Universal Music calls Drake’s ‘Not Like Us’ lawsuit ‘misguided’

With the Drake takedown Not Like Us, by Kendrick Lamar, now officially the most celebrated rap dis ever, the record label behind both artists is seeking to dismiss Drake’s defamation lawsuit, arguing that its lyrics are merely “a series of hyperbolic insults,” the lingua franca of any hip-hop feud.

In a filing Monday in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, the company, known as UMG, provided its first substantial response to the lawsuit brought in January on behalf of Drake, the artist born Aubrey Drake Graham. He accused the label of defamation and harassment, claiming that Lamar’s track “intended to convey the specific, unmistakable, and false factual allegation that Drake is a criminal pedophile, and to suggest that the public should resort to vigilante justice in response.”

Last month, Not Like Us, which accuses Drake of liking young girls, among other personal attacks, won five Grammy Awards, including song and record of the year, and provided the centerpiece for Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime performance.

According to UMG, Drake “lost a rap battle that he provoked and in which he willingly participated” and then “sued his own record label in a misguided attempt to salve his wounds.” The label, citing in its filing lyrics by both artists tied to last year’s fight, added that Drake had leveled “similarly incendiary attacks at Lamar” and that the tone and context of the back-and-forth made the defamation claim impossible to prove.

The lawsuit, UMG said in its filing, “disregards the other Drake and Lamar diss tracks that surrounded ‘Not Like Us’ as well as the conventions of the diss track genre,” adding: “diss tracks are a popular and celebrated artform centered around outrageous insults, and they would be severely chilled if Drake’s suit were permitted to proceed.”

In the suit, lawyers for Drake had argued that Not Like Us was beyond the pale of a typical rap beef because the song’s accusations were framed as fact — for instance, using as its cover art a map of Drake’s home with sex offender markers superimposed on top — and that it led to real world violence, citing a shooting at the residence days after the song’s release that injured a security guard, calling it “the 2024 equivalent of ‘Pizzagate.’” The claim also cited two other attempted trespassers in the days that followed.

Drake’s legal team includes Michael J. Gottlieb, who previously represented the owner of the Washington pizzeria targeted by the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorists. In a statement Monday in response to UMG’s filing, Gottlieb said, “UMG wants to pretend that this is about a rap battle in order to distract its shareholders, artists and the public from a simple truth: A greedy company is finally being held responsible for profiting from dangerous misinformation that has already resulted in multiple acts of violence.”

To prove defamation, a public figure like Drake must show that false and damaging information was published knowingly and with malice. Drake’s lawsuit argued that UMG would not have maintained a long-standing business relationship with him if it had reason to believe that any allegations of sex abuse were true and that the label was incentivized to devalue Drake’s brand because his contract would soon be up for renegotiation.

UMG says that rather than conveying fact, Not Like Us and its associated promotional materials, including the cover art and music video, were full of imagery that was “satirical and vitriolic,” in keeping with earlier songs in the beef, including Drake lyrics that accused Lamar of domestic abuse.

“No reasonable viewer would believe that the image of Drake’s Toronto mansion with 13 sex offender markers is real; the image is hyperbolic and exaggerated,” UMG argued in the filing. “Moreover, assessment of the broader context makes clear that ‘Not Like Us’ relates to well-known controversies that Drake himself acknowledged and perpetuated,” including in previous lyrics. (On “Taylor Made Freestyle,” an earlier song in the beef, Drake rapped in character as Tupac Shakur, addressing Lamar: “Talk about him liking young girls, that’s a gift from me / heard it on the Budden podcast, it’s gotta be true.”)

The filing also denies that the label’s promotion of Not Like Us invited harassment, accusing Drake of attempting “to contort violent metaphors in the lyrics into incitement,” despite using similar language in his own songs against Lamar. “In short, as with his defamation claim, Drake seeks to chill a form of artistic expression that he himself has embraced.”

Drake’s most recent album, Some Sexy Songs 4 U, a collaborative project with singer and producer PartyNextDoor, debuted at No 1 on the Billboard album chart last month, the rapper’s 14th release to do so, although its numbers were relatively modest. The album was released in part by Drake’s longtime partner, Republic Records, a UMG subsidiary.