Drake and Kendrick Lamar have brought up a lot about each other’s personal lives — including how they live.
In response to a track from Drake that accused Lamar of being shorter and poorer, Lamar released “Euphoria,” which turns that allegation into a metaphor for how he lays relatively low. “Yeah, I’m out the way, yeah, I’m low, okay” and “the island here’s remote, okay.”
Drake lives in a $100 million mansion in Toronto that he has broadcast to the world with a glossy spread in Architectural Digest. It’s 50,000 square feet. There is an indoor basketball court and a great room with 44-foot-high ceilings. The artist Takashi Murakami painted the inside of a showy grand piano. There are chandeliers, and there is furniture of “ostrich skin and mohair … macassar and bronze,” according to AD. He also owns a $15 million ranch compound in Texas with multiple houses and Robbie Williams’s former $75 million Beverly Hills mansion, which he’s been trying to flip.
Lamar, on the other hand, has never let the press into his relatively tame $16 million house in Bel Air. It was built in 1951 and looks like it: From the driveway, all you can see is drab beige vertical wooden siding and small framed windows.
This isn’t to suggest Lamar doesn’t enjoy real estate. “I really like to buy property, whether it’s apartments, whether it’s buildings, whether it’s houses,” he once said in a radio interview. In 2014, he bought a $523,500 home in Eastvale, California, and in 2018, he purchased a $2.65 million home in Calabasas. The next year, he splurged on a $9.7 million Manhattan Beach mansion. And last year, he bought a pied-à-terre in Brooklyn in a new-build condo on the waterfront that’s also drawn Ed Sheeran.
That apartment comes up in the Drake track “Family Matters,” which goes after Lamar’s family; he has two kids with his high-school sweetheart. They’re engaged, but they never got married. Which Drake points out: “Why did you move to New York? Is it ’cause you livin’ that bachelor life? Proposed in 2015, but don’t wanna make her your actual wife?”
Kendrick didn’t respond with a rap that pointed out the home has four bedrooms — plenty for the family. Instead, he released the track “Not Like Us” along with cover art that shows a Google Maps shot of Drake’s Toronto mansion covered with the same style of markers that appear on an app that warns users about sexual predators.
The lyrics follow the theme, with Lamar accusing Drake of being a pedophile. (“Say, Drake, I hear you like ’em young / You better not ever go to cell block one.”) Within 48 hours, fans were messing with Google Maps to change the name of Drake’s mansion to “Kendrick’s Dog” or “Owned by Kendrick.” And then, there was what might be a real-world consequence: At 2 a.m. Sunday night, someone shot the mansion’s guard.
There’s even a real-estate diss that isn’t about either of their houses. In “Family Matters,” Drake slides into a tangent focused on Rick Ross. Drake, a former child star, mocks Ross for once working as a prison guard and for owning a “House sittin’ on some land, but it’s out where no one even really know y’all niggas.”
Ross lives in Fayetteville, Georgia — which is actually closer to downtown Atlanta than Drake’s mansion is from the heart of Toronto. But who’s taking sides?
