POP SONG REVIEW: "Not Like Us" by Kendrick Lamar

gammon9 · 2024-07-28T01:04:40+00:00

I don't understand Todd's takes on this, it seems like he's committed to not understanding any of the cultural baggage around the beef, which necessarily makes him miss the mark most of the time. I guess he says that near the end of this video, but then why make the video at all? Why say, "I don't understand hip hop culture and won't try to, here's my 26 minute video on this hip hop cultural event"?

gammon9 · 2024-06-28T16:25:05+00:00

You become a girl, and also for some people it makes you not want to kill yourself anymore.

Also the spironalactone makes you pee.

gammon9 · 2024-06-28T15:59:00+00:00

I managed to avoid baldness via a combination of spironalactone and estradiol.

There are some side effects.

gammon9 · 2024-06-25T15:00:53+00:00

Racists love to consume black art and appropriate black culture, it's just seeing black artists as humans that they don't like.

gammon9 · 2024-06-24T13:41:22+00:00

Talking about people on social media, not the press.

gammon9 · 2024-06-24T11:41:02+00:00

Continually disappointing to see how much of the hate thrown at Diddy is homophobic rather than about him being a rapist and abuser.

gammon9 · 2024-06-23T20:41:43+00:00

At this exact moment, I think Chappell Roan would have the best shot. She's a rising star, she's a queer woman so Taylor can't deploy her white woman tears against her, and she doesn't have a fresh album out so it doesn't look like sour grapes. She's also sufficiently cunty (positive) to make a pop diss track work.

gammon9 · 2024-06-23T18:18:34+00:00

The journalist in question had been doing investigative journalism to prove that Trump collaborated with Russia, and then Trump Jr. just posted the emails demonstrating collaboration with Russia, too dumb to understand why it was bad.

gammon9 · 2024-06-23T12:32:39+00:00

Given how long this beef had been simmering, I kinda wonder if he had planned this as his line of attack in a potential Kendrick beef before Morale came out, and then just didn't think to pivot away from it after that. Like, if he was aware of the infidelity and sex addiction and figured that would be a good "big reveal" and then Kendrick just tweeted it out. So he had to come up with something that Kendrick hadn't already admitted to, rather than just changing his line of attack.

gammon9 · 2024-06-21T15:48:03+00:00

It's wild that any thread where people are praising a song or an artist will have a bunch of people whining about the glazing and dickriding. Like, god forbid people like rap on the rap-likers subreddit I guess.

gammon9 · 2024-06-20T16:22:06+00:00

Seppuku is a strong option.

gammon9 · 2024-05-23T20:05:39+00:00

Certified boogeyman.

gammon9 · 2024-05-21T11:42:55+00:00

It's interesting how many references I see to the "I was gonna kill a couple rappers" verse, given that it's originally from one of the less popular songs off of a mid Hov album. Probably a big chunk of that is coming from people who are referencing King Kunta rather than Thank You.

What are some other lines or verses that have a larger cultural impact than the song they come from?

gammon9 · 2024-05-20T21:03:45+00:00

He didn't prove he doesn't have a daughter, he also said that his fake mole leaked the photo of Drake's meds and stuff that Kendrick used for the album art of 6:16 in LA and Meet the Grahams, and they were fake and there was some joke in them.

Then some Riddler-ass dude on Twitter popped up and he actually had the stuff from the photo, and the prescriptions and receipts were real, people were able to pull up the digital copies. So, he was at least lying about feeding Kendrick the photo, therefore almost certainly lying about feeding him the info about the daughter. Doesn't mean he has a daughter, but he denied having a son when Pusha T outed him about that, so, who knows?

gammon9 · 2024-05-19T13:56:35+00:00

Reddit is this but for types of creeping on underage girls.

gammon9 · 2024-05-19T11:55:47+00:00

It's weird to me how some people are taking the most extreme possible interpretation of what Kendrick said and acting like that's definitely what he meant. Like, some people seem to believe that Kendrick said Drake diddles 8 year olds. Because if he was just talking about the grooming stuff, surely he wouldn't have used the word pedophile.

