Diss Track Season Was Ultimately Good For Hip-Hop Culture And Business

At some point, many people lost count of the number of diss tracks that Drake and Kendrick Lamar swapped this spring. J. Cole was involved, and then he wasn’t. Kanye West subsequently popped off on Drake and Cole in his ‘Like That’ remix. At various junctures, Rick Ross, A$AP Rocky, The Weeknd, and Metro Boomin also weighed in through songs directed at Drake. A friend and collaborator of the feuding musicians, 21 Savage effectively told his social media followers to leave him out of the Drake/Metro Boomin mess. The Drake/Kendrick saga seemed to end when ‘Not Like Us’ dropped. Tennis megastar Serena Williams declared the anthem this summer’s hit. Chris Brown and Quavo also traded diss tracks this spring, one of which necessitated a response from Saweetie. This was just months after Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion exchanged daggers in their respective songs. It was seemingly the busiest diss track season in music history, but it wasn’t. Rap battles are a longtime, near-everyday cultural tradition in hip-hop. It appeared new and more abundant this year to some due to the fame of the artists involved. But this season was a widely-publicized homage to one of the genre’s most ordinary...