Kendrick Lamar, the widely acknowledged champion of this year’s most brutal rap feud, will be taking an onstage victory lap this month in the form of a just-announced live Juneteenth performance in Inglewood.
On June 19, Lamar will headline “The Pop Out — Ken & Friends” at the Forum in a show produced with his label/creative agency pgLang and Free Lunch. While the full lineup has yet to be announced, this will be Lamar’s first live set in Southern California since he and Drake scorched the earth with reams of diss-tracks that topped charts and changed their legacies forever.
The beef with Drake started with Lamar’s shot-firing appearance on Future and Metro Boomin’s song “Like That,” which kicked off a generational war between two of hip-hop’s most successful and acclaimed artists.
Lamar arguably came out ahead with cuts including “Euphoria,” “Not Like Us” and “Meet the Grahams,” which displayed a whole new tier of viciousness from the Pulitzer winner, including unsubstantiated accusations of pedophilia against Drake. Drake parried with songs including “Family Matters,” “Push Ups” and “Taylor Made Freestyle,” deploying the AI-ghost of Tupac Shakur, but after accusing Lamar of domestic abuse (also without evidence), he ultimately threw in the towel on “The Heart Part 6.”
Amid the heated rivalry, several trespassers harassed folks at Drake’s Toronto home, including one incident in which a security guard was shot.
“How, then, do Lamar and Drake — the latter of whose home in Toronto was the site of a shooting in which a security guard was injured, according to police — move on from this?” The Times’ Mikael Wood asked. “Do they make new work within the parameters of what we’ve learned about them? Or do they treat the beef as a kind of off-the-record exhibition game, as Lamar says in ‘Meet the Grahams’ he initially intended?”
The gig appears to take its name from a line in “Not Like Us”: “Sometimes you gotta pop out and show … / Certified boogeyman, I’m the one that up the score with ‘em.” One possible guest — SoCal’s own DJ Mustard, who produced “Not Like Us” — just announced a new album of his own, “Faith of a Mustard Seed,” due out this summer.
Tickets for the show are in presales sale now with the general sale starting Friday.
