For a weekend in May, rap artists Drake and Kendrick Lamar ignited a fierce battle that engulfed popular culture. Lamar struck first. On Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That,” Lamar set the stage for a relentless exchange of songs and disses between Drake, Kendrick Lamar, J-Cole, and Rick Ross. Drake responded with “Push Ups” and the controversial “Taylor Made Freestyle,” where the rapper utilized verses from AI renditions of Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg. Nearly two weeks later, Lamar responded to Drake with “Euphoria” and “6:16 in LA.” From there, the two rappers exchanged disses—Lamar dropped “Meet the Grahams” minutes after Drake’s response to “Euphoria” and “6:16 in LA,” “Family Matters.” Lamar punctuated the beef with the scathing and catchy viral track “Not Like Us.”

The battle became a rare moment of monocultural spectacle. Suddenly, everyone seemed to weigh in on television, podcasts, and social media, whether through commenting, appropriating, explaining, or chastising. Pop singer Dua Lipa appeared on the May 4 episode of Saturday Night Live, just hours after Drake and Lamar exchanged disses, to explain the beef. Ubiquitous sports journalist Stephen A. Smith took to his podcast to register his disapproval of the two artists taking the conflict too far and urged them to cease the battle. The Biden-Harris social media team even used Lamar’s lyrics from “Euphoria” to mock former President Donald Trump.

The Drake–Kendrick battle also became a stage for analyzing the politics of hip-hop beefs and litigating their cultural work in our contemporary moment. As the dust settled following Drake’s concession track, “The Heart Part 6” (referencing Lamar’s “The Heart” series), some Black music writers like David A. Dennis Jr. rightfully criticized the artists for using Black women as props, weapons, and shields. Andre Gee expressed concerns about listeners echoing Lamar’s accusations of pedophilia to mock Drake on “Not Like Us.” Sensitive to the timing of when the beef erupted, Jeff Ihaza expressed his frustration about the battle overshadowing Israel’s war on Palestinians in Gaza and mass arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters at colleges and universities. Other rappers also chimed in with more-pointed critiques about the beef’s implications for the music industry and authenticity of hip-hop as a genre. Vince Staples, for example, panned the rappers for not using their platforms to help more artists earn more from streaming services like Spotify. More melodramatically, the Roots drummer and music historian Questlove claimed the beef’s lack of “skill” and trading of low blows suggested that hip-hop was “truly dead.”

Yet, amid the flood of discourse about the meaning of Drake and Lamar’s beef, precious few commentators have interrogated the rap beef as a form of capitalist accumulation, one that enriches artists—and, most of all, the corporate suits that run their record labels—even as it drags their reputations through the mud. Artists engage in cutthroat competition, in other words, not only to garner support from fans or square up over long-festering rivalries, but also to increase market share.

Rap battles were not always so tethered to the free-market economy. Battling of all forms has been part of hip-hop culture since the 1970s, and the roots of the rap battle lay in “the dozens,” a verbal game where competitors trade creative jokes and insults about one another. In the contest, most topics are fair game—one’s skin color (i.e., “You’re so Black …”), clothes, character traits, and family members. Yet, the rules of engagement in “the dozens” often depended upon the participants’ familiarity with each other and, just as importantly, what the audience were willing to tolerate as acceptable. But the art of sparring with a fellow rapper, while a form of self-promotion and means of generating hype as an artist, was not necessarily an engine for capitalist growth. In the early days of rap, lyricists conducted battles outside of the purview of the entertainment industry and the mass music market.

As rap music grew in popularity and became seen as more of a commodity, the stakes in rap battles rose. By the 1980s, rap battles provided an on-ramp for new artists to enter the industry and for producers to sell more albums. The “Roxanne Wars” represented the first notable—and profitable—rap “battle on wax” in the 1980s. In 1984, the hip-hop group UTFO scored a hit with their song “Roxanne, Roxanne,” which was a catcall song about a fictional woman named Roxanne who refused the rappers’ advances. After UTFO pulled out of a performance organized by rap producer Marley Marl, radio DJ Mr. Magic, and his manager, Tyrone Williams, Marley Marl invited Lolita Shanté Gooden, who was 14 years old at the time, to record an answer record to “Roxanne, Roxanne.” “Roxanne’s Revenge” picked up where UTFO’s song left off and responded to the men with ridicule.

