Kendrick Lamar Overshadowed the VMAs. The Timing Feels Very Intentional.

At 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time last night, the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards kicked off in Elmont, New York.

Inside the arena, a glitzy scene unfolded. Rappers posed for photos with pop stars. TikTok stars pranced down the red carpet in designer clothes. Post Malone and Taylor Swift walked around with armfuls of awards. It was a party.

At exactly the same moment, 8:00 p.m. ET, Kendrick Lamar uploaded a new song to his Instagram page.

“I think it's time to watch the party die,” he rapped in a villainous tone, sounding absolutely disgusted with everything happening around him. “Burn a whole village, we start over, it's really that time.”

He repeated the line “I think it's time to watch the party die” for effect, before getting more specific: “Street n****s and the corporate guys, the rappers that report the lies/ I need their families mortified.”

For five minutes, Kendrick rapped about his favorite topic: the culture. And he’s not too happy with the direction it’s heading. He’s upset about the state of hip-hop media and “the radio personality pushing propaganda for salary.” He’s fed up with peers who “use money as a backbone” as they make “nasty decisions.” He’s tired of influencers who have repeatedly criticized him because he’s “not with the basic shit.” He’s become so disillusioned with the industry that he isn’t even sure if he wants to release new music: “They wonder why I'm not enthused to drop/ The more visible you get, the more your spiritual is tried.”

Kendrick clearly has a bleak view of the culture in 2024, going so far as to say he can’t be proud of any of his peers. In fact, he says he would trade all of them to bring back an artist who actually had some integrity: the late Nipsey Hussle. By the end of the song, Kendrick has come to a conclusion. He has one path forward: “Gotta burn it down to build it up.”

Is it a coincidence that he dropped the song at precisely the same moment that the VMAs started? Only Kendrick knows the answer to that question with certainty, but if you’ve followed his career up to this point, you’re aware of how calculated he is when it comes to the presentation of his music, including release dates and times.

The VMAs aren’t Kendrick’s main target and this certainly isn’t a diss song about an awards show. But he is railing against many of the things that shiny corporate events like the VMAs symbolize about the current state of music and media. So it’s easy to picture him holed up somewhere, laughing maniacally as he diverted attention away from an award show that celebrates the glossy, commercially-minded industry he’s criticized in his music.

Of course, this wasn’t the prevailing narrative of the evening, because there’s an elephant in the room that must be considered: Drake. This is the first time Kendrick has dropped a song since “Not Like Us” (and the announcement that he’ll be headlining the Super Bowl) so it was immediately dissected by fans who were looking for Drake disses. The Toronto rapper is never mentioned by name, but there are some bars (“Just walk that man down, that'll do everyone a solid” and “Dirty mackin' bitches because your spirit is insecure/ The flashy n***a with nasty decisions using money as a backbone” to name a couple) that seem to be aimed at Drake.

If you focus too closely on perceived Drake subliminals, however, you’ll miss the actual point of the song. This isn’t a Drake diss as much as it is a declaration of war against the whole damn industry. In fact, Kendrick’s dissatisfaction with the state of hip-hop (and culture at large) was the undercurrent beneath his entire beef with Drake. He isn’t simply upset with Drake. He’s furious about what Drake represents.

Throughout the beef, Kendrick positioned Drake as an outsider, an “actor,” who took advantage of the culture for his own benefit. He seems to view Drake as a symbol for an entire industry of inauthentic “clowns” (his words, not mine) who have invaded hip-hop culture and watered it down for their own commercial gains, rather than for a pursuit of genuine artistic expression.

As Kendrick put it on “6:16 in LA,” “The industry's cooked as I pick the carcass apart.” He knows he’ll face repercussions for his desire to burn everything down and rebuild, but he doesn’t care. “The industry can hate me, fuck 'em all and they mama,” he rapped on “Not Like Us.”

Kendrick isn’t the only one who feels this way. Remember when Yasiin Bey criticized Drake in January and said his music is compatible with shopping at Target? Yasiin’s quotes about how he views Drake as “pop” went viral, but the words he said right after were actually a lot more telling. Instead of simply dismissing Drake’s music, he seemed to view the Toronto rapper as a symbol for the way hip-hop culture at large has become overcommercialized and lost some of its soul."What happens when this thing collapses?” Yasiin asked. “What happens when the columns start buckling? Are we not in some early stage of that in this present hour? Are we seeing the collapse of the empire? Buying and selling, where is the message that I can use? What's in it for your audience, apart from banging the pom-poms?”

Several days later, Yasiin went live on Instagram to explain his comments, saying, “What I would like to see, in terms of creators or creative people in the world as it relates to our culture, is for people to connect with us beyond the jukebox or the dance floor. A fair-weather friend can hardly be called a friend at all.”

Then he interestingly evoked the same word (“party”) that Kendrick used as a central metaphor in his new song: “The people that party with you, that’s cool, but will they show up if you at the triage, or you’re in a crisis situation?”

The beef with Drake might be over (or at least in a new stage), but Kendrick clearly isn’t finished with his message. He’s putting a voice to the feelings that many have about the direction of hip-hop culture right now, and it all goes much deeper than Drake.

The new song, uploaded to Instagram instead of DSPs, feels like an introduction to something larger that hasn’t yet been revealed. It’s always a dangerous game to speculate about impending new music from a notoriously mysterious artist, but this song could be interpreted as a teaser for a new Kendrick Lamar album that focuses on the same themes. After all, he’s already pulled a page from that playbook with his “Heart” songs, a series of pre-album tracks that lay the groundwork for the themes of each project that follow.

As Kendrick associate Euro posted on X on Wednesday evening, “That’s just a teaser watch the next shit.”