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      Kendrick Lamar’s Drake Victory Lap Unites Los Angeles

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      Kendrick Lamar’s sold-out homecoming at the Kia Forum, an arena just outside Los Angeles, promised pyrotechnics with its name alone: “The Pop Out: Ken & Friends.”The “Pop Out” ensured drama — it’s from a line in Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” his recent No. 1 song, and a scathing salvo in his war of words with Drake.The “& Friends” guaranteed surprise appearances from high-profile names: ultimately Dr. Dre, YG, Tyler, the Creator, Roddy Rich, Schoolboy Q and Steve Lacy, among many others. The whole thing would go down on Juneteenth, the annual celebration of Black emancipation in America, after a battle in which Lamar questioned Drake’s status within the Black community.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Going Behind the Scenes of ‘Popcast (Deluxe)’

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      The weekly culture roundup show, hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, celebrates its first anniversary on May 31.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.When you walk into the “Popcast (Deluxe)” recording studio on the second floor of the New York Times office in Manhattan, the first thing you notice is two colorful chairs in the center of the room with black microphones perched on the seat backs.“We were thinking ‘elevated basement,’” said Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic for The New York Times and a host of the show, a weekly culture review on YouTube. “It’s a little ‘Wayne’s World.’”Mr. Caramanica and his co-host, the Times pop music reporter Joe Coscarelli, picked out the furniture for their studio at Horseman Antiques on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. The chairs are among many quirky personal touches they’ve added to the space — books, photography from their work at The Times, lots of junk food — that, like the show, blend a highbrow and lowbrow aesthetic.Both Mr. Caramanica and Mr. Coscarelli were treading new ground when they began hosting “Popcast (Deluxe),” The Times’s first video podcast, together one year ago. The show is a spinoff of “Popcast,” a weekly pop music podcast that Mr. Caramanica has hosted since 2016. For the “deluxe” version with a broader view of pop culture, the idea was to take something that was already working — the easy and playful rapport between Mr. Caramanica and Mr. Coscarelli, a frequent “Popcast” guest — and adapt it for YouTube, a video platform that podcasts were increasingly moving into.“We want to go where smart, curious, pop-culture-interested people are living,” Mr. Coscarelli said. “YouTube was the obvious next place.”The pair records on Mondays and releases segments of the conversation throughout the week on YouTube, as well as a full audio episode on Wednesdays. For the week of May 13, Mr. Caramanica and Mr. Coscarelli had decided to cover the feud between the hip-hop giants and rivals Drake and Kendrick Lamar, as well as Zendaya’s star turn in the tennis film “Challengers,” and they allowed a Times Insider reporter to observe.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Popcast (Deluxe): The Kendrick-Drake Beef Ends + Zendaya & Post Malone

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:The seeming conclusion of the beef between Drake and Kendrick LamarThe way in which Kendrick Lamar used the tools that Drake had long perfected against him, especially in the hit “Not Like Us,” now the No. 1 song in the countryHow the meme ecosystem turned on Drake, long its most effective weaponizer, owing in part to the crowdsourced takedowns recorded to Metro Boomin’s instrumental song “BBL Drizzy”What might be next for both Drake and Kendrick LamarZendaya’s star turn in the tennis film “Challengers”Whether Zendaya’s emergence as a red carpet fixture trumps her actingZendaya’s Disney pastSongs of the week from Post Malone featuring Morgan Wallen (“I Had Some Help”), plus Ian’s “Figure It Out” and Central Cee’s “CC Freestyle”Snack chat about hip-hop jewelry and blown-out mixesConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Kendrick Lamar Rides a Rap Beef All the Way to No. 1

