Hey, everyone. Anthony Fantano here. The internet's busiest music nerd. It's time for the story that refuses to die. Drake. Aubrey. Drake. Graham. Rap song man Canadian guy still being angry and bitter about the l he took against Kendrick Lamar in the highly publicized beef they had last year.

If you guys remember, he had a bit of a legal complaint that he filed against his record label and Kendrick Lamar's record label, UMG, saying that not Kendrick Lamar, but UMG itself is actually responsible and culpable for the damages to his reputation, and they actively took part in the destruction of his reputation by pushing this "Not Like Us" track to the world overhyping it, making it more popular than it actually is.

Well, Drake rescinded that complaint only to then file an actual full-fledged lawsuit against UMG. Not just a complaint, but an actual lawsuit with a jury trial demanded. It is an 81-page beast of a document, but I thought that maybe we could go over some relevant highlights here.

I also want to mention before we read the document, UMG has already responded to Drake's lawsuit publicly, saying that

"Not only are these claims untrue, but the notion we would seek to harm the reputation of any artist–let alone Drake–is illogical. We have invested massively in his music, and our employees around the world have worked tirelessly for many years to help him achieve historic, commercial and personal financial success.

Throughout his career, Drake has intentionally and successfully used UMG to distribute his music and poetry, to engage in conventionally outrageous back and forth rap battles to express his feelings about other artists. He now seeks to weaponize the legal process to silence an artists creative expression, and to seek damages from UMG for distributing that artist's music.

We have not, and do not engage in defamation–against any individual. At the same time, we will vigorously defend this litigation to protect our people and our reputation, as well as any artist who might directly or indirectly become a frivolous litigation target for having done nothing more than write a song."

Wow, Drake getting responded to harshly in another rap battle, legally speaking, from UMG. Pointing out very quickly the hypocrisy that, yeah, this guy talks about and shades other people with his music. And this is a pretty big reminder of the hellscape we will be living in if Drake somehow wins this lawsuit or makes some kind of legal dent with it.

Because if that happens, what are we supposed to do past this point vis a vis, I don't know, diss tracks or any songs that might be about another person and could be unflattering on some level? Will rappers have to clear every diss song they write with a lawyer, just to sort of see if it passes muster? Will all of Taylor Swift's exes be able to take her to task legally for things said about them on any number of tracks?

The way Drake is expecting the world to just manipulate the rules to his benefit in this instance, I don't really know what to label it other than insanity, especially given that it's not like you were just sitting there doing nothing. And then Kendrick Lamar, just like you know, said you were a PDF file out of the blue, out of nowhere, for no reason whatsoever. You were in a rap battle, man. You were in a multi-track beef. Cue that one Drake clip where he's like, 'I study rap battles for a living, man. I study rap battles.

"I study rap battles for a living."

Yeah, you study rap battles, and yet you didn't see this coming. Especially given that on the eye track, you literally dared Kendrick to bring that topic up in the lyrics of the track. And yet Drake's like, 'Why would he do this? Why would this happen?'

Anyway, held within Drake's multi-page lawsuit, there are some interesting claims and observations made. Page three kind of breaks down the intentions of the song, like we're looking at a Rap Genius annotation, but for a court, the lyrics repeatedly accuse Drake of engaging in criminal acts, including by calling him a certified Pedialyte drinker and a predator who needs to be placed on neighborhood watch.

"The image was designed to reinforce, and in fact reinforces that accusation by depicting Drake's actual Toronto house covered in the icons that were known to be used by law enforcement, as well as public safety applications like citizen to identify child offenders residences online."

The next page alleges that all of this damage to Drake's reputation is once again UMG's fault, essentially saying that they waged an unrelenting campaign to spread the recording, image, and video together the defamatory material, as widely as possible, with no real notes made here of any potential organic spread of the song.

It's like the lawsuit just wants to characterize the popularity of this track as being purely fabricated. Nobody actually likes it. It's not actually people engaging in the song on a personal level and enjoying it on a personal level. Everything is just bots. Everything's astroturfed. It's all a psyop, man. It's all a UMG psyop.

Page seven is really interesting. Because not only does it bring up the very scary and unfortunate attack on Drake's house in 2024, that happened in the midst of the beef. But it also compares this attack to the likes of the Pizzagate conspiracy, which is a very odd thing to try to hitch to this whole situation.

Okay. In this next section over here, UMG publishes the defamatory material. The document actually goes over in bold multiple lyrics from the song. And it's funny because the explanations are just, like, literally on their face what the lyrics pretty much say. I'm not trying to make an argument on behalf of Drake over here. It's just hilarious and cringe that somebody had to go over every bar of this song and was like this, uh, line that, uh, insinuates this says this. Oh, really? Wow. And crazy.

Starting over here at line 58 within the first minute, "The recording identifies Drake by name and states that Lamar has heard that Drake has a predilection for underage women." Say, Drake, I heard you like em young. "The next line is a thinly veiled threat that Drake should be careful that he never ends up in prison, a place where child predators are notoriously the targets of violence."

