The real winners in the ongoing Drake vs. Kendrick beef are the Kendrick listeners. Unlike his adversary, the Compton rap superstar has never forced his way onto us to the point of exhaustion in seeing his mug all over social media, or dropping half-assed albums with bloated tracklists just to game streaming charts. K-Dot’s “worst” album is still a thousand miles ahead of the rest of the game, and Drake hasn’t dropped a hot one since 2017’s More Life, and that’s being generous. Kendrick’s got this way of disappearing into the cultural mist like an enigma, and only ever reemerges when he’s got something to let off his chest. Well, he’s got something to let off his chest on “Euphoria”, and to Drake’s credit, we can thank him after he’s licked his wounds later for prodding Kendrick out of his millionaire batcave to ether his ass in this modern day rap battle. There’s been a lot of blood spilled through the bars since this whole thing got started, but “Euphoria” is the engine rev that takes all the smoke. All of Kendrick’s personalities come out for this one, beginning with that wise meditative sage who he summons to provide a few words of warning to anyone stepping to him, but since he’s already been stepped to, we meet his many unhinged alter-egos. The most real one, however, is Kendrick the hater who hates the way Drizzy walks, talks, and dresses. He appropriates the certified lover boy’s cat’s name to deliver a unsavory subliminal through a faux Toronto accent. That’s not even the hardest of what Kendrick spits out either. It’s like watching an influencer whose lived most of their celebrity life behind filters and carefully curated publicity campaigns trying to go toe to toe with the physical manifestation of authenticity itself, and getting dressed down in public in embarrassing fashion. The beat behind it all is pretty good, but Kendrick’s beatdown in the wordsmith diss form is what we’ll remember the most when the smoke clears.

Kendrick Lamar’s “euphoria” single is available now on Interscope Records / pgLang.