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      On the Billboard album chart, Dua Lipa’s heavily promoted “Radical Optimism” opened at No. 2, held off by the third week of Taylor Swift’s “Tortured Poets.”An old-fashioned rap war that unfolded online at lightning speed has sent Kendrick Lamar to No. 1 on Billboard’s latest singles chart, while Taylor Swift easily holds off a challenge from Dua Lipa’s new album.Relations between Lamar and Drake, two hip-hop giants and longtime rivals, exploded into a public war of words in recent weeks, in the form of a rapid-fire sequence of diss tracks packed with insults and unsavory (and unproven) accusations. Lamar seemed to get the last word with “Not Like Us,” released May 4, which becomes his fourth No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart. That total counts collaborative releases — among them “Like That,” a track in March with the Atlanta rapper Future and the producer Metro Boomin, which kicked off the latest volley.Consumption of “Not Like Us” was driven by streaming, with 71 million clicks in the United States last week. Another Lamar diss track, “Euphoria,” which came out the week before, is No. 3 on the latest singles chart, while Drake’s “Family Matters” is No. 7.For this week’s Billboard 200 album chart, Lipa seemed to enter the contest with some advantages for “Radical Optimism,” her third studio LP. To promote it, she went on “Saturday Night Live” as both performer and host, and was on the cover of Time and Elle. Earlier this year, she had prominent performances at the Grammy and Brit award shows, and appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone.But “Radical Optimism” was still trounced by the third week of Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department,” which holds at No. 1 with a wide margin.“Tortured Poets” had the equivalent of 282,000 album sales in the United States, including 298 million streams and 51,000 traditional sales, according to the tracking service Luminate. In its first three weeks out, “Tortured Poets” — which smashed records in its debut two weeks ago, despite mixed reviews — has racked up the equivalent of 3.3 million sales, including 1.6 billion streams for its 31 total tracks in the U.S. alone.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kendrick Lamar vs. Drake Beef Crashed the Genius Website

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      The furious exchange of diss tracks and the rush to interpret each song briefly overwhelmed Genius, where users can annotate lyrics to songs.Cole Swain was scrolling through his phone one morning before school last week when he received an alert from YouTube. It was 8:24 a.m. in Los Angeles, where Mr. Swain is a university student, and Kendrick Lamar had just released “Euphoria,” a highly anticipated diss track targeting Drake in the escalating showdown between the two rappers.As Mr. Swain’s group chats and social media feeds blew up, he logged onto Genius, a website where users can transcribe and annotate lyrics to help explain their meaning. A volunteer editor for the site and a fan of Lamar’s, Mr. Swain was ready to dig into the track.But Genius was apparently not ready for Mr. Swain and the crush of visitors. After nearly two weeks of silence after Drake’s diss record, Lamar’s response on April 30 drove swarms of traffic to Genius, causing it to crash temporarily just as fans were clamoring to pore over what the artist had to say.“This is crazy,” Mr. Swain, a 19-year-old who is studying bioengineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, recalled thinking. “Everyone is scrambling to write the lyrics as much as everyone wants to read them.”A screenshot of the Genius homepage. The feud between Lamar and Drake hit breakneck speed over the weekend, with both musicians trading songs packed with heavy punches. All the while on Genius, a small, collaborative corner of the internet built for those who love music, users like Mr. Swain worked furiously to deconstruct the songs as the hype around the releases exploded.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Happens Next for Kendrick Lamar and Drake? Let’s Discuss.

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      After a week of bitter diss tracks, a conversation about how the rap battle played out for the chart-topping rappers and how their personas and careers might be affected.It’s gotten ugly between Kendrick Lamar and Drake.Over the weekend, the two generation-defining rappers turned a decade of competitive tension into increasingly personal attacks delivered on a barrage of diss tracks filled with taunts, insults, accusations of abuse, alleged inside information and threats.With Lamar’s songs, including “Euphoria” and “Not Like Us,” dominating the online conversation and streaming charts, the battle seemed to cool on Sunday evening, after a resigned-sounding second response this weekend from Drake, who denied some of the most serious claims against him, including pedophilia, even as he doubled down on his allegations against Lamar. Then, on Tuesday, a security guard was shot and hospitalized in serious condition outside Drake’s Toronto home; the authorities said they did not yet have a motive and the investigation was ongoing.As the musical volleys paused, at least for now, the New York Times pop music critic Jon Caramanica and the Times music reporter Joe Coscarelli surveyed the songs, the strategy, the reputational wreckage and where each rapper stands now for an episode of the video podcast Popcast (Deluxe). These are edited excerpts from the conversation.JOE COSCARELLI I don’t think we need to jump in right away to definitively say who we think won this beef, because the fight seems to have been decided by popular vote. Nobody’s really calling this for Drake, right?JON CARAMANICA I think even Drake is not calling this for Drake, because of the tone of what he put out last, “The Heart Part 6.” In the big picture, though, everyone won and nobody won. Thinking about fandom in the stan era, you’re either on one side or the other. But what I’ve realized in the wake of these songs is that Drake fandom comes with different levels of fickleness. His fans are willing to entertain, “Maybe he’s not the person that I thought he was.” Whereas most Kendrick fans are not willing to entertain that idea, despite Drake’s allegations in “Family Matters” that Kendrick at some point hired a crisis management team to cover up that he abused his fiancée, which are quite serious.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Popcast (Deluxe): How Kendrick Lamar Out-Drake’d Drake

