Rapper 21 Savage has revealed he warned Drake not to engage in his highly publicised feud with Kendrick Lamar, telling the Canadian star there was “no way you can win,” per rollingstone.com.
Speaking on the Perspektives With Bank podcast, 21 Savage said that while Drake felt “challenged lyrically” and wanted to respond, he had advised him to “leave that shit alone” as the battle began.
Recalling a conversation with Drake early on, he said: “You finna go into a battle that you can’t win. There’s no way you can win.”
The rapper elaborated, explaining that some situations are set up so that “even if you win, you still don’t win.”
He suggested that when a figure is at the very top of the industry, a victory has nowhere to go.
“The only difference is, when you’re at the top… where does winning put you? You can’t go Number One-Point-One. So how the f**k could you win, anyway?” he summarised.
The public rap battle was followed by legal action. In October, Drake filed an appeal to revive his defamation lawsuit against Universal Music Group (UMG) over Lamar’s infamous diss track “Not Like Us”.
The suit was originally dismissed by a federal judge, who ruled that the allegedly defamatory statements in the hit song – including the claim that Drake was a “certified paedophile” – qualified as “nonactionable opinion.” Drake has continually denied any wrongdoing.
The day the initial ruling was thrown out, “Not Like Us” re-entered the iTunes and Apple Music Top 100 song charts across multiple countries, and was said to have received upwards of 1 million streams on Spotify.
The legal battle kicked off last year when Drake’s Frozen Moments LLC filed a dispute against UMG in New York, alleging that the publisher and label had “artificially inflated” streams for the track in favour of Lamar.
UMG had previously filed a motion to dismiss the suit, claiming the rapper had sued them because he “lost a rap battle” and was unwilling to “accepting the loss like the unbothered rap artist he often claims to be.”
Drake’s lawyers hit back, however, arguing that UMG’s line of argument was “doomed to fail” because people had taken Lamar’s words seriously, writing that “millions of people, all over the world, did understand the defamatory material as a factual assertion that plaintiff is a pedophile.”
Lamar performed the contentious track during his headlining slot at the Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show in February, which was later named the most-watched Super Bowl performance in history.
