Drake Sues UMG Recordings Over ‘Not Like Us’

The beef with Kendrick Lamar aside,Drake has upped his game by going head on with his very own record label, Universal Music Group.

According to recent legal fillings, Drake claims the label fully knew the implications of the diss track ‘Not Like Us’ and still went forward with publishing it.

The first exchange of nuanced jabs and cryptic lyrics between Drake and Kendrick escalated into a full-fledged musical confrontation last year.

It started after  Lamar reiterated his claim as the king of hip-hop on a joint tune with rapper Future and producer Metro Boomin.

In the song, he specifically replied to Drake’s 2023 tune, “First Person Shooter.”

The song “erroneously accuses Drake of being a pedophile and calls for a violent response against him,” according to the Wednesday complaint in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Kendrick called Drake by name, saying “Drake, I hear you like ’em young” and calling him and others “certified pedophiles.”

Drake reciprocated by releasing a track called “Family Matters X,” a song that called Kendrick an abuser and and a cheater.

Last year, “Not Like Us” topped the Hot 100 for two weeks. It was nominated for five Grammys on Feb. 2, including record and song of the year.

Did UMG Think This Through?

“Even though UMG enriched itself and its shareholders by exploiting Drake’s music for years, and knew that the salacious allegations against Drake were false, UMG chose corporate greed over the safety and well-being of its artists,” Drake, via his lawyers, alleged in the complaint.

UMG has stated that it is also ready to fight the lawsuit as it seeks to protect other musicians for “having done nothing more than write a song.”

The complaint referenced an incident in May when  someone discharged a firearm outside his Toronto residence, hitting the front door and injuring a security guard identified in the lawsuit as “one of Drake’s friends.”

It further claimed two attempted break-ins at his home, including one by a guy who dug beneath the fence with his bare hands and “managed to yell racist slurs and threats against Drake before being taken off the property.”

Critics and audiences universally saw “Not Like Us” as the conclusive strike in the rap feud, since the track garnered extensive praise and maintained the number one position on Billboard’s Hot Rap Songs chart for 21 weeks,  a record previously held by Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” released in December 2018.