Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl LIX halftime show performance led to 125 FCC Complaints. It also led to a couple of legal ones, too. Most notably from his arch-nemesis Drake.
Drake had already filed a lawsuit against Universal Music Group over Lamar’s track “Not Like Us,” claiming the song defames him by labeling him a “certified pedophile,” among other accusations.
But following Lamar’s decision to perform the diss track during the Super Bowl — a broadcast seen by over 100 million people — Drake expanded his lawsuit, arguing the performance amplified the damage to his reputation.
The Toronto-based rapper included the Grammys in his lawsuit, too.
“You really ’bout to do it?”
Kendrick sure did.
And Drake is arguing it’s bigger than the music.
He’s accusing Lamar and UMG of weaponizing two of the most-watched stages in music and sports to broadcast alleged defamation on a global scale. The updated complaint, filed Wednesday, adds new allegations against UMG, claiming the Super Bowl and Grammy broadcasts directly contributed to a spike in threats made against Drake and his family.
“These prestigious and high-exposure events introduced new listeners,” Drake’s lawyers wrote in the latest filing, according to CNN. “Not only did streams of the Recording increase significantly following these two mega-cultural events, but threats against Drake and his family did as well.”
Kendrick Lamar is notably not named as a defendant in the lawsuit. On the advice of his legal team, he reportedly deferred to lawyers and network censors to determine which parts of “Not Like Us” could be broadcast during the halftime show.
He didn’t rap the now-infamous “certified pedophile” line at the Super Bowl, but he didn’t exactly hold back, either.
Midway through the performance, Lamar delivered another incendiary lyric that also accuses Drake of inappropriate behavior toward young girls.
Say, Drake, I hear you like ’em young
You better not ever go to cell block one
To any— that talk to him and they in love
Just make sure you hide your lil’ sister from him
In Wednesday’s filing, Drake’s lawyers argued that Lamar deliberately skipped the song’s most infamous lyric because, as they put it, “nearly everyone understands that it is defamatory.” But they maintained that the damage was still done.
According to the lawsuit, the performance only intensified public perception, especially when “the image of Kendrick Lamar looking directly at the camera when he named Drake and stated that Drake ‘likes ’em young… became a viral meme.”
“It was the first, and will hopefully be the last, Super Bowl halftime show orchestrated to assassinate the character of another artist,” Drake’s legal team wrote.