Roxanne Shanté’s UTFO diss initiated what observers called the “Roxanne Wars,” as more artists joined in the battle. Sparky D heard Shanté’s response and recorded “Sparky’s Turn (Roxanne You’re Through).” Shanté dissed Sparky D on “Queen of Rox.” The two songs inspired a battle LP, Round 1, featuring disses from the two women. UTFO also recruited Elease Jack to perform as The Real Roxanne. However, UTFO replaced Jack with Adelaida Martinez who then recorded under the moniker.

While the Roxanne Wars popularized the “answer record” in hip-hop—artists responding to others’ songs—the initial battle also illustrated how rap beef, or battles, boosted the hip-hop economy. If we thought Lamar and Drake produced too many records in their battle, the Roxanne Wars generated at least 30 songs with titles like “Roxanne’s Doctor—The Real Man,” “The Parents of Roxanne,” and “Roxy (Roxanne’s Sister)” by artists like Dr. Freshh, Gigolo Tony and Lacey Lace, and DW and the Party Crew (some have said nearly 100 response records were released) over the next few years. This sprawling rap battle was a boon for Select Records, which produced UTFO’s “Roxanne, Roxanne,” and Pop Art Records, which released Shanté’s “Roxanne’s Revenge.” Both songs were hits and sold hundreds of thousands of copies when the rap music industry was still in its infancy. Most rap record companies were small and major labels like Sony and Warner Music Group had not started investing capital in the burgeoning genre. These records allowed Select Records and Pop Art Records to expand their rap talent and business operations and to demonstrate the growing genre’s profitability.

Of the artists who contributed replies to “Roxanne, Roxanne,” the wars produced three notable women artists—Sparky D, The Real Roxanne, and Shanté. Yet, the men around the women artists seemed to benefit the most. According to music journalist and historian Dan Charnas, DJ Marley Marl, Mr. Magic, and Williams capitalized on their roles in the beef to enter the music industry. The Roxanne Wars illustrated rappers’ ability to react opportunistically to establish themselves in the burgeoning rap industry. It demonstrated the contradictions/fallaciousness of rap authenticity as this opportunism produced multiple “Roxannes,” leading one to ask whether it mattered who was the “real” Roxanne.

Market considerations also played into one of the most high-profile rap beefs of all time. Even nonlisteners tend to be familiar with the 1990s rap battle waged by Tupac Shakur and Christopher “The Notorious BIG” Wallace. Their high-profile rivalry positioned entire record labels, Death Row Records and Bad Boy Records respectively, against one another, and their ever-escalating beef mobilized fans to proclaim fierce loyalties with East Coast (Biggie) or West Coast (Shakur) hip-hop scenes.

That Shakur and Wallace were both tragically murdered as a result of the beef typically serves as cautionary about how rap battles can spiral out of control. But such discussions tend to downplay how Shakur especially saw the battle not just through reputational terms but through the lens of power and money. For Shakur and Death Row Records founder Suge Knight, the beef wasn’t about who could come up with the cleverest disses; it was about who would corner the rap market and reap the most gains at a time when record labels began to profit more from gangsta rap.

The beef allegedly began the night of November 30, 1994, when burglars ambushed, shot, and robbed Shakur at Quad Studios while The Notorious BIG and members of his crew, Junior Mafia, recorded inside. Soon after, Shakur implicated Bad Boy CEO Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs and The Notorious BIG, claiming that if Biggie were as potent a figure in NYC streets as he claimed, he would have warned Shakur of the ambush.

