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The Drake/Kendrick Lamar feud was this year’s biggest rap event thus far, and it was a cause for a whole lot of excitement among many fans. But certain rap elders have expressed their disapproval of the whole spectacle. Questlove, for instance, posted that it was “wrestling match level mudslinging” and that “Hip Hop Is Truly Dead.” All-time rap great André 3000 doesn’t go as far as Questlove, but he didn’t like it, either.
Right now, André is touring behind his instrumental flute album New Blue Sun, and he’s the subject of a new Crack cover story. In the interview, André says how he felt about the Drake/Kendrick battle: “I got a little sad, at a certain point. In early rap battles, you had kids in the park rapping against each other. But it’s not just people rapping now. You got people with 100 employees. You have livelihoods, empires, companies, deals — all of it can be jeopardized. If you don’t have anything to lose, sure, go for it. But if I already made it, I’m not sure it’s even worth it anymore.”
André says that he’s written diss tracks about other artists and that it can be a good way to work out feelings, but he made up his mind not to release any songs like that, even if another artist called him out by name. But André didn’t mind hearing his name used in Kendrick Lamar’s verse on Future’s “Like That,” the first real shot in the feud: “If he walk around with that stick, it ain’t André 3K.” André tells Crack, “As a 49-year-old rapper, you’re just happy to get a shoutout. But as a rapper, I’ve noticed myself walking around with this stick. So it was a line for me, too, and I was trying to find a way to use it. But Kendrick used it, so I had to say ‘Yeah, he got it.’”
It’s a little notable that André still think of himself as a rapper and that he’s still thinking about new lyrics. Last year, André told GQ that he didn’t think he could really rap about his life in middle age: “Not to say that age is a thing that dictates what you rap about, but in a way it does. And things that happen in my life, like, what are you talking about? ‘I got to go get a colonoscopy.’ What are you rapping about? ‘My eyesight is going bad.’”
In the Crack story, André mentions that the last rap verse that he wrote was the one on Kanye West’s “Life Of The Party” in 2021. (He appeared on Killer Mike’s Grammy-winning “Scientists & Engineers” last year, but he tells Crack that he recorded that verse seven years ago.) Now, André says that those comments are particular to him, that they don’t necessarily apply to rappers with different styles: “Some are the best braggadocious rappers in the world, and we love them for that — but it’s so much easier to do that for the rest of your life. I don’t necessarily rap like that. Our formulas are different… He doesn’t know what it takes for me to do what I do. I don’t know what it takes for him to say the same thing over and over again and still keep it creative. But I love him for doing it.” (That’s a generic “he,” not a specific person.) Read the Crack story here.