For as long as there’s been hip-hop, there’s been “beef.”
Slang of unknown origin, beef is a disagreement between two or more people, and it existed well before anyone thought to put a rhythmic, rhyming recitation over a beat. With ancestral roots in Jamaican toasting and “the dozens,” a game of insults born in African cultures, hip-hop made beef an art form with the diss track, a song that calls out and ridicules another rapper.
That’s exactly what Kendrick Lamar did in his verses on “Like That” with Future and Metro Boomin — he came after rappers J. Cole and Drake. So when Cole, fresh off his own Lamar-targeted diss track, “7 Minute Drill,” took the stage at a recent show, the audience probably expected him to unleash another verbal barrage after what he initially called “a warning shot.”
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But what he did shocked fans and shook hip-hop: Cole apologized.
“Y’all love Kendrick Lamar, correct? As do I,” Cole said at his Dreamville Festival in North Carolina on April 7. “I just wanna come up here and publicly be like, bruh, that was the lamest goofiest [stuff], and I say all that to say it made me feel like 10 years ago when I was moving incorrectly.
“And I pray that God will line me back up on my purpose and my path,” he said. “I pray that [Lamar] didn’t feel no way and if he did . . . I got my chin out, take your best shot. . . . All good. It’s love. And I pray that y’all [will] forgive [me] for the misstep and I can get back to my true path ’cause I ain’t gonna lie to y’all, the past two days felt terrible.”
If any rapper was going to publicly end a beef with words of reconciliation, it’s Cole. Throughout his career, he has spoken thoughtfully about his depression, his childhood trauma, and the stigma around mental health issues, especially in the Black community.
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But Cole’s decision has roiled some fans and artists who were primed for a protracted lyrical battle between him and Lamar and feel robbed of another chapter in a revered hip-hop tradition. Marion “Suge” Knight, the incarcerated rap mogul who founded Death Row Records, equated Cole’s apology with weakness, adding that hip-hop is a “contact sport,” and if Cole “don’t want to be a gangsta rapper, go be R&B.”
That was a wrongheaded but common theme on social media — that Cole somehow impugned his manhood by backing down from a fight. He didn’t. He walked away with his head high and his heart intact.
“The emcee with a competitive nature part of me is upset at that young man while the mental wellness take care of your spirit part of me is very proud of him,” said Styles P of The LOX, who offered a more nuanced take on Instagram Stories. “He just confused . . . my frequencies but imma always go with the take care of you[r] spirit and please y’all self before you worry about pleasing others!”
Musical beefs didn’t always hold so much weight. In the 1950s, calypso masters Mighty Sparrow and Lord Melody kept up a call-and-response duel for years, much to the delight of fans who loved the clever wordplay and storytelling. Eventually, the two singers paired up on the classic “Picong Duel,” a precursor to today’s rap battles, on which they alternated improvised verses and roasted each other.
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With the dawn of hip-hop more than 50 years ago, such battles for status, reputation, or publicity continued. The only weapons necessary were wit and a microphone.
That changed with the media- and fan-fueled so-called “East Coast/West Coast rap war” that pitted New York and Diddy’s (then Puff Daddy’s) Bad Boy Records and its biggest star, The Notorious B.I.G., against Knight’s Los Angeles-based Death Row Records and Tupac Shakur. That feud led to some classic tracks but also to violence that culminated with the stunning murders of Tupac in September 1996 and Biggie in March 1997.
These twin tragedies have haunted every hip-hop beef and the culture itself for more than 25 years. While there’s always an eye on escalation beyond jousting on wax, it’s highly unlikely that rap scuffles between Cole and Lamar — the first and, so far, the only rapper to win a Pulitzer Prize in music — would have turned violent. But it could also have created a needless, ugly rift between men who’ve always been considered friends.
In releasing his diss track, Cole did what fans expected of him. But it fell below what he expected of himself. He quashed a beef by doing what every person should do: He acknowledged his mistake, asked for forgiveness, and promised to do better. And that’s an unprecedented level of emotional maturity that hip-hop — and society in general — would do well to emulate.
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Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com. Follow her @reneeygraham.
