The following was my 2025 entry for the Anthony Burgess Prize…

In Not Like Us, Kendrick Lamar delivers a devastating diss track, a club banger, a workout song and a treatise on cultural appropriation all at once.

Taking aim at his long-term rival Drake, the zingy composition which uses samples from Monk Higgins’s 1968 jazz classic I Believe to My Soul, is surely the knockout punch in the pair’s long-running feud.

Drake’s lyrical (rather than legal) response – “F*ck all rap beef, I’m trying to get the party lit,” he offers in Gimme A Hug – feels less a reach for the moral high ground than it does a murmured resignation. That Drake would prefer to sue Universal Music Group, the parent company overseeing both his OVO Sound and Lamar’s Top Dawg Entertainment, rather than address the exhaustive list of insults in kind, says a lot. He claims defamation. But is this an admission of defeat, if not guilt?

Drake and Lamar’s beef stretches back to 2013. Since then, the pair have traded blows on their songs about each other’s rapping skills, fidelity, parenting and more.

But Not Like Us ups the ante in terms of the nature and scale of the allegations Lamar directs towards Drake. He implies Drake has had sex with underage girls. “Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A-Minor,” he raps, with the last word delivered with a mischievous vibrato that immediately tempts listeners into mimicking.

He also accuses Drake of being a “coloniser”, who exploits black culture for commercial gain, without having lived it. “You run to Atlanta when you need a check balance,” Lamar snipes. This is a nod towards Drake’s collaborations with Atlanta artists Lil Baby, Young Thug, Future and others, suggesting that the Canadian borrows their sound, slang and stories when he needs a hit.

Not Like Us flits between subtlety – Lamar compares himself to Deebo, the imposing bully from the 1995 film Friday, who can make a “free throw” (easy shot) on any competitor – and sledgehammer directness when he says with his whole chest: “Certified Lover Boy? Certified paedophiles.”

The song’s music video is also layered, offering a clever combination of Easter eggs and overt provocation. In one scene, again implying Drake’s attraction to young girls, Lamar pointedly performs 17 push-ups on cinder blocks in a room resembling a prison cell. This is a reference to Drake’s own diss track directed towards Lamar, Push Ups, wherein he mocked his rival’s appearance and questioned his standing within hip-hop.

In this scene, the set is designed to resemble a famous 1997 photograph featuring actress and model Milla Jovovich for a German fashion agency. Jovovich, who started her modelling career aged 11, was reportedly discovered by the disgraced talent agent Jean-Luc Brunel, who had ties to prolific sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Another scene features Lamar dancing – specifically, he’s Crip Walking in an acknowledgement of his Los Angeles roots – over a hopscotch court. That he is doing this, rather than playing the game as intended, suggests that he doesn’t associate with minors.

More on the nose, meanwhile, there is another scene in the video in which Lamar destroys an owl-shaped piñata. The mascot for Drake’s OVO Sound label is an owl. A caption during the piñata’s bashing on-screen reads: “No ovhoes were harmed during the making of the video.”

The chorus of Not Like Us – “They not like us” – is repeated over an infectious beat. This provides both a convenient mantra for the West Coast rap scene for which Lamar has anointed himself king, and an opportunity for less lyrically capable listeners – that’s most of us – to rap along.

Great art, said the author and academic César A. Cruz, should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. That’s exactly what Not Like Us does. Rarely does a rap song – or a song of any genre for that matter – have equal potential to stun listeners into silence and get them talking. Beyond the beef with Drake, which it does a conclusive job of winning, Not Like Us explores the tension between artistic integrity and what the suits think will sell.

Where other epic diss tracks such as 2Pac’s Hit ‘Em Up or Eminem’s Killshot might have been similarly edgy and audacious, what makes Not Like Us a Grammy magnet and a suitable Super Bowl anthem is its versatility. You can dance to it. You can lift weights to it. You can write an essay on it.