These tensions spilled out into the open in 1995 as Shakur was serving a prison sentence for his role in a sexual assault. At The Source Awards show in New York City, Knight mocked Combs and suggested that aspiring rappers sign with Death Row if they didn’t “want their producer all up in their videos.” Other Death Row artists joined in their attacks on the East Coast. Tha Dogg Pound, a hip-hop duo made up of West Coast rappers Kurupt and Daz Dillinger, ridiculed New York City on “New York, New York”; the music video featured a giant Snoop Dogg kicking down city buildings like Godzilla.

Amid this swirl of insults and accusations, Biggie released the menacing “Who Shot Ya” as a B-side to “Big Poppa” in February 1995, where the rapper famously opened with the question “Who shot ya?” and then followed by providing vivid descriptions of acts of violence aimed at fictional rap adversaries. Lyrics like “It’s on … fuck all that bickering beef” generated much inquiry from those who wondered where he stood concerning Shakur. Biggie denied that the song was about the Quad Studio robbery and shooting, but Shakur took it as mockery of the entire affair, if not as admission to his complicity.

A year later, Shakur dropped “Hit ’Em Up.” According to Shakur biographer Staci Robinson, “Even though Tupac saw this as a response to Biggie’s song, he took it to the absolute extreme.” Shakur demonstrated his willingness to conjure all of rap’s demons—sexism, fatphobia, homophobia, and violence—to humiliate Wallace, his group Junior MAFIA, Combs, Bad Boy Records, and other East Coast rappers. Before the song even began, Shakur lobbed an insult at the rapper and his wife, singer Faith Evans, calling her a “b****” and claiming that he slept with her. Over a track resembling Junior MAFIA’s “Get Money,” Shakur accused Biggie of stealing his style while he and members of his crew, the Outlawz, issued death threats to Biggie, Junior MAFIA members Lil’ Kim and Lil’ Cease, and Bad Boy Records. Shakur then interpolated Biggie’s chorus on “Get Money”: “Grab your Glocks when you see 2Pac / Call the cops when you see 2Pac / Who shot me? But you punks didn’t finish / Now you ’bout to feel the wrath of a menace.” Finally, he called out Queensbridge group Mobb Deep, cruelly pointing out that Prodigy lived with sickle cell anemia. He proceeded to cuss out a litany of East Coast rappers and affiliates, including not only Notorious BIG, but Puff Daddy, Junior Mafia, Chino XL (a West Coast rapper), and “Bad Boy as a staff, record label, and as a motherfuckin’ crew.” As Tupac’s cousin Katari Cox explains, “What Pac did with that record is that he made it very personal. It changed the way beef songs were done. … ‘Hit ’Em Up’ turned the hip-hop community upside down to where the beef shit is not so trivial. … It became serious.”

At this point in time, hip-hop fans had not heard one rapper diss so many people by name. But Shakur and Knight also understood that sparking controversy and launching vitriol sold more records. To be sure, Shakur’s explanations for the beef ranged from personal animosity to the drive for political power. But there was also a clear economic angle to his approach. In conversation with writer Rob Marriott, a writer then collecting interviews for Shakur’s autobiography, Shakur referred to the two leading rap labels, Bad Boy and Death Row Records, as “regimes.” Shakur admitted that Biggie and Bad Boy had the upper hand while he was incarcerated. However, while Bad Boy Records sought to corner the New York rap market, Bad Boy’s Sean Combs only seemed concerned with profit for profit’s sake. Instead, Shakur argued that Death Row Records would try to expand to New York and New Jersey, and the rapper envisioned Death Row’s geographical expansion could facilitate the financing of community-based projects for Black folks. Therefore, more Black Americans would support him and Death Row Records because they would see a return in the form of these programs. Referencing the 1996 election, Shakur told Marriott,

That’s why they rushed the polls. They wanted a new regime, and my regime includes the East Coast [and] the West Coast. It brings money. It’s economics. … I’m bringing money to New York by signing groups [to] Death Row East. … I’m bringing the bridge through this motherfucker. I want to start an athletic team where all the rappers sponsor a team. You know what I mean? I’m bringing the community … giving back to the community. We got Mother’s Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas so far. … Clothing, feeding … that’s the welfare right there.

