyson called both rappers “brilliant” and “ingenious” before calling out their distinctions.
“Most people would acknowledge Kendrick as genius, but not Drake, right?” he continued. “‘Drake is commercially viable. He's a monster. He sells records. But is he as deep?’
“Drake is being indicted by Kendrick Lamar implicitly and explicitly. ‘Not Like Us,’ is a perfect anthem for the present president,” Dyson said.
The author explained that he attended last year’s Super Bowl LIX, when Kendrick headlined the halftime show, and the said he didn’t see a major difference between the track and the “theme” of Trump’s presidency.
“‘You are not like us. You are Somalian. You are Ethiopian, you are Eritrean, you are Mexican, you are whatever, fill in the blank, you are Haitian,’” Dyson said. “And so to me, that very theme, forget the song, the song is the song, whatever you think about it. But the notion itself is a man distinction, a big distinction, us versus them. And they're trying to de-Black Drake.”
Dyson added that Kendrick was “reducing Blackness to Compton,” and noted that Black Canadians “fled America” to “escape the iron tyranny of enslavement.”
“His daddy is Black. He went to Memphis every summer. The Memphis horns fill his music, the first albums Drake made. His grandmama babysat Aretha Franklin. and his uncle is Larry Graham from Sly the Family Stone,” Dyson said of the five-time Grammy winner. “What Black card he got to show?”
On “Not Like Us,” Kendrick referred to Drake as a “colonizer,” which Dyson also refuted in the interview above.
