6:16 in LA: Kendrick Lamar escalates Drake feud as he releases ...

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Kendrick Lamar has doubled down on his feud with Drake by releasing a second diss track in a week – this time taking aim at the Canadian superstar’s inner circle.

The new track, which he released on Instagram on Friday, is titled “6:16 in LA” and parodies Drake’s “timestamp songs” such 2023’s “8 AM in Charlotte” or 2015’s “5 AM in Toronto”.

Ratcheting up the beef another notch following the bruising “Euphoria”, Kendrick takes several swipes at Drake’s record label OVO Sound, which he runs with a large “crew” of signed artists, friends and associates.

“Have you ever thought that OVO was workin’ for me?” Lamar asks in his latest track, calling Drake a “fake bully” who “must be a terrible person”.

“Everyone in your team is whispering that you deserve it,” he continues, adding Drake “can’t ‘Toosie Slide’ [dance his way] out of this one.”

Lamar also suggests the people Drake is in business with are untrustworthy and if the rapper was “street smart” he would see “twenty” of his “entourage” are trying to “hustle” him.

Back in 2015 when Drake entered a feud with Meek Mill, he released two diss tracks “Charged Up” and “Back to Back” before Mill had a chance to respond.

In “6:16 LA” Lamar references the historic beef, having used the same strategy himself with the release of his latest track so soon after “Euphoria”.

“‘Back To Back,’ I like that record / I’ma get back to that, for the record,’ he raps.

Drake and Lamar have been involved in a long-simmering feud for many years.

In March, Lamar took aim at Drake and fellow rap rival J Cole on a new track, claiming that rather than representing the genre’s “big three” it’s just “big me”.

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The song, “Like That”, appeared on Future and Metro Boomin’s collaborative album We Don’t Trust You.

Lamar was directly responding to J Cole’s verse on “First Person Shooter” from Drake’s 2023 album For All The Dogs.

On that song, Cole rapped: “Love when they argue the hardest MC / Is it K-Dot? Is it Aubrey? Or me? / We the big three like we started a league, but right now, I feel like Muhammad Ali.”

Lamar is known by his nickname K-Dot, while Aubrey is Drake’s birth name.