Here, Shakur explained that the competition between the Bad Boy Records “regime” and Death Row, as well as the latter’s expansion via Death Row East, would generate revenue, not just for the label but also for those signed in its expansion. From there, Shakur suggests that Death Row would “giv[e] back” proceeds “to the community.” What is notable about Shakur’s explanation is that beef, or this capitalist competition between Death Row and Bad Boy Records, would form the material basis for community projects. Shakur recognized how he and Death Row were economic engines—they could sign groups, to paraphrase him, or hire Black urban working-class people to become rappers, producers, A&R staff, record label employees, security, et cetera. Shakur’s explanation reflected traditional theories of Black entrepreneurship within US capitalism that were especially popular at the time. If Black folks supported Black-owned and -run institutions, the thinking went, they might pool financial resources and use them to create community initiatives and provide jobs for Black folks.

Of course, though, Shakur’s reasoning is outlandishly utopian. There was no more evidence that such a plan was afoot other than his suggestion of this in his interview with Marriott. Also, how much money could Death Row make to employ enough Black urban youth to make an impact in New York City communities? At that point in time, rap had not grown into the multibillion-dollar industry that it is today. While scholars like Robin Kelley, Dan Charnas, and Felicia Angeja Viator have shown how hip-hop culture provided economic uplift for some in the urban Black working class, it is hard to imagine any record label representing a mass employer on such a scale.

Rappers perform for their fan bases or to bolster their reputations. But they also do it to make money, and beef has been profitable.

Shakur’s death from gunshot wounds on September 13, 1996, short-circuited the artists’ ambitions. Death Row East never really got off the ground, and Biggie’s murder that following March forced the rap industry to take stock as the genre lost two of its most popular and promising artists. Journalists and artists decided that beef engagement rules needed to be redrawn, at least drawing the line at acts of physical harm. The Death Row–Bad Boy beef cost lives—Shakur’s and Biggie’s, but also those lost in a rash of gang violence sparked by Shakur’s death. Suge Knight was incarcerated for violating his probation on the night of Shakur’s killing. Death Row fell apart after Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg left the label.

As Shakur himself had begun to articulate, however, the Death Row and Bad Boy rivalry demonstrated the profitability of rap beef. It sold records and magazines, so much so that some rappers like KRS-One accused music media outlets, like The Source and Vibe, of escalating tensions. While Shakur’s animosity seemed too personal and combustible to entirely blame magazines for the beef’s escalation, it is not unreasonable to suggest that magazines profited from their coverage. According to Charnas, The Source overtook Rolling Stone as the leading magazine in the US amid the rivalry, while Vibe’s circulation increased to 450,000 copies in 1997.

More consequentially, record labels profited. The Notorious BIG’s long-awaited follow-up to Ready to Die, Life After Death, would’ve sold well if the rapper had survived. Still, the latter sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the wake of Wallace’s murder two weeks prior. As a result, rap beef created another valuable cottage industry within rap—the posthumous album. Bad Boy Records released two posthumous albums containing unreleased verses and remixed songs—Born Again and Duets: The Final Chapter. Both albums sold more than 1.5 million records. According to Cheyenne Roundtree and Nancy Dillon, Biggie’s death also propelled Sean Combs’s career as a solo artist: “At least 2 million [of the nearly 5 million copies of No Way Out] were sold due [to Biggie’s death], straight up. And that doesn’t necessarily feel good, but that’s the reality.” And, it is difficult to separate the growth of Bad Boy Records and Combs’s elevation to music and media mogul status in the 21st century without the deadly 1990s rivalry (that is, until singer Cassie and others accused the executive of sexual assault and other heinous acts).

Shakur similarly represented a boon for Interscope Records in the years after his death. Powered by “Changes,” Shakur’s optimistic track sampling Bruce Hornsby and the Range’s “The Way It Is,” Shakur’s Greatest Hits (released on Shakur’s Amaru imprint, which Death Row and Interscope Records owned) sold more than 9 million records in a year. Shakur’s estate and Interscope issued several posthumous releases throughout the 2000s.

