Teaching the Kendrick/Drake Beef – Prequel #1 – “Ab Soul’s Outro” – Purpose in a Larger Context

[This post is part 2 of a series – click here for part 1 – Why the Kendrick/Drake Beef is Great for AP Lang – One Line as Proof of Concept]

I don’t know if Drake intended to set off the firestorm that eventually happened when he called himself the GOAT on “First Person Shooter” (2023), but it was huge, probably the biggest hip hop beef ever, and I wanted to explore this in class.  Because among other things it was a huge moment of public rhetoric, a finely layered artistic confrontation brimming with political and ethical implications.  It’s also something that my 2025-2026 junior classes that studied these songs lived through as freshmen.  According to a really helpful video from Hip-Hop Daily – “The Drake vs Kendrick Beef Is Way Deeper Than We Thought”, the roots of the beef go back almost to when our students now were toddlers.  I want to keep the focus on these ten songs from 2023-2024, but first, I want to share a few lessons that explored Kendrick/Drake music that predates the beef, and also that I used to help develop some skills I thought they’d need to analyze the beef itself in a deeper way.

DISCLAIMER: I came to this as a huge Kendrick Lamar fan.  I was indifferent to Drake (and basically still am) though perhaps Kendrick’s arguments later convinced me he’s more pernicious than I realized.  I find what I’ve heard from Drake sort of boring and shallow.  Point being, I didn’t really try to maintain “objectivity” that much – it seemed to work better with students to name my predispositions.  I received plenty of spirited pushback, which felt like a good thing.  My previous experience with topics that are debatable is that the more I share my opinion, the more their work will conform to that opinion, and I don’t think that’s usually good.  Something about the ownership they may have over this music, something about the fact that they’re much more the target audience than I am, let them feel freer to take their own stances regardless of what I said.  Or maybe something about the emotional reality of music let them overcome the “say what the teacher wants me to say” thing.  Not entirely but somewhat.

Exploring Kendrick Lamar’s Political and Philosophical Ambitions – Modelled Dialogue about “Ab-Soul’s Outro”

The summative assessment I planned for the end of the unit was for students in groups of 2-3 to do a sustained rhetorical analysis, in the form of a recorded podcast with the music used as evidence, of one of the 10 central 2023-2024 songs from Kendrick or Drake.  I had students form 10 groups in each class, so they could work together through the unit, and then had them pick songs towards the end.  The idea was to create a “podcast season” where all 10 songs were considered in depth.  In their recordings, they would introduce a thesis idea, then track it through the song, to develop a line of reasoning verse to verse – a spoken group rhetorical analysis essay.  I’ve done versions of this assignment with different hip-hop over the last five years.  Given the state of AI and also what I think is a crucial aspect of hip-hop – composition on performance (i.e., freestyling) – I wanted students to come in with relatively few prepared notes about the song, and talk through their ideas on recordings.  I thought this would help them truly develop that “line of reasoning” skill AP wants them to have, because they actually would reason with each other in conversation.

To model what I eventually wanted students to be able to do on their own, I invited a colleague of mine and asked him to listen to Kendrick Lamar’s 2011 “Ab Soul’s Outro,” but not think too hard about it, and then to come to my class so the two of us could do a live, extemporaneous analysis of the song.  We didn’t prepare beforehand, which was part of the point.  This song is mostly fellow performer Ab-Soul, with a jazz backing and more of a spoken-word feel.  There’s a lot of great ideas to explore, about life, politics, freedom and constraint, interesting intersections with the music.  I wanted students to hear what it would mean for two sincere interpretive interlocutors to discover and build meaning together.  I am white and my colleague is Black, we have significant age and other demographic differences too.  I wanted our potentially divergent perspectives and cultural awarenesses to have space too.  My junior AP classes are predominantly white but each of them has at least a handful of Black students, so I think it was important to do something at the outset to decenter my perspective.