In the B section around line 68. This is where Drake and his team start denying the claims, which, you know, I will say, as crazy as it is to read it in this lawsuit, he he does a more effective job of it here than he did on "The Heart Part 6", because I guess, yes, in fact it is true. Drake is on no such types of these lists.

Oh God, they're even going into the music video. "The video also includes allusions to Drake's OVO brand, which is represented by an owl in combination with the lyrics 'Wop wop wop wop wop, Dot, fuck 'em up.' The video shows Lamar beating an owl-shaped pinata with a bat. During this scene, a caption appears at the bottom of the video that states disclaimer no OVhoes were harmed during the making of this video." I mean, it seems you're just repeating them with no pushback. It must be true. Maybe no OVhoes were in fact harmed.

Oh no. On line 118 he's he's he's angry about the pop out. He's angry about the pop out show. Oh, no. The record label allowed a song that they licensed to be played publicly. That's crazy. Oh my God, why would a record label do that? Just like they did every Drake song to ever exist where he dissed somebody else? This is crazy. There's no precedent for this. Why on earth?

Oh, no, this is damning over here at 119, UMG's subsequently made the live performance of the recording available to be played on the radio and radio stations played it. Oh, no, not the radio stations. No no no. Oh my God, no! Oh no, the radio stations played it. Oh my God!

And here it is at 127, uh, under this D section, first section of that UMG caused third parties to fake streams in bold lettering. That is the claim which it brings up bots says artificially inflate the spread of the recording on Spotify. It explains what bots are, but it doesn't really offer any proof of that. Like, what are you citing? What information do you have that this is true?

There is allegedly a whistleblower, but the whistleblower just claims that Spotify itself is very easy to bot due to their knowledge of the platform. It also says that someone from Interscope sent him a payment of $2,500 via the digital payment platform Zelle, and that he was promised another $2,500 and a percentage of the recordings total sales for the initial push. Which, honestly, if that's all it takes to get a number one fucking song that the entire world listens to, holy shit.

There are countless musicians that are going to be really hyped to hear about this. Like bro, apparently all it takes is five G's to become the number one artist in artist in the world, and apparently ruined Drake's career. We're talking about a multi-billion dollar music industry, with multi-millionaire artists fighting each other and uploading their music to the biggest music streaming platform on the entire planet. And apparently, you can subvert all of that. All of that industry can be completely upended for five G's. I mean, holy shit, at those prices, I'm going to start a music career. Why am I over here making YouTube content every day like a jackass, when I can become an overnight sensation for $5,000?

Okay, apparently, page 52 over here focuses on a lot of content creators who made videos about "Not Like Us" and did reactions to the song and so on and so forth. And it's kind of interesting, like what creators on the platform Drake decides to focus on. We have the CartierFamily. We have No Life Shaq as well. Oh, seems that Drake is mad at Zias! Shout out to Zias! He's a nice guy. Met him. He's a cool dude. Also angry at RDC. Seemingly upset with Kai Cenat as well.

Before I get further into this, let me just say, what's kind of funny about this situation is that this was one of the biggest cultural events of the year. When people reacted to this song, which we all did, we didn't know it was on the fucking track when we reacted to it. Drake is acting as if this content was created and posted nefariously with full knowledge of what was going on and what was happening.

Like, even if every single YouTuber, every single content creator here, immediately after reacting to the track, including Kai, decided that he was going to. You know what? This track went a little too far. I'm not going to react to it. I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to do that. The content, the stream, is already out there. People are like fucking screen-grabbing that shit and posting it all over the internet anyway.

To act as if, again, these people are somehow involved in this bad act and like they're being paid and made to react to the song as if like it wasn't being demanded of all of us by our viewers, by our commenters. Speaking of which, what where am I? Where am I in this shit? What did I do or what did I not do? I don't know, I reacted to the video as hard as anybody else. I'm not good enough to get a thumbnail in here.

Still shout out to Kai though. This is kind of insane. Like you would think. Drake is trying to give his career a bump, or do him some kind of favor by putting his face in the lawsuit. There's no possible way he and his lawyers are looking at this and are like, 'Yeah, man, this is a this is a bad look for all these people. Look, you got caught. You got got. Yeah yeah yeah. Hand in the cookie jar and all that. The vegan cookie jar. Oh my God."

Pages 62 and 63 literally have YouTube comments copied and pasted into it. This is embarrassing.

"The caged owl. Got me truly believing Kendrick Lamar. Now Drake going to prison possibly?"

Oh boy. They're making memes around it. He does not like the memes. Bro, you literally shared memes about Meek Mill on stage when you were wrecking his friggin career. Like again, I wonder if Drake wins this, does Meek Mill have grounds to retroactively sue him for ruining his career essentially? I think that would be the case.

But look, I only have so much time for the insanity. I'm going to have to cut it here. Let me know in the comments what you think about all of this rigmarole. I'm sure you will.

Anthony Fantano. Drake. UMG lawsuit. Embarrassing. Forever.