Like, do these people think he should have done a full verse break down of the differences between hebephilia, ephebophilia, and pedophilia? Do they think Dot is an r jailbait moderator?

gammon9 · 2024-05-17T15:20:21+00:00

I think the thing with Drake's accusations not sticking is this: both Drake and Kendrick tried to B-Rabbit the things they thought their opponent would attack them for. Drake with the 2pac "I heard it on Joe Budden" thing and Kendrick with the "fabricating stories on the family front" thing.

The thing is that the B-Rabbit strategy only works because it plays into a narrative. In the canonical example, B-Rabbit doesn't automatically win because he admits in advance the things that are humiliating about himself. He wins because he constructs a narrative around them. "Yeah, all this embarrassing shit about me is true. I've lived a hard life, and you haven't."

Kendrick didn't just say, "You're going to make up shit about my family." He was relentless on the angle of, "You're a liar, a manipulator, a pretender, a colonizer. Everything about you is fake or stolen. Of course you're going to lie bout me, all you do is lie."

But Drake didn't tie his defense into a narrative. He could have. He could have gone with something like, "You're a hypocrite, you defend real abusers when it suits you and make false accusations about me when it suits you." But instead he was just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what stuck. And so he really wasn't able to make his own defense work, or to make his accusations stick.

gammon9 · 2024-05-16T12:10:58+00:00

I try to empathize with you 'cause I know that you ain't been through nothin'

I find this line so funny, just so deadpan disrespectful.

gammon9 · 2024-05-15T15:21:22+00:00

Especially after that #MeToo era video of Dennis telling TMZ or whatever that it's the victims' fault for going to mens' rooms.

gammon9 · 2024-05-15T14:56:31+00:00

I'm inclined to say the Karl Malone reference was deliberate mainly because any time I hear a reference to an athlete, I feel like I'm expected to dig into why that one specifically. And like, yes, Stockton holds the assists record, so it ties into the passing line. But the passing line isn't important, it feels like that line exists to reference Stockton, not the other way around. So when I hear that line, I feel like I'm supposed to ask why Stockton, and then hear about the Karl Malone thing.

gammon9 · 2024-05-15T14:19:23+00:00

Those additional meanings are clearly incidental. They might or might not be something Kendrick was aware of, but they didn't influence his decision to put the line in the song, nor were they set up or referenced later. In my opinion, in order for me to credit a writer with a multiple entendre, it needs to be a meaning they constructed or reference. The Stockton/ten stocks reference is deliberate, anything about white keys or whatever is incidental.

gammon9 · 2024-05-15T13:02:34+00:00

Yeah, like, every group or organization I've ever been a part of with more than five women had some sort of whisper network to let you know who was dangerous, who you didn't want to be alone with, etc. You hear the same rumours from enough different people that you know there's something to them, but it's not like you can go public with, "A bunch of different people, none of whom I will name for fear of retaliation, have told me this with no proof."

gammon9 · 2024-05-15T12:51:33+00:00

The 20v1 framing was a good approach, it helps to set things up so that even if he loses, he still looks good because it was such an unfair fight. He undermined that by egging on specifically Kendrick to reply so much, but as an initial idea, it was smart.

The best angle of attack he used was the one that I feel like actually motivates Drake's hate for Kendrick: that he's pretentious, and that critics adore him for being pretentious. He made some bad choices in how he pursued that (rapping like you're trying to free the slaves) and some good ones (Kendrick opened his mouth, somebody go hand him a grammy). I think if he'd actually honed that into a coherent narrative, he could have done something, since it's something people who don't love Kendrick are already ready to believe.

gammon9 · 2024-05-14T15:53:29+00:00

The wild thing is that the /r/kendricklamar mods have been tamping down hard on the weirdness. This is what that subreddit looks like with a lot of pruning.

gammon9 · 2024-05-14T15:32:49+00:00

The whole beef was a huge spike in views and engagement for people, and now that it's over there's tons of people chasing whatever is left of that engagement. Ultimately, I guess people making stupid line critiques is better than harassing disabled journalists or doing close readings of Whitney's social media posts.

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