Can Every Rap Feud Be Like This One?

Drake and Jay Z are taking this rap beef thing too far. Too far in the right direction, that is. I never thought I'd say that there should be a gold standard for rap beefs, but Drake and Jay Z are setting that bar. The latest song by DJ Khaled is called "They Don't Love You No More" and features a verse by Jay Z taking a possible shot at Drake in what is just the latest in a mini-feud that, quite honestly, is making them both look really good. When's the last time you remember reading about any feud that had both sides coming out smelling like roses even while they were making digs at each other? The answer is never.

To be fair, the existence of a true "beef" between Drake and Jay Z has been denied before. However, it was kind of hard to take that seriously when Drake was calling Jay Z's art references "corny" in Rolling Stone and when Jay Z was giving Drake a sarcastic apology on Jay Electronica's remix of "We Made It". Then Drake's team, the Toronto Raptors, went up against Jay Z's team, the Brooklyn Nets, in the NBA playoffs and Drake couldn't resist taking a hilarious shot at Jay Z over the sheer irony of it all.

The real irony of the feud is that it's got to be one of the friendliest rap feuds that history has ever seen. Take, for example, the feud that Nicki Minaj once had with Lil' Kim back when she was still a rising star in the mainstream hip hop game. The things those ladies had to say about each other in interviews — when Minaj had anything to say at all — got brutal and resulted in Black Friday, a Lil' Kim diss mixtape ripping on Minaj's Pink Friday album, and "Stupid Hoe", one of Minaj's more colorful, and incredibly unsubtle, works that had a chorus made up entirely of the repetitive phrase "You's a stupid hoe".

Go even further back and there was the infamous feud between Tupac and Notorious B.I.G that resulted in the murder of both rappers in the late '90s. Back then, the rap game thrived on how much tougher and badder you could make yourself sound than any other artist and it was common to see them wandering around with guns that they might actually have to use. Nowadays, rap music has evolved into bragging about how much more money you have than any other artist, with everything from possessions to paychecks to the women/men in your lives making up the reasons for why you're the best in the game and shouldn't be messed with.

The Jay Z and Drake feud is thriving on that lack of danger to fantastic effect. After all, if the worse insult you can throw at someone is that they talk about art too much and are "somewhere eating a fondue plate", then that's a clear indication that we finally live in a world where keeping on top of a rap beef doesn't necessarily go hand in hand with worrying about which one is going to get shot at first. Jay Z and Drake are also putting out songs even as they're taking swipes at each other and, unlike Minaj and Lil' Kim, the songs are actually good. Mainly because the lyrics don't solely focus on how annoyed they are with each other — at least, not yet. Can every rap feud from now on be like this one?

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