The Death Row–Bad Boy rivalry demonstrated the financial power of rap beef for artists and record labels. And while some rap artists used battles and beefs as promotional tools, the Shakur-Biggie beef was a reminder that it was still the larger record labels and their CEOs—who, at the time, were mostly white—who garnered the most profits from rap feuds. Bert Padell, an accountant who worked for artists like Run-DMC, told the New York Times in 2002, “Companies make out well. … Managers make out well. Artists don’t make out well.” The case of Shakur and Biggie set up a morbid outcome where Interscope (Music Corporation of America bought a 50 percent stake in 1996) and the Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG) extracted profits from dead Black men (and the same case can be made about the companies who continue to release posthumous albums from other dead rappers).

It is important to remember that the Death Row–Bad Boy rivalry transpired at a time when the music industry had entered a slowdown in the mid-1990s. As stated in a 1996 New York Times, music sales generally slowed to 2 percent. CD sales plateaued across many genres in the mid-to-late 1990s. Jazz and classical listeners stopped replacing vinyl with CDs. Fans of popular genres like alternative rock bought less due to market oversaturation and high prices. Yet, rap represented one of the few areas of growth in music, as it grew to a $1.6 billion industry by 2000. It is hard to imagine that the East-West Coast beef was not a factor as record companies like Interscope Records, which housed Death Row, and BMG, a German-based media company, distributed Bad Boy Records and continued raking in sales from those involved—Shakur, Biggie, Puff Daddy, and others who were associated with those labels. As former Death Row Records executive Alex Roberts later reflected, “The East Coast/West Coast thing was great for business. There was a beef, but we leveraged it to sell records more than anything else. It sold one hell of a lot of records. I’d tell people to look at the positives, just don’t push it too far.”

Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s beef contains the same profit incentives of beefs past. But their feud stands out because of the way they used social media and the streaming economies to maximum effect. Now, rather than the traditional music industry, the streaming economy governs rap beef. In theory, streaming appears to provide today’s rappers with more control over their art and the profits they receive. They dropped songs when, where, and how they wanted to, which would have been unheard of in the 1980s, 1990s, or even the early aughts. This new economy and the intensified scrutiny accompanying rap’s takeover of popular culture in the 21st century have expanded rappers’ reach, allowing more people to peer into rap’s most grimy crevices but also to generate value for rappers who gain from their streams. Lamar earned $275,000 from “Not Like Us,” with nearly 59 million streams in less than a week. The Compton rapper saw almost $725,000 from his three diss tracks, while Drake earned a little over $200,000 . That same week, Billboard reported that Lamar’s back-catalogue streams increased by 49 percent while Drake’s decreased by 5 percent, reinforcing the notion that rap beef often reflects an economic zero-sum game. These earnings, as well as the attention rap beef among leading artists can create, illustrate why some artists like 50 Cent have used rap beef as a promotional tactic.

But the apparent freedom that the streaming economy appears to afford artists is more farce than fact. Though beefs undoubtedly offer pots of gold for the most prominent rap artists, they also line the pockets of record companies, tech companies operating in social media and music, podcast hosts lucky enough to monetize their labor, and many more entertainment-industry bosses. Moreover, record labels, especially the big three—Warner Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Universal Music Group—and the tech companies that run streaming platforms, like Spotify, continue to earn the most profits from the streaming economy. Labels use their artists’ catalogues as leverage to dictate to the streaming companies how much artists earn—a dynamic that ultimately undercuts all artists’ profits, though the already famous do not feel the effects as acutely as those who are up-and-coming.

That rap beefs amount to such a cash cow for those at the top makes their use of sexist, homophobic, and personal digs all the more discomfiting. Rappers are not just slinging mud and making fun of each other; they are slinging the reputations of women and family members, digging up life-changing and potentially humiliating information about one another, and making up troubling accusations. Rappers perform for their fan bases or to bolster their reputations. But they also do it to make money, and beef has been profitable. The question is: What happens when the beef goes bad?