Kendrick Lamar serves beef, well done

Kendrick Lamar took the biggest stage in our country last weekend, looked directly into the camera and addressed the man with whom he has spent much of this year feuding.

"Say Drake," he said.

It was the latest — and potentially the last — salvo in an ongoing grudge between two of the world’s most popular entertainers.

This sort of thing is not new to hip-hop. Rap beef occupies its own little corner of the genre, situated somewhere between professional competition and commercial bloodsport.

Now I am someone who has always disliked Drake, and I have also repeatedly daydreamed about ways that I could get back at people I believe to have wronged me, which means that felt downright gleeful while watching Kendrick Lamar perform.

This week, however, I’ve found myself wondering how Kendrick feels now. I’ll explain why in just a bit, but first a few grudge-related links.

😡 The Grudge Report 😡 

• Grudge fuels Jamal Murray’s career-high 55 points

  Resentment is a well of motivation that is both potent and deep for athletes. Michael Jordan dipped into it constantly over the course of his career. Jamal Murray — a guard for the Denver Nuggets — is just dabbling as he took the frustration he felt after being ejected from a game against Portland to come back and score a career-high 55 points against the Blazers when the two teams played two days later.

• The feud between Sam Altman and Elon Musk

  By Jai Hamid, MSN

  There are some very hard feelings between two of the more powerful technocrats on the planet. The fact that Sam Altman and Elon Musk were co-founders of OpenAI is part of the back story that has heightened the stakes, and when Altman stood next to Donald Trump to announce the $500 billion initiative called Stargate, well, the world’s richest man immediately started fuming.

• Ghosting by the goose leads to ghosting by the gander

  New York Times Magazine

  This is going to stretch the bounds of what we typically think of as a grudge … however … I think it qualifies. The New York Times Magazine talked to 10 people who had “ghosted” romantic interests (i.e. just stopped communicating without providing any notice or explanation). This one struck me as particularly interesting:

🎤 Mic drop 🎤 

OK, now where was I?

Oh yeah, this guy staring straight into the camera during the halftime show at the Super Bowl and saying, “Say Drake …”

Kendrick Lamar then proceeded to say that Drake was reputed to be interested in young women. For this reason, Kendrick said, Drake should hope he’s never incarcerated. Kendrick than advised any woman who might have a romantic interest in Drake that she should take steps to cut off Drake’s access to any younger sisters they might have.

“Not Like Us” becomes less subtle as the song progresses. More catchy, too.

It is what rappers call a diss track. That is, it’s a song created to belittle someone who has been identified as not just a rival, but an enemy or “opp” if you prefer the current hip-hop vernacular.

In other words, Kendrick Lamar has a grudge against Drake and vice versa. And in hip-hop, grudges are not only tolerated, but encouraged and even rewarded.

What makes the beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake unique is not the intensity of the conflict so much as how unambiguously Kendrick won. That song calling Drake a pedophile won five Grammys, which matches the number Drake has won in his entire catalog. Taylor Swift danced to “Not Like Us” during the awards show.

Puzzlingly, Drake has taken steps that have made things worse for himself. He sued his own record label over the song, and then watched as Kendrick turned around and used that to tease his performance of that song during halftime of the freaking Super Bowl. And if that wasn't enough, he brought out the best women's tennis player of all-time -- who had reportedly dated Drake at some point in the past -- to dance as part of the show.

If you want a specific timeline of the beef, you can find that here.

What I’m most interested is what happens now.

Is it “Game Over” as the show itself indicated, lights in the crowd spelling out that message at the end of his performance? Has Kendrick crossed Drake's name off his shit list? Or does K-Dot perhaps switch to surveillance, pausing his verbal annihilation provided Drake offers no further provocation?

I guess more specifically, I’m wondering if Kendrick Lamar’s prosecution of this particular grudge has eliminated or at least diminished the negative feelings that he held toward Drake when the conflict began.

This gets to what is so very tricky about grudges.

1. What is it -- specifically -- that we believe we want?

2. How will we feel if and when we get it?

What is the result of “winning” a grudge? Not in terms of popular opinion or even validation. I’m talking about how you actually feel about yourself and the person you’ve been beefing with.

Has Kendrick Lamar experienced some type of catharsis?

Essentially, I’m trying to apply a very modern example to something that the psychologist Karen Gorney wrote about way back in 1948 in her paper titled, “The Value of Vindictiveness.”

Is Kendrick Lamar Person A, who chose to respond to Drake’s provocations and has – through his lyrical evisceration – let off the psychological steam that he was feeling?

Or has this feud tapped into something that is more indicative of Person B?

The closest I've ever come to winning a grudge was when the host at a rival radio station apologized for insulting my wife online and turning my reaction to this insult into content for his radio show. He delivered this apology in front of an audience. We were both watching the Seahawks practice. There were a number of fellow media members around us, including several of my co-workers. He said he was wrong, and extended his hand. He had previously apologized to my wife on Twitter, which was where he had posted the initial insult.

I shook his hand, but I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about it. All I said was, “OK.” I didn't feel relieved. I didn't feel satisfied. If anything, I felt a little more resentful. Like he was more concerned with how other people felt about him apologizing than he was about me.

What did I want?

I’ve thought this a lot about this over the past 5 years, and I’ve concluded that what I really wanted was to remain mad. To fully accept his apology would require me to give up the idea that I would have some sort of final say in the dispute. I would have to give up my chance to get back at him. I wasn’t quite ready to do that.

I got there, though. It just took me a couple more years.

I needed to realize that my anger had become an end toward itself. I was much more like Person B than Person A, and the person it was hurting most was me.

I am a little embarrassed about how long it took me to fully accept his apology, but I’ve subsequently appeared on his radio show. This summer, I saw him at a wedding of a mutual friend. We even posed for a picture together.

My point here is that the resolution of this particular grudge wound up having very little to do with the person I was mad at and much more to do with the way I processed anger or more accurately, failed to process it.

I realize this makes it sound like I'm judging Kendrick Lamar, and that's not the case.

I've never liked Drake's music. I've never liked Drake's persona. I feel he’s the worst kind of millennial in that he has a tendency to pick fights with little off-the-cuff remarks -- what rappers refer to as subliminal disses -- and then, when he gets lyrically smacked in the nose by someone who doesn’t want to play his little reindeer games, he sticks out his lower lip like a whiny baby and literally calls his lawyer.

I howled on Sunday as Kendrick Lamar began to perform “Not Like Us” last week, and my excitement went up an octave when I saw Serena Williams was dancing on the stage.

From a purely psychological perspective, though, I really wonder what it feels like to settle a grudge in that dramatic of a fashion. Was it as satisfying as Kendrick Lamar thought or hoped it would be?