There’s A Secret Interview That Would’ve Taken The Drake-Kendrick Lamar Beef To DEFCON 1

Carl Williott | June 15, 2016 3:50 pm

It’s wild to think that Drake and Kendrick Lamar were once competing for the same hip-hop territory, so divergent have their career paths been since 2014. But back in 2013, Kendrick dropped a bomb known as The Verse on “Control,” wherein he called out just about everybody, including Drake, for having inferior bars. Drake brushed it off in a subsequent interview, Kendrick threw a few more subliminals at the 6 God in a freestyle and on Dr. Dre‘s album, but all in all the beef faded away, as Lamar focused on making woke jazz-rap and Drake focused on dismantling Meek Mill and finishing Views. But apparently, the beef is one interview away from escalating to nuclear levels.

ESPN Radio’s Marcellus Wiley says when the rivalry was still fresh, he witnessed an interview that would’ve blown things open, an interview that was so inflammatory all footage of it was destroyed like some Bourne subplot.

“All I know is there was a beef, and all I know is I was witness to when the beef would have ignited to proportions we have not seen since Ja Rule/50, maybe even Ice Cube/N.W.A.,” Wiley said on today’s Max & Marcellus show, according to Complex. “Like it went there. But that was destroyed from everyone’s property. That was destroyed, that interview, that moment was destroyed. That’s all I’m gonna say. But I was there and I heard the shots fired.”

He wouldn’t say which rapper was talking mess in the interview, but said the publicist made sure it was spiked. Now, we know both dudes have been on ESPN before, but Complex points out Drake was in the network’s studios a month after “Control” dropped. And it would be so Drake to respond on-camera on a sports network instead of on wax.

This is such disappointing news, man. We’ve been robbed of an all-time rap beef, in an era that’s sorely lacking when it comes to beefs. We needed this. And now it’s gone, because we live in the buddy-buddy CYA era where things rarely escalate beyond passive-aggressive tweets, Young Thug vs. Future style.

Or maybe it’s all for the better, since instead of getting embroiled in some dick-measuring contest, Kendrick gave us TPAB and Drake came up with “Hotline Bling.”