Kendrick Lamar: “euphoria” Track Review

When Pusha T eviscerated Drake on 2018’s “The Story of Adidon,” he set the bar for all future Drake teardowns. The blackface cover art. Pusha’s methodical and theatrical delivery, building flawlessly to the Adonis reveal and the mocking “tick, tick, tick.” A concise three minutes that permanently cracked the image Drake had been meticulously crafting all his adult life, and which he has been desperately trying to Gorilla Glue back together for the last five years. Kendrick Lamar’s “euphoria” is not that—it’s six minutes of rambling over two of the worst beat switch-ups you will ever hear. But it is funny enough to earn Kendrick a nomination for hater of the year.

There’s not much here that’s not been said about Drake before, but the appeal is that it’s shocking to hear jokes about Drake’s plastic surgery abs and Blackness from Kendrick’s mouth. He gets his hands dirtier than I ever thought he would. If he had bowed out like J. Cole (smart man) after Drake’s “Taylor Made Freestyle” troll job, I would have understood. But Kendrick sounds real energized throughout the song’s three phases—from channeling Ghostface’s gutting of Action Bronson by getting disrespectful over Teddy Pendergrass to busting out the Toronto accent voice work in the song’s sparkier finale. He sounds like he’s been waiting years for this moment. “I hate the way that you walk, the way that you talk/I hate the way that you dress,” he raps; cliche, but it works because he sounds like he really means it.

But energy can’t make up for punchlines that just aren’t that tight or individually memorable. Kendrick is lacking a knockout blow, the one line that pushes this beef past fleeting spectacle. Too many of the lyrics instead leave me feeling like Huh? Was that funny? “We hate the bitches you fuck because they confuse themselves with real women.” That could mean anything. “How many more Black features ’til you finally feel that you Black enough.” Wasn’t Rick Ross just saying that Drake got a nose job to look less Black? They really should convene to make sure that their puns are on the same page. “I believe you don’t like women, that’s real competition, you might pop ass with ’em.” You know the beef is running low on material when the gay jokes start flying.

You can feel the pressure weighing on Kendrick to make a diss track that lives up to classics like “Hit ’Em Up,” “Ether,” “Checkmate,” and, of course, “The Story of Adidon.” He gets close to that sort of landmark moment at the very end, when he sings, “We don’t wanna hear you say nigga no more” with contempt in his voice, followed by the most fed-up “Stop.” It could be the line that the beef between two of the biggest rappers of the last 15 years is remembered by—but also, Rick Ross has been beating this joke into the ground for weeks now. I’m tired of it already. That may be unfair, but in a 24/7 beef cycle, my interest in this circus has waned just as it seems to be getting started for real.