Whether you're Team Drake or Team Kendrick Lamar , Jermaine Dupri says there's no denying that the rappers' months-long feud has brought "life back to hip-hop." Dupri chatted with ET's Deidre Behar on the red carpet of the 2024 BET Awards, where the 51-year-old mega-producer weighed in on the public beef that's played out across multiple diss tracks, a moment in pop culture that Dupri said pushed back against the idea that hip-hop was "dying." "It just brought life back to hip-hop," he opined.
"People saying that hip-hop was dying and it was a dying genre at the time and I think it just brought a lot of light back into it, made people start talking about rap again." The public feud seemingly all began with Drake and J. Cole's October 2023 release of "First Person Shooter" -- in which Cole called him, Drake and Lamar the "Big 3" of rap -- and Lamar's response in "Like That" is what seemingly ignited the lyrical war against Drake.
Video At one point, even actress Uma Thurman got in on the action, offering support to the GRAMMY winner while he was facing off against several of his hip-hop peers. Most recently, Lamar, 37, threw a star-studded one-off concert , "The Pop Out -- Ken and Friends," to celebrate Juneteenth, during which he gave his first live performance of his viral Drake diss tracks, " Euphoria " and "Not Like Us." The Juneteenth concert, presented by pgLang and Free Lunch, featured a long lineup of iconic artists , mostly from Los Angeles and California, who perform.