The complex relationship between Toronto hip-hop fans and Kendrick Lamar

When rapper Kendrick Lamar played two shows in Toronto last week, it was more than just the latest stop on his stadium tour with SZA. After Lamar's long battle with Toronto's own rapper, Drake, the concert symbolized an affront to the city and its hip-hop culture. Last year, Lamar won the feud by releasing his final Drake diss track and hit song, Not Like Us.

Though many Canadians happily attended the Lamar concert and didn't think about the feud, for others, it was a sore spot. Drake publicly called out Jagmeet Singh for going to the show, prompting the former NDP leader to release an apology for his attendance.

Today on Commotion, host Elamin Abdelmahmoud sits down with culture critics Matt Amha and Rad Simonpillai about the complexity of Toronto's relationship with Lamar and with Drake.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: How does a rapper, like Drake, become the site of an identity crisis like this one, do you think, Matt?

Matt: Because it takes on all of this additional cultural meaning. As someone that has been talking about this battle as a Black Canadian for the better part of the last year, it became very clear, very quickly that this was actually not about Drake and was instead about all of these larger questions around belonging, identity, nationalism, cultural exceptionalism, around people that understood Not Like Us to not just be a critique of Drake, but to be a critique of the place that he's from: Toronto, a city that we've said on the show before that American rappers don't understand. And this is something that Kendrick played into, in advertisements of his Superbowl performance, we saw Kendrick quite literally wrapping himself in the colours of the American flag. When Canada plays the United States in sport, they play Not Like Us. When Argentina beats Canada in soccer, in football, Argentina puts up an image that says, "Not like us." 

And then the more interesting conversation is the intra-community conversations that we are having as Black people in this country, where this became a referendum on Blackness. All of these canards about Black Canadians not experiencing racism, Canada as some kind of post-racial oasis, about us not being raced as authentically Black, you know? And actually framing Toronto as not having a real claim over the thing that we call hip-hop, which is an impossible argument to make about a city that produced Saukrates and Choclair and Kardi [Kardinal Offishall], etc., etc., etc. If Toronto, the most diasporically rich city in the world, does not have a claim to rap, no city in the world has a claim to rap. 

Elamin: I think the most cutting line of Not Like Us is Kendrick saying, "You're not a colleague, you're a colonizer." This notion of accusing Drake of being an interloper in hip-hop. And if you are to believe that Drake is an interloper in hip-hop, what you're really saying is Canada has no place in the hip-hop conversation, it's really an American art form. Rad, is that your interpretation of it?

Rad: I mean, not to me. Because, for me, I feel like Canada is getting caught by strays as shots taken at Drake. Maybe that's just me kind of compromising or negotiating or dealing with my cognitive dissonance? Because I take Matt's point about [how] this is an attack on Canada's claim to hip-hop culture. I mean, look, I love the guys he referenced — Saukrates, Choclair — I went to the same high school as those guys.

I have a lot of love for the history of hip-hop in Toronto. And in no way am I agreeing with someone that says we don't have a claim to that culture, because that is formative for me. And again, I think I'm choosing to negotiate with myself to separate out the Drake aspect of this. Maybe I'm choosing to separate Drake from that history of Toronto hip-hop that I cherish and I would fight for. I think it speaks to the multitudes of who we are as hip-hop fans, and who we are as Toronto as a culture, and who we are as people who may actually not want to use the word "crodie" and feel like he's dissing a certain generation of Toronto. It's complicated. I think the way we receive a song like Not Like Us, that also contains multitudes.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Ty Callender.