And Baka got a weird case, why is he around? Certified lover boy, certified pedophiles. Wap, wap, wap, wap, wap. Dad, fuck him up. Wap, wap, wap, wap, wap. I'ma do my stuff. Why you trolling like a bitch? Ain't you tired? Trying to strike a chord and it's probably A minor. They not like us They not like us. They not like us. This is the Culture Study Podcast and I'm Anne Helen Peterson. And I'm Joel Anderson. I am a co-host of the Press Box Podcast at The Ringer and a staff writer for...
The Ringer. I said The Ringer already. So there we go. I am so happy to have a pro here today. Just a podcast pro. Someone whose work I've admired for so long. And also someone who knows a lot about celebrities. feuds for various reasons that we'll get into over the course of this podcast. But the first thing that we're going to talk about, this is our peg for this podcast.
is a little bit about a feud that's going to be very front and center in the next week. So let's get to our first listener question because it will set up this whole episode. It's from Robin. My question is about the Drake-Kendrick Lamar celebrity feud. I would love to know more about how celebrities profit from their feuds, making albums, even winning awards. This happened with Kanye and Taylor Swift as well.
I would also love to know more about how the public and broader culture navigate when there are very serious accusations that come out of things that start as feuds, like Okay. So we opened the show with a little bit of Kendrick Lamar's track, Not Like Us, which was the fourth, I think, diss track he put out about Drake during a really intense couple of weeks of back and forth, which like.
I am a... celebrity gossip aficionado and like it took everything to like keep up with what was happening so ahead of kendrick's super bowl halftime performance which like talk about a victory lap um can you start us like can you get for listeners who maybe weren't as obsessed with it as I was. Can you start us off with some broad strokes of the feud?
Well, I mean, I guess it goes back to the very early part of their careers. You know, they came around, I guess 2009 seems like a good starting point. That was like the very early part of their careers. Drake was still, at that point, the bigger star. And they kind of circled.
each other because that's what you do in hip-hop you know you see the guys that's that's going to be the guy or maybe you might be the guy and you sort of circle each other and they don't necessarily run in the same crew or anything you know Kendrick has his his friends and his rap cohort TDE from, you know, South Central and his parts of LA and Drake has his folks from Toronto and all over. So they did collaborate though on Kendrick's, I guess it would be his debut release.
Poetic justice. Right. Right. And that was Kendrick's first number one song. And so as a result, there's always just sort of been this like rivalry, which Drake can say, hey, look, you were not really a star until I made you a star. And Kendra's point of contention is that I was always going to be a star. Also, I'm...
authentically of this culture and so they've been circling each other and dropping little you know hints and lines and rap songs over the over the last decade or so it's always sort of been building to this I don't think anybody thought that it would get to a moment to where Drake would be
suing his record label, but that's where we are today. It escalated last year around May of 2024 when they all released a series of diss tracks, which you said are just kind of... unprecedented in in hip-hop history i would say yeah yeah and i think the the fascinating thing for me about all of it is just like sometimes you're like oh they keep like competing with each other and like who's the winner but
There was just such a clear victor. Do you know what I mean? Oh, yeah. And that seemed unprecedented in a way to me. Well, I mean, it's just... I can't recall another rap beef that ended with one of the guys going on to performing. Halftime of the Super Bowl, you know. So you're right. Like there's never quite been a victory like that. There have been other victories. And Drake has lost beefs before. People can go back a few years ago.
I guess it was 2018, 2019 when he got into a beef with the rapper Pusha T. And Pusha T... released a diss track, the story of Adidon, which revealed to people that did not know that Drake had a child. At that point, Drake had not. Right. Oh my God, his secret child. Yeah, right. His son, right. Yeah.
And the cover, the cover of the diss track was, it was from a photo shoot that Drake had taken when he was an actor, very much, much younger in his career. And he's in blackface. And that was the cover.
of that thing and so drake has been the decisive loser in a beef before but it was one thing when it's pusha t who was a very good very credible long-time rapper it's another one that got the guy that's coming after you is you know maybe competition for number one and he eviscerates you in the way that Kendrick did right right and like Kendrick like he has a Pulitzer am I remembering this he has a Pulitzer yeah he has a Pulitzer yeah and like right with such deafness
that for all of Drake's musical qualities I just don't think he can rival but Drake also strikes me as the guy who like keeps on trying to start the fight because there is like a little bit of like and again this is just analysis of star image like there is this feeling of like trying to legitimize himself always yeah no I think there's definitely that and that's kind of that's what how I think Kendrick really was able to unnerve Drake it wasn't that like I know that you're cool
I know that you make a lot of money. I know that you have slept with a lot of my friends, girls. And maybe if you went after my wife, you might have a shot at it. But the thing about me, which is I'm speaking as Kendrick to drink, is that I am authentically of this culture. I'm not putting on an accent. You know, I'm from where I say I'm from. I'm from right out here in Compton. You know, you're from Toronto, which is...
It has its own unique, established hip-hop culture, and you're not even really a part of that, you know? Like those guys up there don't really mess with you. And so that really poked at something that has always sort of dogged Drake, in addition to accusations that he does not write his own raps. And so like that is the sort of thing that really it seemed that.
