“You can’t just mumble your way and gimmick your way to a song no more, buddy.”
Kendrick Lamar, Drake (Josh Groom, Supplied)
Snoop Dogg has broken his silence on the Kendrick/Drake beef, talking to Entertainment Tonight recently about how the whole saga benefitted the rap game.
Snoop has been notably absent from the discourse around the rap battle so far, only posting a bemused reaction to Drake’s Taylor Made Freestyle, which included an AI-generated version of Snoop’s voice.
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With this latest interview, though, Snoop has finally had his say on the matter.
“The only thing I want to say on that whole scenario is that I want to give both of them a shout-out for raising the bar as far as lyrics,” he said. “The writing has been upped since the confrontation, or whatever you call whatever they went through.”
He stayed neutral on the rest of the beef, though, going so far as to say that the allegations brought up within the various diss tracks were none of his business.
“Those are my nephews. I’m not in the middle of it. I support both of them,” he said. “That’s some personal business and not my business.”
He continued to say how good the whole debacle was for the hip-hop industry itself.
“As far as what they did for the industry and the rap game, they made you rap again,” he said. “You can’t just mumble your way and gimmick your way to a song no more, buddy. So thank y’all.”
If you’re wondering who really won the battle, numbers-wise, Kendrick Lamar was crowned the victor, debuting at #1 on the Billboard chart with 70.9 million streams for Not Like Us.
In recent Snoop Dogg news, the rapper and entrepreneur made headlines when he linked up with country star Chris Stapleton, dropped the bombshell news he was “giving up smoke”, revealed that to be part of a cheeky marketing campaign, and found the time to star in a Prime Video comedy series.