In one class, instead of my colleague, a student and I modelled the dialogue, with all the same considerations – this student was a Black female and also, most crucially, an avowed Drake fan.  One perspective different from mine (not the only one by any means) she brought was to these lines:

There’s fire in the street, fire in the swisher
Fire in between the two legs of your lil’ sister

Moments like this always make me tense up a little, because there is a kind of sexuality that can be frank in hip-hop that causes classes, especially AP classes, to tense up too.  And then sometimes pretty quickly, we end up talking about “misogyny in hip-hop” (which often has at least as much to do with race, really, as it does with gender, even if the latter is being named much more clearly than the former).  In contrast to this trajectory, what my student said was she thought what the lyrics were doing was reflecting on the way that young black women were often expected to be more sexually active than they really were.  In other words there was a level of irony she found that a lot of white listeners sometimes seem not to hear in similar moments.  To her, Ab-Soul wasn’t saying that someone’s little sister was over-sexual, but more that the world saw her that way, as oversexual-ized.  

That’s just one moment, but it’s a good display of something I was really hoping would emerge through having students create group podcasts instead of individual essays: spontaneous discourse about multiple perspectives.

A Reading of Kendrick’s Outro to “Ab-Soul’s Outro”

In all three discussions, we barely scratched the surface of this almost six minute song.  What I’m going to write about now is some more of what we explored, especially kendrick Lamar’s part at the end.

Something that I admire about Kendrick Lamar is something I think others see as his weakness for taking things too seriously.  Because I’m like that too.  I will see the deep seated racial politics embedded in a micro-moment and want my classes to explore them, for example, even when they think I’m overanalyzing.  I have trouble “agreeing to disagree” when fundamental issues of politics and morality are at stake.  And I think that’s a trait Kendrick Lamar shows through his music.  One of Kendrick’s earliest releases is the concept album called Section.80.  Released in 2011, it’s not the earliest – there’s like five years of stuff that precedes this, but this is an album length exploration of some ideas that he then continued to develop over the next 15 years.  “Section.80” as a title melds Section 8 housing – subsidized post-high-rise public accommodation, with the children of the 1980s, aka Gen-Y or the Millennial generation.  

Kendrick ends “Ab-Soul’s Outro” with this jaw-dropping declaration of artistic intent:

See a lot of y’all don’t understand Kendrick Lamar
Because you wonder how I could talk about money, hoes, clothes, God and history
All in the same sentence
You know what all them things have in common?
Only half of the truth if you tell it
See I spent twenty-three years on this earth searching for answers
Till one day I realized I had to come up with my own
I’m not on the outside looking in, I’m not on inside looking out
I’m in the dead fucking center looking around
You ever seen a newborn baby kill a grown man?
That’s an analogy for the way the world make me react
My innocence been dead
So the next time I talk about money, hoes, clothes, God and history
All in the same sentence
Just know I meant it, and you felt it
Cause you too are searching for answers
I’m not the next pop star, I’m not the next socially aware rapper
I am a human motherfucking being over dope ass instrumentation
Now fuck ’em up Terrace

I remember the first time I heard this, right where I was – the emotional intensity just jumps out of my headphones.  And even just reading it there doesn’t do justice – click on the link above and listen to it – hear his voice.  In my opinion it’s a truly astounding statement made by a 23 year old on record.  Let me try to do justice to it.

A crucial line for AP Lang, I think, is “Just know I meant it, and you felt it” – if we’re doing rhetorical analysis, we’re talking about purpose, intention, audience, and here Kendrick is granting permission for would-be rhetorical analysts to have confidence in their emotionally and intellectually sophisticated readings.  I spent some time with this in class – Kendrick is here telling us he’s writing with intention, writing with purpose, and writing in the hopes that we will build our own meanings out of his words, and that we should reflect on the interaction between meaning and emotion while doing that.  

But stepping back, let’s look at the whole passage, line by line:

See a lot of y’all don’t understand Kendrick Lamar
Because you wonder how I could talk about money, hoes, clothes, God and history
All in the same sentence
You know what all them things have in common?
Only half of the truth if you tell it

As a student of literature, these lines immediately remind me of Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of “the carnivalesque,” where forces culturally positioned as “high” and “low” intersect to produce unexpected meaning.  In an almost uncanny way.  That idea that “money, hoes, clothes” and “God and history” could coexist ‘in the same sentence” suggests to me that the kinds of “complexities and tensions” and “broader context” we want students to identify and explore on their way to “sophistication” are especially likely to emerge as we analyze Kendrick’s songs.  And the idea that each of those is only “half of the truth” is also a declaration of the seriousness of talking about “money, hoes, clothes” – I think the idea that that “god and history” are also only half the truth is a pretty bold claim, one that gives us license to take this music seriously as public, morally engaged rhetoric.