It got really personal for Drake in a way that not many other beefs have gotten for him or for anybody else for that matter. Yeah. The point you made that I hadn't thought a lot about is that it always is these like people of the same cohort. So you don't have as many. feuds that are necessarily amongst people from like several decades apart from one another.
We think about like Biggie and Tupac vying for the same sort of cultural position at the same sort of time. So you did a whole season of Slow Burn, which I strongly, strongly recommend to anyone listening. But how would you compare? that feud with this or even like
50 and Diddy, which has, I think, come to the fore again recently in light of all of the accusations levied against Diddy. It'll be easier for me to do it for the Tupac and Biggie. I'll see if I can circle back and get to the Diddy 50 piece of it. One of the major differences between the Biggie and Pac beef, as opposed to the Kendrick and Drake beef, is how raw and new it was when Biggie and Tupac did it, right? Like, beefing has always been a part.
of hip-hop culture. It's a part of American culture, right? Like, I don't like you. I don't like you. All right, what are we going to do about it? You know, that is all of us in a nutshell, but in hip-hop, like, competition is a big part of it. And with... Tupac and Biggie, it was very, very personal. Like they were really good friends once upon a time. Right. And if people remember one of the central most inflammatory allegations.
in the biggie tupac beef was that tupac had slept with biggie's wife faith evans right and so it was a very personal very heated you know i mean again this It feels like I'm just adding on drama to make this sound even crazier. But don't forget, Tupac got shot. Right. This is the first time. Yeah. And blamed Biggie and his associates, including Diddy, for setting him up and getting him shot. So there was a lot of things that happened that made this a very organic, very real, very young beef.
thing that happens when you're 24 25 years old where like something happens and it kind of gets out of control and you can't quite get it back yeah um Drake and Kendrick is not that. They're both almost 40 years old. They're very experienced. They are very experienced at the record industry. A lot of this required the level of planning and anticipation. professionalism that
It's just totally different from what was going on with Biggie and Pac. Like, these are two grown men who are industries in their own right. They feed a lot of people with their music and their work. Like, so this did not happen by accident. This did not happen because they are homeboys gone.
wrong this happened because they're both vying for the same thing and they kind of don't like each other yeah yeah and it's not as tragic either right like that's the thing like that the horrible the contrast right it's like that feud ended with both people dead and that's not I don't think that's going to be the what I would say is that not long after the not like us song dropped and this is an allegation that Drake puts in his lawsuit against his record label
Somebody shot at his house in Toronto. People have kind of forgotten that. Buried that a little bit, right? but they don't know if the source of that was the Kendrick beef or another beef he was having with local rappers in Toronto but so yes to your point
Nothing bad has happened yet. Nobody has gotten hurt. Everybody seems to have come through this. Well, I should say somebody got shot at Drake's house, a bodyguard. So somebody did actually get injured, which is often what happens with these beats. But nobody...
has died it's a chance for people to sort of move on and yeah the thing about the biggie and tupac thing i'm sure we'll come back to this later and talk about it because they were so young um i think they were denied an opportunity to reconcile And I think that would have happened as they had gotten older. So that's the real tragedy of Biggie and Pac. They never got old enough to see the error of their ways. Yeah. There's a lot of distance with these guys. How old were they?
Remind me. We'll see. So, Pac was 25 when he died. Oh, my God. Biggie was 24. Yeah, I mean, they were babies. Yeah. They were babies. happened when i was in ninth grade i think eighth grade or ninth grade and like to me at that time i was just like they're adults like they're just they did they seem so grown yeah yeah yeah but that is so young in hindsight They were such babies. And I mean, man, if you just...
I mean, both of them came from nothing to kind of something, very rarely. Like, Tupac had just graduated from high school, bouncing from place to place, was basically living below the poverty line with his mom, you know, as recently as five, six years before the time.
he got shot like he was paying his mom's bills this this was we are not talking about a wealthy guy who was putting a lot at risk and same for biggie biggie kind of came from a different place but a very similar sort of circumstances so yeah they were just they were i mean god man the stuff that you let go at 46 as opposed to 24 you know what i mean so i wish they'd had opportunity to get there yeah
Robin asked us how celebrities profit from these feuds. And I think we'll get into this more, too, when we talk about some of the other feuds in question. How much do you see this? You referenced this like somewhat obliquely earlier. How much do you see this as like a very savvy?
commercialization like i don't think that it's like pre-planned or anything like that but they think they also understand like oh well this is a way to make people pay attention to me too oh yeah i mean you know one of the side you know the unfortunate realities of the biggie and pock beef is that it did like drive record sales for my record labels right yeah it made them into much bigger celebrities than they might have otherwise been
And so people peep that out early. And really, this has been going on a long time. But when Nas and Jay-Z beefed in 2001, it drove a lot of record sales for them. Like, even if you go back to last year. Megan Thee Stallion and Nicki Minaj have been engaged in a beef that has been going on for years now at this point. And they released a couple of diss tracks last year.
