If You’re A West Coast Rapper Who Has Not Battled Joey Bada$$ Yet, Stay In Line

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There’s a war going on outside no B-list (or lower) rapper is safe from. Almost a year to the day from the May weekend that saw Kendrick Lamar and Drake send approximately five songs at each other, resulting in one of the most commercially successful diss tracks in the history of the sport and one of its most decisive losses (sorry, owl-in-bio readers), we are once again witnessing a spring surge of rappers from opposing coasts having words with each other. Is it in any way close to the mass cultural event that Kenny versus Drizzy was? Obviously not—the sad truth is we may never see a conflict of that magnitude again. But what initially felt like a somewhat forced attempt to stir up contact-sport raps for the love of the game has morphed into something mildly entertaining, even if the stakes are lower and the lights aren’t as bright. But isn’t the love of the game enough?

A brief recap, for the uninitiated: Brooklyn rapper Joey Bada$$ set the tone for his 2025 with a New Year’s Day music video announcing “The Ruler’s Back”; despite being a Blog Era darling for some time, Joey’s recent pop-cultural output has been on the small screen, as he built off of his solid recurring guest spot on Mr. Robot with lead roles in Hulu’s Wu-Tang: An American Saga and the hit Power spin-off Raising Kanan. “The Ruler’s Back” is a laid-back statement track, emphasizing his renewed focus on music and underscoring his seriousness with a couple of loaded lines about “too much West Coast dick lickin’.” That Jay-Z quote and some other choice lines implied Joey was calling Kendrick to the podium, throwing stones at the highest rapper on the mountain for attention and definitively punching well above his weight class in the process.

But in the months that followed, a funny thing happened. Kendrick is probably never going to respond to Joey, nor does he need to—he gains nothing from defeating Joey Bada$$, and Joey’s initial lines were more in the spirit of a “Control”-esque, I’m-on-your-head-to-be-the-best than real disrespect. But in that same spirit of sport, a bevy of LA rappers loosely associated with him did respond—most notably TDE signee Ray Vaughn, Reason, GNX scene-stealer AZ Chike, and the battle rapper Daylyt—and so far Joey has more than handled his own. In fact, in my humble opinion Joey’s actually up, firing off increasingly direct tracks over very solid beat selection at an increasingly breakneck pace.