Is Kendrick Lamar Taking Shots at Drake on Dr. Dre’s Album?

Last night (August 6), after 16 long years of delays and false starts, rumors and speculation, Dr. Dre finally dropped a new album. Compton: A Soundtrack has all the hallmarks of an LP from the good doctor, including attempts to create new stars through sheer force of will. But lost for a second in the fanfare and in the parsing of King Mez and Anderson .Paak are some intriguing bars from one of the more established contributors. Fans have long been combing Kendrick Lamar and Drake's respective songs for subliminal shots at one another, and two of the younger Compton MC's turns on the album have some of his most obvious barbs yet.

First, from "Darkside/Gone": "But still I got enemies giving me energy, I wanna fight now/Subliminally sent to me all of this hate." Of course, this would be in reference to "Energy," a cut from Drake's If You're Reading This It's Too Late that recently got the video treatment. ("Darkside/Gone" is also the first of two songs on Compton where Dre shouts out the late Eazy-E, with whom he once had a beef that was anything but subliminal.) Later, on "Deep Water": "They liable to bury him, they nominated six to carry him/They worrying him to death, but he's no vegetarian/The beef is on his breath, inheriting the drama better than/A great white, nigga, this is life in my aquarium." Kendrick also starts the verse with "Motherfuckers know I started from the bottom."

Back in 2011, Drake tapped Lamar to appear on Take Care, where he had the "Buried Alive" interlude to himself. In turn, the Canadian child star popped up on the Janet Jackson-sampling "Poetic Justice" from the following year's good kid, m.A.A.d. city. The two have also rapped alongside one another on A$AP Rocky's "Fuckin' Problems." Fans first started pointing to friction in 2013, when Drake dismissed Kendrick's "Control" verse as a "fleeting Twitter frenzy" and Lamar responded by calling Aubrey a "sensitive rapper" in his BET Awards Cypher. Some took lines from Nothing Was the Same's "The Language" as yet another diss.