See I spent twenty-three years on this earth searching for answers
Till one day I realized I had to come up with my own

Here Kendrick is identifying his youth as something not lacking but worth taking seriously – that 23 years is a long time, and that he discovered he needs to create, not only receive, knowledge.

I’m not on the outside looking in, I’m not on inside looking out
I’m in the dead fucking center looking around

This is the line that bowls me over every time.  I don’t think I’ve fully processed all its implications but a few things it brings up for me: that he’s not just an “urban voice,” just speaking “for the ghetto” even if that’s how he and others doing hip-hop get positioned.  That he’s not an outsider within America’s bounds, commenting from a place of detached observation.  That he’s “in the dead fucking center looking around” pulls me to explanations of the big bang, and a astrophysicist’s answer to the question “where did it happen?”  Everywhere.  Here.  That’s where Kendrick is standing.  Here.  Everywhere.  He has the confidence to see that his world is the world he’s commenting about, in microcosm, like what Nelson Mandela said about his prison – that it was a smaller version of the country that imprisoned him.  Kendirck Lamar, like Nelson Mandela, has the confidence to realize that what he sees signifies something much broader, that he’s at the center of.  Not in a narcissistic way, but from a boldly grounded, centered perspective.  That Compton is America in a true sense – not an “underprivileged” part of America, but a deep reflection of all America’s tendencies and qualities – something explored in further depth on the 2015 song “Hood Politics” – “From Compton to Congress” being the key phrase there.

You ever seen a newborn baby kill a grown man?
That’s an analogy for the way the world make me react
My innocence been dead

That as a 23-year old, he knows what the world might do to him, but he’s already past all of that.  But it’s also a puzzling analogy – who’s the baby, who’s the grown man? The world?  Kendrick Lamar?  His innocence?  This also brought me to James Baldwin’s 1963 interview with Kenneth Clark, where he declares that “by the time I was 17, you’d done everything that you could do to me. The problem now is, how are you going to save yourselves?”  

Where Baldwin talked about “you” (i.e., white America) here Kendrick is talking about “killing a grown man,” but I think the sentiments align.  Kendrick goes on:

So the next time I talk about money, hoes, clothes, God and history
All in the same sentence
Just know I meant it, and you felt it
Cause you too are searching for answers

There’s that permission to interpret, analyze, and discover meaning.  Note that he’s taking his audience seriously, seeing them as capable of reflection and creation, positioning himself alongside them.

And then the kicker:

I’m not the next pop star, I’m not the next socially aware rapper
I am a human motherfucking being over dope ass instrumentation
Now fuck ’em up Terrace

Kendrick is resisting the framings he might be placed within (a student pointed out that his Wikipedia article says that “his music features conscious, introspective lyrics”), and in the place of those, again, he’s centering himself as “a human motherfucking being.”  The emphasis on the expletive, unlike often, carries real power here – stop putting him into boxes, it seems to say, and stop doing that to the rest of us too.  This phrase is then cleverly followed up with “over dope ass instrumentation” – the whole line recalls the duality between the two “halves of the truth” mentioned earlier – the humanity and the instrumentation being the “dead fucking center” of experience.  Then he invites the music to come back in – “now fuck ‘em up Terrance” inviting the saxophone back into the track to close it out.

Someone who can write this verse needs to be in our English classrooms, on a regular basis.  This is someone taking language and its relationship to the world seriously in ways we often bemoan that our students do not do, or when we’re really exasperated, we say they cannot do.  I take some solace in the fact that this is a best-selling artist, not just some critical darling: our students are already engaging with his work.  Building on that is a great opportunity, if we are willing to take it.

[This post is part 2 of a series – click here for part 1 – Why the Kendrick/Drake Beef is Great for AP Lang – One Line as Proof of Concept]