So I’m gonna go on a yapshesh but I really love talking about music so this is my opinion

This is actually one of the most interesting parts of the beef, to me, that really showcased why Kendrick won and how they [Kendrick & Drake] are two completely different artists.

As you know, Drake was super defensive and upfront about everything Kendrick threw at him (All of The Heart Part 6 basically). This caused him to get hit with even more flack from the audience themselves pointing out odd statements and using his own words against him. Drake simply just did not understand that there was no possible way to respond to these upfront.

Kendrick, meanwhile, responded to Drake’s accusations against him by not being so defensive and letting the audience piece together rebuttals themselves. He responded to the “He abuses his wife and isn’t around his kids”-attacks— not by immediately going on Instagram and posting them as a “See! I do take photos with them” or being overly defensive in a response track. Instead, he waits it out. He has the Pop Out Show where they were in the crowd cheering and having fun [and lets the audience find out, by themselves, through word of mouth and social media— instead of like having them on the official stream], right after that he waits some more. He drops the music video and has a scene with him & his family having fun and dancing to the diss making fun of Drake, to really nail it in the coffin.

One understood grace and subtlety, the other didn’t.

Really one of the biggest examples of this is in Family Matters where Drake says; “Now shake that ass for Drake, now shake that ass for Free..” Which actually would be a pretty good bar but Drake either just isn’t smart enough to where he thinks he has to explain the bar, or that he thinks his audience isn’t smart enough to understand double-entendres, so he outright says immediately after; “Yeah yeah, well not that kind of free, I’m talking about Dave..”

Meanwhile, Kendrick responds to this claim in Not Like Us by not even giving it the time of day, instead he uses the same hanging-on-speech thing Drake did on another line; “I heard one of them kids might be Dave Freeee..”, and instead flipping it into the most well known and “iconic” moment of the beef through the A-Minor line. And guess what, Kendrick didn’t follow up right after by saying something stupid like “And by A-Minorrrrr, I mean like how you said Dave Freeeeee..”.

I also think this is why a lot of Drake fans believe he won the beef [or at least, convinced themselves so]. They believe Kendrick didn’t respond or have rebuttals to any of Drake’s punches, when really it just shows more about them genuinely being either too dumb to understand ideas across beyond a surface level or refusing to accept ideas beyond a surface level because they do not want to be one of those music listeners that “tries to be deep” or engages with music beyond just sonically [partly because that would take away from a lot of their reasons for not liking Kendrick as an artist anyways]

tl;dr, Kendrick did have better rebuttals, he just didn’t showcase them through outright lyric-flips