Did Michigan football just pick a side with the Kendrick Lamar, Drake beef?
Over the past month, pop culture has been captivated by the beef between hip-hop artists Kendrick Lamar and Drake.
It started with a collaboration between J. Cole and Drake but Lamar blasted the duo on a track with Future and Metro Boomin shortly after. J. Cole apologized at a concert, but Drake went ahead and released a track ‘dissing’ Lamar called ‘Push Ups.’ He then released ‘Taylor Made Freestyle’ which had AI versions of Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg, but the Shakur estate made him take it down. Drake continued to goad Lamar into a response, which didn’t come until last Tuesday, when he released ‘Euphoria.’ On Friday morning, Lamar doubled up by releasing ‘6:16 from LA,’ but Drake released his rebuttal, ‘Family Matters,’ later that evening. Lamar wasted no time, releasing ‘Meet the Grahams’ just minutes later, usurping any hype that Drake intended to get with what was expected to be his kill shot.
Then, Lamar doubled up again, dropping ‘Not Like Us’ on Saturday evening. A West Coast-style club banger, Lamar’s ‘diss’ on Drake went straight to No. 1 on the charts.
And now Michigan football is tapping in.
On Wednesday evening, the official Michigan football X (formerly Twitter) account took advantage of the audio from ‘Not Like Us,’ which repeats the chorus, ‘They not like us,’ along with visuals of the Wolverines winning the 2023 national championship.
Drake had released another track after all of this, with Sunday night’s ‘The Heart part 6’ but it has failed to reach the same critical acclaim as Lamar’s sudden hit.
Michigan isn’t the first team to use ‘Not Like Us.’ Unsurprisingly, USC — the Big Ten school closest to Lamar’s native Compton, California — co-opted the track showing clips from practice mixed with the song.
If nothing else, the social media managers for Michigan football are paying attention to the pop culture moment and utilizing the moment for tremendous content.