And I mean, you see this tremendous bump and not only that Spotify listens, but there's another way to judge this stuff now. YouTube views. Yeah. So there's a whole lot of ways to sort of judge what's going on. So this stuff has been proven to. It tends to help people. Very rarely does it hurt. Well, and I think too, like the video for Not Like Us, like...
It itself is like an aesthetic diss, like all the ways that it functions. And so that even generates like so many more YouTube hits and all that sort of thing. It's all very savvy in that capacity. You know, the funny thing about that, Anna.
Like after the song got dropped, everybody knew a video was coming for the song, which is sort of that's not often how rap beefs work. Like we didn't get a video for the story of Adidine. You know what I mean? And so it was like, oh, like Kendrick is operating on a.
whole nother level of professionalism in this and which is true to who that dude is right this is i mean this is him being the artiste uh in the in this beef and so yeah that that the the video really took it over the top and if you go look at the views Even for the songs that he didn't release on the streaming services, they're way up in the millions. So there's a lot of ways to monetize this stuff for sure. Have you seen the whole genre of TikTok reaction video where people play the song?
for people who haven't heard it yet and you're just waiting for like like whatever point like really gets through to someone like oh my god like even that itself as a sub industry is really fascinating to me oh yeah I mean that is the thing and I used to think this was bad just as a kid like I was trying
of think back like man it would really suck to be a kid now if you lost a fight at school because people because you'll have to live it every day and there's all kind of people like doing and so that's what drake is living through man he lost a fight at school And there's all these reaction videos. You have to basically shut off the internet to avoid the response.
And that's what's so damning about it because it's like, man, how do you get away from that if you're Drake? You can understand why you would file a lawsuit to make it stop if you thought that would help. Drake's like so many of us, right? I was like, I'm going to delete my Instagram for a little while.
gonna take a break i'm gonna do a cleanse a social media cleanse it's like yeah okay you probably should i know um our next question comes from emily and it gets to like the point of all of this so here we go Why do so many rappers, male and female, have deep and apparently vitriolic beef with each other? I'm so confused on what these extensive and often long-lasting feuds are supposed to be about.
Is it mainly a publicity stunt or are there like genuine reasons for this? The same applies to pop stars like Katy Perry and Taylor Swift. Just why? OK, so if we can get to some of like the philosophical. why of this. It might be interesting. What interests you about celebrity feuds just generally? It's a chance often for them to step from behind the artifice or the public facade, right?
It's hard to be somebody else when you're in a fight. You got to kind of tap into who you are and what you're about if you're going to fight. So if you're going to open, have you ever, I don't know, maybe this is a little, you know, this is maybe sociopathic behavior.
I would never fight somebody if I didn't have some assurance. Like, I got to make sure that everything, all my defenses have got to be up to par here. Like, this is the way this person might attack me, whether they may say something to me about this, they may. be bigger than me and use their strength, whatever. You're sort of preparing, you're arming yourself to defend yourself. And I think that that's the thing that's sort of interesting to me.
a celebrity you really are put you're exposing yourself you're putting yourself out there for judgment if you lose this fight and your opponent makes some really good points you might have to live with it forever right right you know and it like shows us uh kind of points of vulnerability or even like instability in a star image right like i think with and we'll talk about this more with taylor swift Like...
even someone who seems like their image is so incredibly polished, right? Or like, oh, they're in the right for whatever reason. Like it's still, it destabilizes the image. And sometimes a star can like really re-stabilize it through others.
songs through other communication like whatever but oftentimes it's a vulnerable point that they might not otherwise have well can i tell because like i don't I don't pretend to have a tremendous backlog of knowledge about a lot of pop culture feeds, but I'll never forget.
This is going to sound, this is what a crazy reference. When Paris Hilton called Lindsay Lohan fire crotch. And I was like, what a, what a diss. Like it stuck with me. And you knew that there was something, there's something behind that.
story that is insane well and like that moment so that was during the peak what i think of as like the peak of uh almost like a free-for-all in celebrity gossip in the mid-2000s when the power of celebrity image was really in transition because you had all of the gossip blogs and paparazzi resting control of what a celebrity meant away from the established media outlets so like
If I'm remembering correctly, I think Paris said that to a TMZ videographer. I could be wrong, but it's something similar to that, if it's not that. And that itself, right? Because who else would she say that to? She wouldn't say... it in an interview she wouldn't say it on entertainment tonight but like kind of wasted out at the club on a saturday night and a videographer comes up to you and like says like what's going on with you and lindsey and that's what she says right like but Also,
Paris was always operating from this incredible point of invulnerability because she didn't need the celebrity. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're right. It was just, it was very much the most popular girl in school who's got everything. And she's like, this girl has got a problem. And I can say something to undermine her and destabilize her. Right. Yeah. And like, I don't care if people make fun of me.
