Actor Tom Hanks turned to his son Chet for a breakdown of the rap world’s latest drama: the feud between Drake and Kendrick Lamar.
The conversation, ripe with the colorful metaphors only Chet could provide, unfolded like a modern-day parable, translating the complex rap battle into a narrative even the uninitiated could grasp. Of course, he starts by setting the stage: how Drake and J. Cole, along with Kendrick, were self-proclaimed members of rap’s “Big 3.” Having supposedly left everybody else in the Big 3 behind for a lengthy soliloquy of his own, Kendrick had just answered strongly in his newest track, which caused the upset.
And then, the stage was set, since Chet launches into the back-and-forth battles of words being filtered among the artists. When Drake mentioned something regarding Kendrick’s height, he responded fiercely, mentioning something about Drake’s parenting and his accent. The personal insult then escalated to comprise the claims Drake was making against Kendrick’s personal life, and these were completely overshadowed by the lyrical power of the comeback track from Lamar.Â
Chet proceeds to effectively illustrate Kendrick’s track—it’s a cultural earthquake, a moment of ‘Town Bidness’ that resonates with the force of a West Coast anthem. This was the knockout punch, a sonic declaration of victory that left the rap community in no doubt of Kendrick’s supremacy.
Ever the worried dad, Tom Hanks writes in shock. “Holy cow! These are fighting words. People taking sides?? Who’s winning??” he writes. Chet, for his part, being pretty confident that he was calling a spade a spade, so he replied in the only way it could have been: to say that Kendrick Lamar’s win was as clear as day.
