Not Like Us – Are you Smarter than ‘Cancel Culture’?

Photo Courtesy: Jon Elbaz via Flickr

‘Cancel culture’ is a self-fulfilling phenomenon. It breeds an unstable ‘mob mentality’ in which there is no beneficiary – everyone is at risk of being permanently ‘cancelled’ and this very fact is what ‘cancel culture’ thrives upon. It prompts us to over-simplify real-world scenarios, forcing us to hold stake in a battle which we have no real, factual knowledge on. It pigeon-holes us into believing that one party is wholly true and one party is wholly false when this may not actually be the case. 

In the music scene, ‘cancellable’ accusations might be made in the form of a ‘diss-track’ – in which the already unstable nature of a celebrity testimony can be made more unstable through the format of music. An example might be Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Not Like Us’. His recent successes, an impressive 5-Grammy sweep, and a killer Super Bowl Halftime performance have had ricochet effects on the entire music community – all spurred by an award-winning ‘diss’.

Gone are the days of sweeping insults, such as Kendrick’s first hit at Drake in 2013 on his track ‘Control’ in which he took broad aim at ‘[…] Jermaine Cole, Big KRIT, Wale,/ Pusha T, Meek Millz, A$AP Rocky, Drake,/ Big Sean, Jay Electron, Tyler, Mac Miller’, stating ‘I got love for you all but I’m tryna murder you n–––s’.  We are now facing days of more direct accusations, with the overarching premise of ‘Not Like Us’ serving as a serious exposé of illegalities – directly pointing a finger at a ‘certified pedophile’ Drake. The question thus arises – is it the place of music to make real, criminal allegations? Similarly then, is it the place of the listener to play judge and jury? 

For all the listener knows, back-and-forth accusations of secretly fathering illegitimate children and domestically abusing spouses could all very well be true – although the fundamental issue with the ‘diss-track’ format is that nothing stated by either party has to be verified. We become so engrossed in celebrity media that we take it upon ourselves to assign a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ label to each party, wholly based on information which has absolutely no responsibility to be truthful to us. 

By giving such a large platform to such a criminal allegation, such as the Super Bowl stage as a platform for Kendrick’s ‘Not Like Us’ performance, 100s of millions of music listeners might confuse the better diss track, as evidence of good character – making the worse artist, by default, the guilty party. 

Post Super Bowl discourse has seen fans of Kendrick make comments (via TikTok) such as ‘“Kindness is free!” “Well being a hater pays” and “proof that violence is the answer”. Furthermore, if the allegations surrounding Drake are proven true in an official setting, has Kendrick’s ‘diss’ diluted them to the extent that an allegation means as much as a verdict?

Overarchingly, liking a rapper does not mean that everything they say is true. Similarly, disliking a rapper does not mean that everything they say is a lie. Neither of these events are mutually exclusive. We’ve established that Drake is ‘Not Like Us’, but how much ‘like us’ are the rest?