I am purposely kind of lampooning my own image with the like, that's hot, like all of that stuff, because I have all of this money and who gives a shit. Right, right, right. Yes. I mean, I don't know how I don't. Has Paris Hilton never had him? Any other beefs? Did anybody ever? So before we recorded this, Melody unearthed this article in Cosmo that's like, find the beef from the year you were born. And some of them are so ridiculous. Like it's trying to say that 1980s.
which is when I was born, was the year of the beef between Jane Fonda and Henry Fonda, her dad, when really that was like a very long standing beef. And in 1981, they released a movie together on Golden Pond that like actually. was anything there like reconciliation but that's a long way of saying that they listed a beef between Paris and Nicole Richie which I didn't know about
Right. I had no idea. I thought they were homegirls, man. That makes me sad. But a lot of this is them grasping for like. oh, these people didn't like each other. Right, right, right. It didn't really explode into a back and forth or anything. It was just for a brief moment, we don't fuck with each other. When I think about old Hollywood, like sometimes these feuds were engineered very much by the studio.
just to generate interest. Like as someone who had a super boring star image, like there was nothing interesting about them except for they were handsome or good looking. If you create a feud, like, oh, well, their rival is this person, then somehow that adds a little bit of gravitas to their image. And I think that you get that a little bit sometimes with like...
I don't know, like some of the contemporary TikTok stars that we're not young enough to know about. Right. Oh, for sure. For sure. For sure. Absolutely. Yeah. Because they haven't they don't have I mean, I shouldn't you know, I don't know all these people, but they don't they don't they don't have a Wikipedia entry.
that is that compelling and so they've got to kind of create something right you know they don't have a list of accomplishments or like a yeah their bio is very thin yeah or and even i think of like one of the
beefs that was listed in this Cosmo article was Lauren Conrad and Heidi and Spencer from the Hills. Do you remember this at all? I remember them as people. I don't remember them beefing each other. So really what it was is that Spencer... decided oh you gave me the villain edit in this show well then I'm going to be the villain right like leaning into that understanding and understanding that like oh i'm a like i'm a reality star how do i extend that is by amplifying
this tension or this conflict that may or may not exist do you know you know what my theory about who how people learn how to do this and i'm sure that i'm you know i'm gonna be wrong but i thought that people doing like villain turns on the real world to the road rules pipeline yeah they're like oh you can really you can really extend your career if you do it right you know like just being out in public and then maybe you might get into wrestling or something
So, yeah. So it seemed like if he if he followed that model, it probably made sense at the time. Yeah, no. And I think this is true. I've listened to a lot of stuff on like how reality culture has changed and how like now you have.
crop of reality contestants who have been raised watching reality television so like survivor for example is incredibly different because everyone like the way that they understand survivor is by being schooled in survivor yeah man that's a really yeah that's got to be so or the real world right like when we first started watching the real world when it first came out like no one knew how to behave on reality television
No, I mean, again, it's just it kind of how like Kevin Powell became a celebrity from like, yeah, I mean, I remember him vividly just yelling outside at Julie, you know, that was his that was sort of his character. Or actually, it was the next season, wasn't it? Wasn't it Puck?
who's kind of the first person that intentionally antagonized people, right? Yeah, yeah. And then, do you remember Real World Seattle? It had Irene. Of course, yes. Steven and Iris, is that her name? Yes. Steven and Iris, yeah. Oh, man. Just like how you learn like, oh, this, if you want to, if you want to be remembered on one of these shows, like you have to essentially take on this almost melodramatic role of a villain or the person that is aggressed against.
And so I think part of this, too, is like people crave that sort of tension and it's a lot easier. Like it's a lot more legible if you're like, well, they're in a fight and this is my side. Do you know what I mean? Right, right, right. Absolutely. Absolutely. Which is like I should say because I. I say clever. This is very different from what happens in hip-hop.
Yeah. OK. OK. So what do you think? How is it different? Well, I just think it's usually the stuff is very organic. It's very personal in like a very weird way. People may not know that the Nas Jay-Z beef goes back. to Nas just missing a recording session with Jay-Z. Okay? You know? And it was just like, oh, you disrespected me by not showing up to my song? And then it kind of builds, right? Or...
I mean, and this is not a small ordeal, but it's like, hey, Ja Rule is accusing 50 Cent or one of his homeboys. Hey, which one of y'all robbed me from my chain? Right. Right. And like this is stuff that is actually happening out there in the streets or whatever. These private, you know, misunderstandings that they happen or these like rivalries and then they explode in the public. But.
Very rarely, unless they're very young and very bad rappers, a lot of this stuff is actually the stuff of personal conflict. Yeah.
that just kind of gets blown up through lyrics and stuff. Yeah, yeah. So it's like the personal conflict made into art. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's like, well, if we're going to do this, there's a way that not only can we get... some third-party mediators into this thing right the fans they can judge but also it's it can it can even be an escalation it could be a provocation right um but
It's always a way to sort of keep the things going in the meantime until you can figure out your next angle. How much of it is about like moral righteousness and that sort of thing? I was reading a very long Reddit thread about like why 50 always hated Diddy. Always. Whereas everyone else seemed to like fall under his spell.
