Photo Credit: Genius
As the Kendrick Lamar and Drake rap beef escalated to meteoric heights over the weekend, the rap lyrics site Genius struggled to keep up. Fans rushed to the lyrics site to decipher the cryptic bars—crashing Genius in the process.
Kendrick Lamar’s drops over this weekend sent most hip-hop heads to Genius to figure out the showdown. Genius’ lyrics offer a community effort place where fans can annotate lyrics and suggest the meaning behind them. The “Euphoria” drop by Kendrick Lamar on April 30 was so highly anticipated that the lyrics site could not keep up with demand.
Genius’ annotation feature leads to huge participation from the community of music fans who document the lyrics and their interpretations. Users who are frequent contributors to the site have different privileges based on their contributions including the ability to approve or reject certain annotations provided by other users.
But this weekend the Genius charts that highlight the songs with the most attention on the site were dominated by all of the Kendrick Lamar and Drake rap beef tracks. The top 10 most-viewed songs this week continues to be dominated by Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” “Meet the Grahams,” and “Euphoria” diss tracks. According to The New York Times, “Euphoria” alone has garnered more than seven million views on the site since it dropped on April 30.
Of course, this isn’t the first time the community-sourced lyrics site has struggled to keep up with demand. Genius crashed in 2022 when Kendrick Lamar dropped his album Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers and again in April 2024 after Taylor Swift dropped her latest effort, The Tortured Poets Department. What’s rare about this instance is there’s no album drop attached to this interest—instead it’s driven purely by the public interest in this very viral rap beef.
Drake dropped “The Heart Part 6” as his response to Kendrick Lamar’s flurry of diss tracks—which has gone unanswered so far. But the internet’s general consensus is that Drake’s response to Kenrick’s drops in “The Heart Part 6” just doesn’t measure up—especially with some of the vitriol seemingly behind Lamar’s bars in “Meet the Grahams.”
