- Drake sued his own label, UMG Recordings, Inc, alleging defamation.
- He accused the label of approving and publishing Kendrick Lamar’s diss track, which the suit said included false and dangerous allegations.
- UMG said it is fighting the case to protect other artists for “having done nothing more than write a song.”
Drake filed a lawsuit against his own label, UMG Recordings, Inc., amid his ongoing beef with Kendrick Lamar.
The rapper, whose full name is Aubrey Drake Graham, accused Universal Music Group of approving and publishing Lamar’s diss track “Not Like Us,” which the complaint says includes allegations that UMG “understood were not only false, but dangerous.”
The song “falsely accuses Drake of being a pedophile and calls for violent retribution against him,” according to the lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on Wednesday.
“Even though UMG enriched itself and its shareholders by exploiting Drake’s music for years, and knew that the salacious allegations against Drake were false, UMG chose corporate greed over the safety and well-being of its artists,” Drake, through his attorneys, stated in the lawsuit.
Representatives for Drake and UMG did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.
UMG told The New York Times that it intends to fight the lawsuit to protect other artists for “having done nothing more than write a song.”
The complaint pointed to one incident in May in which someone opened fire outside his Toronto home, striking the front door and wounding a security guard, who the lawsuit described as “one of Drake’s friends.”
In the days following, the lawsuit said there were two attempted break-ins at his property, one of which involved an individual who dug under the property’s gate with his bare hands and “managed to yell racist slurs and threats against Drake before being escorted off the property.”
The complaint underscored that Lamar was not named as a defendant. It said UMG’s actions in publishing the track were the cause of the string of incidents.
The complaint further said that UMG did not help Drake when he confronted company executives about the situation.
The lawsuit is another escalation in the ongoing beef between two chart-topping rappers that started more than 10 years ago.
What began as an exchange of subtle shots and coded lyrics in their songs turned into an all-out musical brawl last year after Lamar once again declared himself the king of hip-hop in a collaborative track with rapper Future and producer Metro Boomin. In the song, he directly responded to Drake’s 2023 track, “First Person Shooter.”
Within a month, Drake and Lamar exchanged several searing diss tracks, at one point going beyond rap and taking shots at each others’ character and personal lives.
Music critics and listeners widely saw “Not Like Us” as the final, decisive blow in the rap beef as the song received widespread acclaim and remained on Billboard’s number one spot on the Hot Rap Songs chart for 21 weeks, breaking a record that was set by Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.”
The Compton-born rapper took a victory lap in June when he hosted a one-night concert in Inglewood, California, where he performed “Not Like Us” six times in a row.
The rivalry escalated in November when Drake involved the courts by filing a legal petition — which comes before a lawsuit — that accused UMG and Spotify of devising a scheme in order to make “Not Like Us” a viral hit at the expense of the Toronto rapper.
UMG previously denied the claims and called Drake’s filing “contrived” and “absurd.”
In a second legal petition from November, Drake attorneys’ hinted at defamation claims against Universal and said that the label should have prevented the release of Lamar’s “Not Like Us” due to the statements in the song.