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:The back story of the tension between Kendrick Lamar and DrakeThe early songs: “First Person Shooter,” “Like That” and “7 Minute Drill”Drake responds: “Push Ups” and “Taylor Made Freestyle”Kendrick Lamar responds: “Euphoria” and “6:16 in LA”Drake responds, and shifts the tone of the battle to the personal: “Family Matters”Kendrick responds, upping the personal ante: “Meet the Grahams” and “Not Like Us”Drake bows out?: “The Heart Part 6”How this battle will play out for Drake and Kendrick Lamar as musiciansHow this battle will play out for Drake and Kendrick Lamar as peopleA snack of the week, chat about TikTok, “Challengers” & the most annoying songs of the N.B.A. playoffsConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Security Guard Injured in Shooting Outside Drake’s Home in Toronto

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      The police said that they did not know whether the shooting was related to the recent exchange of increasingly personal diss tracks traded between Drake and Kendrick Lamar.A man identified as a security guard for Drake was wounded in a shooting outside of the rapper’s Toronto mansion around 2 a.m. on Tuesday, the police said.The man was taken to a hospital with a gunshot wound, Inspector Paul Krawczyk, a member of the gun and gang task force, said at a news conference at the scene on Tuesday morning. The suspects fled in a vehicle and remain at large; the police did not offer a description but said the shooting had been captured on video.The shooting occurred outside the gates in front of Drake’s 50,000-square-foot mansion on Park Lane Circle in the North York neighborhood known as Bridle Path in Toronto, but did not involve the rapper, the authorities said. Drake was previously permitted to build fences twice as high as allowed by city law, citing a need for increased security.The shooting followed a weekend of increasingly personal diss tracks traded between Drake and the Compton, Calif., rapper Kendrick Lamar, whose long-simmering musical rivalry resulted in the release of six songs in 72 hours, including detailed attacks involving family members and claims of abuse against women on both sides.“I cannot speak to a motive at this time, because it’s so early, but as we get information we will share it with you,” Inspector Krawczyk said at the news conference. He said that he could not confirm whether Drake was home at the time of the shooting, but that authorities had been in contact with the rapper’s team, which was cooperating.The police said the victim, who was not identified, remained at the hospital in serious condition.A representative for Drake declined to comment.Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” which was released on Saturday and taunts Drake and his associates as “certified pedophiles,” features an aerial shot of Drake’s home on a map as its cover art. The track is currently topping the charts globally and in the United States on streaming services including Spotify and Apple Music. The cover is edited to portray the home as dotted with markers meant to represent the presence of registered sex offenders.Kendrick Lamar’s single “Not Like Us,” which was released on Saturday and taunts Drake, features an aerial shot of Drake’s home on a map as its cover art.Drake has previously referred to the location of his home, which he calls the Embassy, on tracks like “7AM on Bridle Path.”Representatives for Lamar did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Olivia Chow, the mayor of Toronto, said she had been briefed by the police but declined to offer any details.“Any shooting is not welcome in this city and I hope the police will find the people that are violating the law and catch them,” she told reporters.Ian Austen More