Rap fan Seth Rogen summarised the ongoing beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar during his show at the Hollywood Bowl on Tuesday (7 May).
The Pineapple Express star was hosting Seth Smokes The Bowl, a Hilarity For Charity benefit event as part of Los Angeles’ Netflix Is a Joke Fest.
“If you’re a rap fan, there’s some crazy s*** going on right now,” Rogen began his set by saying.
He then outlined the back-and-forth between the two rappers, which has materialised in a series of diss tracks over the past few weeks.
“The way rappers fight with each other is they write mean rhymes,” he said, “which is an objectively funny way to fight with another person.”
In his latest track, “The Heart Part 6”, released on Sunday, Drake denied pursuing underage women after Lamar called him a “certified paedophile” in his third diss track, “Not Like Us”.
“You don’t hear defensive rapping that often,” Rogen said at the Bowl. “Rapping’s usually pretty aggressive. You don’t hear rap that’s like, ‘I am a good father. I should not be a registered sex offender.’ I would say as soon as you are asserting in a rap song that you should not be a registered sex offender, you’ve lost the rap battle. That’s not a good sign.”
He continued: “What’s crazy is these are not, like, personal correspondences: These are songs! These are hit songs! These are No 1 and 2 on iTunes, like, right now! These are songs the Apple algorithm is telling my mother to listen to while working out.”
He then compared Lamar’s track to Alanis Morissette’s 1995 hit “You Oughta Know,” which is famously believed to be about Full House star Dave Coulier, whom Morissette dated in the Nineties.
“Alanis wouldn’t cop to it,” Rogen said of Morissette, who never directly confirmed the track to be about Coulier.
“But now Kendrick is like, ‘F*** you Drake, you’re a pedophile.’ And these are hit… people are dancing to these songs!” he added.
“Could you imagine going to a club and seeing a room full of people dancing to a song about you being a pedophile? Especially if you were one? I don’t know if he is, but if he was, I assume that’d be a very alarming moment in your life. ‘Oh no, they’re on to me.’”
The artwork for “Not Like Us” features an aerial shot of Drake’s mansion with sex offender targets overlaid. There is no evidence to support the allegations being made against Drake but it is typical for rappers to make false claims in diss tracks to try and humiliate or insult their opponents.
On Tuesday, a security guard was shot in a drive-by shooting at Drake’s mansion in Toronto days after its location was doxxed by Lamar.
The security guard, who has not been named, suffered a gunshot wound to the chest and was not conscious when officers arrived at the home, police said. He was transported to a hospital with serious injuries.
It is not clear if Drake was home at the time but his team is said to be cooperating with investigators.
Paul Krawczyk of the Toronto Police Service’s Integrated Gun and Gang Task Force said that the motive behind the shooting at Drake’s home remains under investigation.