This new chapter arises from a lawsuit lodged earlier this year over Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl performance of his song “Not Like Us.” The hit, a lightning rod for what’s evolving into a legal tempest, aired to a staggering 133 million viewers during the 2025 Super Bowl Halftime Show.
The performance wasn’t just another music moment, but, in the words of a 107-page amended complaint filed by Drake’s team with a New York court, “orchestrated to assassinate Drake’s character.” And one lyric that was seemingly directed at Drake featured the word “pedophile.” Although that word was bleeped out in the NFL broadcast, Drake’s legal team claims that the league did so, proving that the league and UMG were aware of its defamation.
UMG didn’t remain silent long. In a vituperative response, the label defended Kendrick Lamar’s stated creativity and redirected the attention to Drake’s legal team, implying that they were sending him on a perilous course.
“Drake, who is undoubtedly one of the most successful artists in the world with whom we’ve had a great 16-year run, is being misled by his lawyers to make one outlandishly irrational legal move after another,” UMG said. The assertion didn’t end there but warned that if Drake presses on down this legal path, the label will show that the claims “are without merit.”
But Drake’s team flipped the script in an exceedingly sharp and pointed response, calling out UMG’s leadership by name. “It’s not Drake who should be concerned,” the group pointedly addressing Lucian Grainge, UMG’s chief executive, and other top executives. “Is it the decision-makers who air an incendiary rant on the biggest stage in America and then pretend it’s no worse than some ‘creative expression’ they can’t control, who should be worried?”
While the courts will ultimately decide the merits of these legal claims, the drama has played out like a hip-hop opera for the modern age with massive implications for artistic boundaries, defamation, and what can or can’t be said on a world stage.
With Super Bowl stages, Grammy slots, and multi-billion-dollar enterprises suddenly involved, it’s a matter of who controls the narrative and who has the final say.
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