Borkowski Media Trends: Drake vs Kendrick | Kneecap vs Kemi
A Drake’s Progress
Drake took a major ego blow last Friday when Kendrick Lamar dropped a surprise album, flaring up Summer's 'beef' between the two, revealing deep scars from the saga, demonstrating how not to manage your reputation when you've taken a public bruising.
For those in need of a refresher, Drake and Kendrick went toe-to-toe in a series of tracks, which peaked when Kendrick released the Grammy-nominated megahit, "Not Like Us", which became one of the biggest songs of 2024 accusing Drake of being a sexual predator. It was effectively checkmate, and Drake, by his standards, let this chapter fizzle out, with Kenny coming out on top.
The resulting silence suited both artists: Kendrick letting his art do the talking and Drake choosing not to draw further attention to the embarrassing episode and seemingly doing his best to move on and work on the next project.
Unfortunately for Drake, this recent action has undone any reputation management efforts in which he was actively or passively partaking, when his team filed a lawsuit alleging UMG and Spotify artificially pumped Not Like Us streams to engineer its virality.
It is quite an extraordinary blunder: timing the lawsuit during the new album's peak, hypocritically suing UMG - who release Drake's records (via Republic Records) - and ultimately acting desperate and petty. Simply put, if Kendrick has benefitted from 'the industry' using bots to boost streaming figures, Drake has too. Own goals don't get as embarrassing as this.
Drake's team of Yes Men clearly couldn't talk him out of this one, and now restoring his credibility has become a seismic task. Given his stature, this won't affect his sales - on the surface, there won't be any significant change; however, his reputation will never fully recover. Ironically, if Drake claims some kind of victory via his claim, he simultaneously implicates himself as also benefiting from being widely known as UMG's poster-boy. This cautionary tale is a 'how not to' manage your reputation and an excellent case for avoiding knee-jerk reactions.
Feather in the [Knee]cap
Irish language rappers Kneecap made headlines on Friday after winning a discrimination case against the UK government after now-leader of the opposition Kemi Badenoch blocked the award of an arts grant.
Kneecap’s response to the legal victory was unrelenting, uncompromising and unrepentant.
In an age where the relentless focus of communications is ‘authenticity’ – usually confined to stage-managed, drip-fed glimpses of humanity—it’s a rare case study of how it’s still possible to thrive as conviction-driven activists.
In what still feels like a triumph of creative X-Factor and populist instinct over intricate premeditated strategy, Kneecap have managed to advocate for the Irish language (and for a united Ireland) in a way that their popularity suggests is provocative without being too alienating, and controversial without getting them cancelled.
There are subtleties to this but sometimes it’s as simple as the fact that despite their political leanings they lampoon republicans as much as unionists, and, in the same spirit, are donating their award money to Belfast youth centres “on both sides of the community”. It’s simple but it also underlines their principles without resorting to gimmickry and in a way that gives their critics little wiggle room.