Yeah, that's interesting because I always find 50 positioning himself as this person of moral rectitude to be really interesting. He's got a lot of stuff on his hands and in his background. I do think that maybe the better word instead of talking about morality for a lot of these guys is code, right? Like there's a code and people could look at Diddy and see the way that he operated. Like, I don't think 50 is a good guy.
But I think that 50 can look at Diddy and say, this guy has mistreated all of his artists. Like, none of his artists ever have been better off for having worked with him. Also, we know that he does some really questionable, like, people didn't know there weren't these allegations. We didn't have specificity of the allegations until recently. Right. But it was always like, quote, diddy parties. And that's a weird guy. You know.
Diddy wants to go shopping with me. Why does he want to go shopping with me? It was always just sort of like this loaded, you know, that guy is weird. There's some other stuff going on and I don't want to be a part of it. And I, you know, I could even say that, like, it's tinge with a little bit of homophobia. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
That is there. So I definitely think that was a part of it. And so, yeah, I don't I don't think it's 50 Cent is a guy who grew up in the streets robbing people. I doubt that he really really cares about like. puffy and like you know how well he treats people but i do think that he identified him as a weirdo early on right and he's just like i don't like that guy and i don't want to be associated with it and then he could find
It turns out lots of reasons to justify his earlier revulsion toward Diddy. Yeah, yeah. No, and even that idea of code, like, I think some of what is at the heart of, like, the violations in question with some other... pop star feuds is often like quote unquote girl code like like you shouldn't date someone that i've dated kind of thing like you know girls have that code too huh yes and no but okay so
So next question is about a non-existent feud. This comes from Rachel. Uh-oh. Okay. Why do people always try to pit Beyonce and Taylor Swift against each other? From what I've seen, they actually seem to support each other. Didn't they both attend each other's film premieres last year? I don't recall either of them ever saying anything negative about the other. Do they secretly dislike each other, or is this just something their fan bases keep stirring up?
Or maybe this all goes back to when Kanye interrupted Taylor at the VMAs and dragged Beyonce into it. I'd love to hear your take. Don't you think she answered her own question? You think it's Kanye? I think it's the last two things. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, right? No, well, and the other thing is like they are of similar age. And then there's just this idea that like there can only be one. Right.
Which is not the case with, let's say, male stars. Right. Well, I mean, in hip hop, that's what a lot of this is about. You know what I'm saying? I mean, it's just kind of very similar. I thought that Kanye needlessly.
Stoke the fires of a beef that probably would have happened anyway And I mean it's kind of if you can lay it perfectly over sort of the Twitter wars of the early teens uh-huh you know kind of like you know moving into like 2017 2018 and then look i'm from houston i love beyonce like you know i don't want to i i i do have my biases here but I mean, there are a lot of people, a lot of Beyonce's fans who look at Taylor Swift.
And they say, this is the woman who has always been given everything. She's willowy blonde, the adoration of peers, everything. And they say, she can't dance like Beyonce. She can't sing like Beyonce. She can't do all this other stuff. And I'm not going to argue.
I don't know Taylor Swift's music well enough, but I think that there's that resentment. Yeah, no, and I think Taylor Swift in particular becomes almost like a figurehead of the white industry and like... white supremacy and i don't mean that in terms of i'm not saying taylor swift is a white supremacist i'm saying wait codes of like how like white privilege for lack of a better word right you know who she is she must be a caitlin clark
Which is like, cause she definitely does not want to talk about this in public. And she's like, well, they may have kind of a point. And again, I'm not saying that Beyonce's fans don't have a point, but she might be like, well, you know, I can't dance like Beyonce. I can't quite put on a show like her. I may have benefited.
I have benefited from being a beautiful white woman in the public spotlight. She hasn't said that, but I bet that like, you know, like it probably is something that she has to kick around every night again. Right. yeah well and just like people group them together and are like oh well there's a movie from both of them this year do you know what i mean like there are ways that they naturally get grouped in like what is the um
What did Taylor say about, like, I want to be excluded from this conversation? Was that her or was that Kim? This narrative. I want to be excluded from this narrative. Yes, Taylor said it. Sorry, Melanie knows. I think, like, I think... Sometimes Taylor just wants to be like, stop, stop having this conversation because in some ways it calls into light some of those.
those things but i don't mean that she's like vulnerable about it but i do think that's part of what's going on yeah i don't think she wants to have it and also you know i mean i'm leaving out the other part of it is that you know there are a lot of i don't even i don't even they're taylor swift fans there's a lot of animus directed
Beyonce or from the other direction, right? Some of it's racism, sexism, boom. Racism and sexism. People talking about how many people wrote her songs or whatever and trying to diminish her as an artist and so people are rightfully like...
