Oh, **** it. I'll just print it. This person on reddit described the problem with the song better than I could, and it's exactly what I thought when I first heard the song.
"it's antisemitic in the complex sense that we are facing today, OR: it is simply a beef. But the rap is structured like this: There's a lot of throwing insults, clever and detailed, accusations of pedophilia, other random *** cultural slights that only make sense to the rap & pop elite and those that obsess over all that. But the actual framing of the whole piece, the ideas should be totally familiar, and they are not ideas that Kendrick Lamar came up with.
It's just the
settler-colonial ideology. Others have noted it here already. Lamar even has to say, "Bear with me for a second, let me put ya'll on game" in order to introduce the ideas that he's parroting from the academic and activist world. Then he explains the core idea of settler-colonialism: namely, colonialism never ended, or as the academics like to say: "it's a structure not an event." Lamar puts it like this:
The settlers was usin' town folk to make 'em richer / Fast-forward 2024, you got the same agenda
There's been no historical development, no fourteenth adendment, no civil rights act, etc etc. What we have today is the same as the 17th and 18th centuries. It's a structure not an event. Then by the end, Drake is the embodiment when Lamar sums it all up:
No, You not a colleague, you a ****in' colonizer
This is where it starts to become anti-Jewish. We all know the remarkable thing about Drake is that he's got a dual identity, both black and Jewish. He's mixed. That property of Drake that he's more than one thing, that he's and embodiment of mixing, and openness between different peoples -- all that is erased. Here's he's just a colonizer. He's a part of this structure that exploits the "folk." Lamar is the folk, but he's hip to the structure. He's unveiling Drake's hip hop status as inauthentic, a cover for what he really is.
So why is this anti-Jewish? It's not simply because of the invocation of the settler-colonial vocabulary. That ideology is probably not anti-jewish in its core essence, but it's being used that way in that it takes Jews to be the example. That's what Kendrick does here. Anti-Jewish thought has always functioned somewhat differently in history compared other ideologies of hate. You can see this clearly when you appreciate, for example, that anti-black racists have never accused black people of being the controlling evil force behind the world's power structures, whereas that is the common crude form of anti-Jewish thought. But we can put a finer point on it still:
Jews have often been used as a foil for identifying and evaluating the moral failings of society at large. When, in the last 19th and early 20th centuries, society was bound up with a critique of capitalism, Jews were seen as the most capitalist capitalists.
Today, the focus on "colonialism" as replaced the concern over "capitalism", and Jews are maligned as colonizers & settlers. This general attitude has, as we all observe, saturated the public sphere. It's a kind of "virtuous antisemitism" because it's a form of hatred at masquerades as social justice. And it's in this atmosphere that Lamar says all this.
All of this is brought together in the repetitive chorus: "Then not like us. They not like us." It's as hateful a chorus line as one can imagine. It compacts all the politics of resentment and harm and inauthenticity and directs it as Drake, the Jew masquerading as a black, the colleague who is just a colonizer. Except now it expands it not just to Drake, but to "they". And we know this conspiratorial pronoun very well.
The problem we have in identifying this rap as anti-Jewish, as based in a politics of rage and hate, is symptomatic of the problem we face in facing much anti-Jewish expression today that courses through the left and liberal political spheres, because it's all cleverly concealed behind the veil of social justice. The language is laced with these meanings in ways that the people who consume it feel without knowing. We have our work cut out for us in combatting this." - ethanzanemiller, Reddit
Yeah, get off my lawn you scoundrel.
) but I got into Kendrick on his first album. Didn’t keep up, but my oldest son (20 yrs old) loves him and we listened to his latest album together a bit on a drive to the airport. The sounds, arrangements, rhythms and creativity of the music alone is just amazing. And the rhythm and sound of his voice and lyrics are so unique, intentional and expertly executed, that anyone who plays music, regardless of genre, should be able to appreciate. 
