Cosmopolitan UK, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons / HOTSPOTATL, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, Cropped by Resist the Mainstream

Rapper Kanye “Ye” West has once again made headlines by jumping into the fray of a rap beef between artists Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole, taking the former’s side in the conflict with a diss track of his own.

This time, West has released a remix of the track “Like That,” originally by Future, Metro Boomin, and Kendrick Lamar, which includes direct disses aimed at Drake and J. Cole. During his appearance on Justin LaBoy’s The Download, Kanye West premiered this remix, making clear his alignment with Kendrick Lamar by explicitly supporting him in his lyrics.

“Yo Dot, I got you,” Kanye rapped, using Kendrick’s former alias K-Dot, to express his solidarity.

“Y’all so out of sight, out of mind / I can’t even think of a Drake line / Play J. Cole, get the p*ssy dry,” West said during his verse, directly targeting both Drake and J. Cole.

Following the release of this track, Kanye took to X to further his assault by posting a lewd meme, implying that disliking Cole’s music would make one more likely to receive fellatio from women.

This online activity follows a series of public exchanges and tracks in which Cole and Lamar, long compared to one another and even rumored as potential collaborators, have variously criticized one another, escalating the feud to new heights.

J. Cole, despite many “woke” views about race, has been characterized by leftist Pitchfork reviewer Craig Jenkins as a “perfect brute” for expressing his frank views about women, a tendency which may partially explain why the North Carolina-raised rapper has lagged behind his peer Kendrick Lamar in critical acclaim. Cole’s most popular song remains 2014’s “No Role Modelz,” a brutal invective against the low quality of women in the 21st century, which culminates in a litany of women from previous who Cole wishes he could “take home” in contrast to the treacherous, deceitful harlots whom with whom he interfaces, characterizing the latter as “hoes from reality shows.”

While Kendrick has enjoyed critical acclaim and is less frequently criticized on the basis of sins against intersectionality, he too is no stranger to controversy. Notably, Lamar’s 2017 album DAMN. features numerous references to the ideology of the Black Hebrew Israelites and related groups, and Lamar was photographed around the time of the album’s release meeting with Louis Farrakhan—the controversial leader of the Nation of Islam, who has been characterized as an antisemite on the basis of statements such as “The Jews, a small handful, control the movement of this great nation, like a radar controls the movement of a great ship in the waters… The Jews got a stranglehold on the Congress,” as documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center—an institution famously reluctant to criticize African Americans.

Lamar himself, in the lyrics of “YAH,” expressed an interest in the ideology of Black Hebrew Israelites, which Jewish groups take offense to as denying the legitimacy of rabbinical Jews, with lyrics such as “I’m an Israelite / Don’t call me black no more.” While Lamar has faced far less criticism for these views than Ye has for his more overt criticisms of the Jewish people, these gestures may be partially attributable for Ye’s solidarity with the critical darling behind good kid, m.A.A.d. city and To Pimp a Butterfly.