You know, they're heightened. Their sensitivities are heightened when she's not winning album of the year. And she's one of the, you know, the artists who've won the most Grammys. I think has she won the most Grammy? I don't know. She's won 32. I don't know. That doesn't seem like that should be the most.
ever but it's up there yeah like how can you win that you how can you be that excellent and still not have this sign of approval from the industry right right i mean the thing is i mean we don't have to have that argument because i just think it's sort of it's i didn't need prince to not win
album with you for purple rain to know that purple rain was the shit you know what i mean but again i know that this is important for for those folks and their fans probably even more than the artists themselves um and so when you're arguing on the internet you got to have that kind of that those data points right Yeah. Okay. Next question is from Katie and it's about the nature and quality of a celebrity feud. Okay. So I think celebrity feuds have actually gotten less interesting.
even as we arguably have more material that can get leaked around. Curious if you feel the same. To me, the people and the feuds themselves are boring, though sometimes the cultural conversation sparked can be very interesting. Really, that's the part I'm interested in now. I wonder how much of this, the dullness to me of the feuds and the people themselves, is because there are so many freaking famous people and I hardly know any of them and they all kind of look the same.
And so I don't have the context for the juicy details. Or is it because people have a stronger grasp on their image and messaging and are more cautious in where they allow mess to creep out publicly? I feel like people got to be, or maybe just were, so much more eccentric in their nonsense in the pre- and early days of social media, and now it's all beige interiors, actually and emotionally.
There's so much going on here. So what is your first reaction to this? My first reaction is this person must be old like me. Don't you think it's like, oh, none of these people are famous anymore. These are real celebrities. Not like Johnny Carson. You know what I mean? Or like they're not fighting. Like, again, I was just thinking of these historical feuds. It's like, oh, it's.
It's not like when Jay Leno and David Letterman were fighting over who would be the queen of late night. Fighting over the future of late night. Yeah, no, yeah, no. So I kind of understand where this person is coming from. I don't know anybody anymore. Do you know what I find to be sort of a fascinating perversion of this trend and how they made themselves? Because I was thinking about this question.
And so if you go back to 2018, there used to be this British influencer. I guess he's still out there. KSI. Oh, yeah. And he won the YouTube boxing championship belt. It is something they created for his one event. And he calls out two people after he wins that belt. You know who they were? Jake and Logan Paul. Oh, right. Right, right, right. And I had never heard of these people then. And I remember like... You were working at BuzzFeed then, weren't you?
I was at ESPN. I was at ESPN then. So that's the very Bruce Springsteen age. You know what I mean? Like a cohort of people at ESPN. You know, that's. And so. I did not. So this is 2018. I felt like I didn't really know who they were. But I remember when Logan Paul fought KSI at the time. I was like, I never heard of these people. And they're fighting. And it's a big deal. And like a million people bought this fight. I was like, what in the hell is going on?
And they figured out a way to sort of monetize that and make themselves even bigger cultural figures as a result of that. But I was like, man, that's a really good model for making like, you know what, if you're going to have beef, at least fight.
Give us something to grab on to. Not like innuendo, not, you know, stuff leaked through gossip writers or whatever, but like we're actually getting to see it play out in front of us. So anyway, I don't know. But yeah, I'm sorry I didn't know the Paul. Did you know who the Pauls were in 2018? Yeah, I did. But again, that's because I was sitting next to Katie Natopolis or something. But I think...
The idea too, the assertion that everyone looks the same or something like that, that to me seems to be referencing reality stars who all do kind of have Kim Kardashian face. And like, yeah, that rate, like that's not interesting if you don't know the narrative. Absolutely. But I think people like who were involved in like the whole Vanderpump universe, like that was, that was incredibly interesting to them. Right. Like that was an incredible.
And it wasn't interesting to me because I didn't have that context. If you keep up with the Real Housewives series, there's just an endless list of folks that I don't know who they are, right? But they're having these beefs. And if you really follow that. I'm sure it's just got to be mesmerizing, right? It's got to be great. And it barely matters what they're following over because it's the personalities clashing, not them arguing about who didn't clean the dishes. You know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah. But again, also taking up these roles as like melodramatic roles that have been slaughtered for them. I think, like, have you been following the Blake Lively, Justin Baldani? A little bit, yeah. A little bit? That to me actually is very interesting because they're using...
the legal system to do some of their dirty work for them. Yeah, yeah. I mean, man. I mean, it's actually... Doesn't that just seem like a high-stakes gamble? I don't know if I would want... that to be my strategy to play around in the court system but obviously they feel like they've got enough money and that nobody's going to
prison at least yet right and so nobody will have to suffer but yeah that seems like a really high stakes game of chicken which is sort of like that's what drake is doing with kendrick now man in the universal like when you sue one way to embarrass
your opponent is to have things come out in discovery and or just alleged things in a lawsuit right and you may not have to prove them later anyway because it's just a lawsuit right yeah yeah no well and that's the thing like what came out is in discovery so like Blake Lively released all of the stuff that came out in Discovery that made Justin Baldani and the whole team look so bad. But then Justin Baldani also releases like, oh, here's these other texts that include like.
Blake Lively talking about her dragons, like she's like the mother of dragons in Game of Thrones and like referencing Taylor Swift as one of her dragons. Like, that's just corny, right? It just doesn't make anyone look good. Right, right, right. You nerd. You dork. And also Taylor Swift is your dragon. But I do think that you're right, that it's a double.
edged sword we're not getting at the the heart of this question which is that more information makes things less interesting do you think that that's true i don't think so i disagree with that yeah i don't agree with that at all i want more information yeah And whenever I see the headline, I'm like, OK, I've got to click on that and figure out because I want to get to the source of it.
