Even when neither of them popped out at last night’s BET Awards, Kendrick Lamar and Drake were still the men of the hour. It started outside the building on the red carpet, where reporters were asking anybody and everybody to weigh in on the months-old beef. “This is my third time being asked about this,” Too Short told Billboard, declaring his fellow West Coast rapper Kendrick the winner. Mostly everyone else on the carpet agreed — even Jermaine Dupri’s daughter Jalynn. Inside, the audience may have thought they were getting a surprise Lamar performance to kick off the show, before realizing that, no, that was just host Taraji P. Henson dressed as Kendrick Lamar. (If the breathless rapping or the lines about the BET Awards also didn’t give it away.) Even Vice-President Kamala Harris slipped a reference into a prerecorded moment with Henson: “The majority of us believe in freedom and equality, but these extremists, as they say, they’re not like us.”
And when it came to trophies, the BET Awards declared a winner in the beef too. Lamar won Best Male Hip-Hop Artist for a record seventh time, though his award wasn’t televised. Drake, though, had come into the night with the most nominations, at seven — but by the end, he hadn’t earned a single trophy. That’s not worse than getting bodied in a rap beef with the world watching, but it’s pretty close.
