Canada gets roped into Drake's beef with Kendrick Lamar
CBC
Drake's beef may have become Canada's burden.
Kendrick Lamar's smash hit Not Like Us, a pointed diss track aimed at the Toronto rap superstar, was used after Canadian losses at two major sporting events this month, and has some worried it's becoming a theme.
When Argentina's soccer team defeated Canada at the Copa America tournament on July 9, the team appeared to mock the rapper — who had placed a $300,000 bet on Canada winning — by posting a graphic on social media with the words "Not Like Us."
The next night, the U.S. national basketball team blared the song over the speakers at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas after beating Canada in an Olympic exhibition game.
Sports blogger Jacolby Hart posted on social media platform X that the track "will get played any time Canada loses in anything for the foreseeable future." Reddit users have suggested Not Like Us has become an anti-Canada anthem and compared it to Blame Canada, referencing a satirical song from the 1999 South Park movie.
The sentiment seems to have been simmering for a while — one X user posted a video of Florida Panthers fans singing the song as they celebrated their June 24 Stanley Cup victory over the Edmonton Oilers.
With the Paris Olympics kicking off next week, Canadians might be hearing more of it.
Del Cowie, a Toronto-based music journalist with expertise in hip-hop, says he's noticed people making the associations between Drake and Canada at large, which he says are coming partly from a lack of knowledge about the hip-hop scene and history here.
While Not Like Us has a competitive element by nature of it being a diss track, which fits well with sporting events, Cowie says Lamar has made some moves to feed into Canada-versus-U.S. tropes — like marking American holidays by performing it five times at a Juneteenth show in Los Angeles and releasing the video on Independence Day.
He says some fans are picking up on Lamar's implications that Drake is piggybacking on other scenes and not having his own sound, based on the line where Lamar raps, "You not a colleague, you a f--kin' colonizer."
"There is definitely a faction or a section of people that seem to think that there isn't anything that Black Canadians could probably contribute to hip-hop without it seen as being colonized," Cowie said.
He said this attitude is coming from people for whom Drake is the be-all, end-all of their knowledge about the Toronto hip-hop scene.
"Toronto is closer geographically than most American cities to New York, where hip-hop was born. And because of that proximity, it has a long history with hip-hop, and that has spanned decades. And then on top of that, there is a history of Black people living in Canada and making music and contributing culturally to the scene that is not well known outside of Canada," Cowie said.
"There's an uninformed ... perspective that anything that Drake in this particular instance is taking from others' styles and everything, when a lot of those styles are endemic, quite honestly, to Toronto's music."