I really think that, yeah, she's like me, that I get frustrated when I see people on TV and in magazines or blogs and I don't know who they are. I had a very, just a quick aside, I had a very similar sensation building up to the election. And I just remember, I was like, I don't know who these people are.
podcast people are man i was like i don't know how do i know that this person and i remember looking at their videos and endorsements for trump or whatever and their videos would be in the millions yeah The millions. And then Kamala went on Saturday Night Live. And I remember thinking, I was like, man, is that actually? Like, is being on Saturday Night Live, does that make you famous?
Do a lot of people care about that in the way they care about a Joe Rogan endorsement or whatever? Right. So anyway, I think once you get familiar with it, I think that like you said, like you said, the Vanderpump stuff. I'm sure that if I watched it, I mean, I would look. My wife was watching a new reality show. I don't even remember the name of it. And it took me 30 minutes to get into it because I just like I bought in and I bought into the beefs. Yeah. You know.
Yeah, no, that's all it takes. No, and then you can have, I've always thought that the cultural conversations are more interesting than the nitty gritty. So once you can access like the nitty gritty, then you can have these larger, more interesting things happening. Absolutely. Okay. So this is about how feuds end, either intentionally or not. We're going to play two questions back to back. The first one is from Kristen.
I'm interested in unpacking the celebrity feuds that have come to a resolution, like with Taylor Swift and Katy Perry, for example. How often do celeb feuds get resolved versus remain unresolved? or somewhere in between, like Taylor and Kanye over the years. And how do those resolutions come to be? Is there some sort of quote-unquote guidebook for celebs? And then this is from Emily. We all know history is written by the victors, but what about celebrity feuds?
What carries more weight? Pre-feud fame? Who lived longer? The merits of the argument itself? Or some other factor? Okay, so I want to use an example of a feud that I think still lives large in the cultural imagination and in our imagination as old, which is Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston. Okay. So.
That feud was really positioned as like one of like fighting over Brad Pitt. Right. Like, and this is, this is so common. Like it's a trope that there's a scholar, Angela McRobbie, she calls it romantic individualism where like. In these scenarios, even if the women, like, don't give a fuck, that they are positioned as fighting over the man because the women cannot be allied with one another. There's only one winner.
And it reminds me, too, of this other love triangle that has always been compared to Jennifer Aniston, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, which is Elizabeth Taylor. Eddie Fisher and Debbie Fisher from the 1950s. So it was that Elizabeth Taylor stole Eddie Fisher from like the cherubic Debbie Reynolds.
that was like it was just everything in the tabloids for like a decade and they so later elizabeth taylor divorces eddie fisher after like a handful of years and many many many years later they appear in a tv special together elizabeth taylor and debbie reynolds and they're like joking like clowning on eddie fisher wow really and to me that's like that's the loser right like the guy was the loser like he always thought he was the main character here but we were the main character
Unbelievable. I love that. I kind of think this is similar to what's happening with Brad Pitt. He's the loser here. Jennifer Aniston's living her life still looks exactly the same. Angelina Jolie also living her life. Like all the kids don't talk to Brad. He's just a weirdo. It is crazy because you're right. Because it really seemed like Brad Pitt was like, you think, what a lucky man. You know, like as a man, he's just like, I got these two beautiful women fighting over you. Yeah.
it's just like how can you lose and then you spin it forward and it was like oh and I don't know if that was brad pitt just living more years or if his trajectory was already going in that direction and he just didn't know right right but yeah that is a really fascinating way of thinking about it because yeah um
I mean, there's no way that Brad Pitt, I mean, nobody counts on getting old in quite the way they're going to get old. But I don't think people, I don't think Brad Pitt ever kind of thought, oh, I'm going to end up looking like a sad old man here. You referenced this at the beginning of the show. Do you think Tupac and Biggie would have grown through things? Absolutely. Absolutely. They had real love for each other. Biggie slept on Tupac's couch.
Tupac initially wanted to be, well, Biggie wanted Tupac to be his manager. when they first started out. They had real love there. Isn't that crazy? And Biggie was going to join Tupac's affiliate group, the Outlaws. That's how close they were.
And so I definitely think that had they lived long enough, that they probably would have reconciled, or at least there would have been some sort of peace. But there's another thing to this, and this is sort of another interesting... beef that i'm pulling from the world of sports if people do people if i say this the ali frazier yeah rivalry right yeah three fights you know ali wins two of them and it was joe frazier who helped
Ali, basically after he had gone to prison and abstaining from going to Vietnam and everything else, Joe Frazier was really integral to getting Ali licensed again and becoming back a professional boxer. And after all those fights, he felt that...
