The FADER’s 2024 Songs of the Summer bracket is divided into four March Madness-style regionals, and the winner of the Main Stage Regional was Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us.” Below, Jordan Darville makes the case for why the song deserves to take home the chip.
Listen to the Main Stage episode of The FADER’s Songs of the Summer series wherever you get your podcasts, or embedded below.
Read Next: Songs of the Summer: Final Four
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Head east down Lake Shore Blvd in Toronto, make it through the bumper-to-bumper, pealing traffic full of Canadians eager to shatter some politeness stereotypes, and you’ll catch a glimpse of the October’s Very Own logo. It’s emblazoned next to the Toronto Raptors’ emblem on the OVO Athletic Center, a training facility for basketball players established in 2016, arguably the era when Drake’s megastardom peaked. Back then, Drake was a new Canadian institution, a champion three years before the Raptors. In the summer of 2024, the stainless steel owl is more of an albatross.
The vitriol fuelling Kendrick Lamar and Drake’s rap beef had a permissive quality — nothing, be it family or speculation over sex crimes, was out of bounds. Every kind of online denizen from multimillionaire streamers to broke Twitter addicts fed into the metastasizing discourse. And yet, improbably, “Not Like Us” managed to escape the whirlpool that consumed the rest of the diss tracks. Lamar has positioned the song as a West Coast anthem that transcends beef, an angle that probably wouldn’t have flown without the rapturous joy of the Pop Out concert.
Canada was already having a miserable summer before “Not Like Us.” The cost of living crisis has exploded to farcical levels, and the coming election in 2025 seems poised to sweep in a far-right prime minister with a supermajority of representatives. When I heard my teenage neighbor blaring “Not Like Us” from his car stereo, it sounded like the final nail in the coffin, hammered from the inside.