Muhammad Ali had disrespected him and had treated him poorly. He called him ugly, called him, said he looked like a gorilla. He did all this stuff in public that really minimized Joe Frazier. People don't remember how mean Muhammad Ali was to Joe Frazier. So there's this great story.
in sports illustrated many years ago and it stuck with me for like the last 30 years the story's called the fights over joe and it talks about how joe frazier in his retirement was still trying to get at muhammad ali even as he's like ravaged by like parkinson's he was still mad like he had not gotten over it and he kept saying
Will you see how Muhammad Ali looks? And look how I look. So that's who won the fight. And so if it's real, it might last for the rest of your life. There might not be any coming back. But then doesn't Muhammad Ali kind of come across as the winner there because he's the one who's like in old age not trying to fight this fight? Yes. Right. Because it makes Joe look small.
and petty and I think so that's kind of the thing I think that if you are if you're great and you tell a good story about yourself or there's a good story about you that no beef in particular is going to harm you like LL Cool J beefed Most good rappers that came up in the 80s and 90s. Yeah. And most people are not sitting around talking about Cool Mo D of Cannabis. No. They're talking about LL Cool J.
You know what I'm saying? Right, right. Who still has a career. Still has a career. People know his name, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, he's doing great. And so I think that's kind of how it ends up going. And so like... Muhammad Ali had already put in the work to win that beef. Yeah, yeah. That makes sense.
Do you have any predictions for the halftime show? Is Kendrick not going to do anything because he has this lawsuit? What's going to happen? He's definitely going to have to perform. He's contractually obligated.
was interested in is because you know because all the fires in LA and everything and he's from there if it's going to have to be a little bit muted right if it's going to have to focus a little bit more on you know helping out his hometown right I wonder if that might take the edge off just a little bit but yeah I mean I think that I don't think it's possible for Drake to lose worse than he already had
Like, what else would have to happen? Like, is there someone that he could invite on stage that would just be a real insult to Drake? Lil Wayne. Yeah. Lil Wayne is sort of like his G, you know, and like the guy that got Drake and he's on his record label. And Lil Wayne was very salty about not getting the opportunity to perform for his hometown of New Orleans.
If they somehow squashed it and he had Lil Wayne on there and got Lil Wayne to do Not Like Us, that would be incredible. I don't think that would happen. But Lil Wayne is a guy that's up for grabs, man. Like he'll pose with Trump. He'll do whatever. Like if the money is right, Lil Wayne will show up. So we'll see. It's a possibility.
It's amazing. All right. Well, I feel like this has been my dream episode. Exactly what Melody and I envisioned when we came up with this idea. Thank you so much for taking the time. You have a lot going on. You have beautiful, young, new kids that you're... trying to you know wrangle and also to be on like a zillion podcasts so this is this is this is i mean look i love my kids but this is more fun
you know, to them, to them, I'm just a vessel, you know, to milk or, you know, fruit snacks. So this is, this is, this is, this was a lot of fun. I'm glad, I'm glad you remember, man. And we used to work in the office together and we're doing this big, great. profiles of Hollywood and celebrity and always has been a huge fan. And Charlie, man. And Charlie's up and he's in the other room. He's probably jealous. He's like, were you just talking to Joel? No, Charlie was cool, man.
Maybe we'll have to come back and have a podcast about that. No, we should. That would be an investigative podcast. Where'd that money go? Did y'all ever have money? Did you ever have money?
Well, and also, you're on the press box, which is common, like... road trip listening in our house so we listened to it just the other day on the way back from seattle um appreciate that can you can you just tell a little bit about what kind of show it is because i think people would really like it if they knew
Well, thank you. Yeah, it's twice a week. And on Monday, my co-host Brian Curtis does it with David Shoemaker. And on the Thursday, he does it with me. And basically, we're talking about media. It's a media criticism podcast.
The Washington Post comes up a lot. The owner of the L.A. Times comes up a lot right now, as you might imagine. How people are covering Trump. So we're revising that. And also there's a lot more sports now. Brian and I are huge sports heads. Don't let that scare you. We try to make it accessible.
because it's also about like how is sports coverage working which is something that like i'm not a huge sports head but i've always loved the ringer and before that grantland like that understanding of like we can talk about how sports are covered because that is culture like that's really interesting
absolutely absolutely we take that really seriously over there but we also try to have fun with it so we do that and i have to write sometimes at the ringer too so sometimes on the website i put up a post and but i like talking more than writing i don't know about you I like writing more than talking.
But I like them both. I think they complement each other. I like them both. Writing is just so much harder for me. Thank you again so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure. Thanks, Sam. My pleasure. you Thanks for listening to the free version of the Culture Study podcast. Paid subscribers got a bonus conversation called Ask and Anything in which Melody and I answered a question from a listener who wants advice about a family member living with them over the summer.
Melody has lots of good advice on this one. She has personal experience. So if you want to hear our answer and also get some tea on. on Melody's post-college life. Become a paid subscriber. This is the way that we get paid subscribers. No matter where you listen, be sure to subscribe. We have so many great episodes in the works and I promise that you don't want to miss any of them.
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The Culture Study Podcast is produced by me, Anne Helen Peterson, and Melody Rowell. Our music is by Poddington Bear. You can find me on Instagram at Anne Helen Peterson, Melody at Melodius47, and the show at Culture Study Pod.