Common Music Group have moved to dismiss Drake’s defamation swimsuit, characterising it as “a misguided try” by the Canadian rapper to “salve his wounds” after he “misplaced a rap battle” with rival Kendrick Lamar.
Within the movement, filed on Monday within the US district court docket for the southern district of New York, Common Music Group (UMG), which represents each artists, claimed that Drake “misplaced a rap battle that he provoked and by which he willingly participated.
“As an alternative of accepting the loss just like the unbothered rap artist he typically claims to be, he has sued his personal document label in a misguided try to salve his wounds. Plaintiff’s grievance is completely with out advantage and must be dismissed with prejudice”.
The long-term rivalry between Drake and Kendrick Lamar escalated in March 2024 with the rapid-fire, tit-for-tat launch of diss tracks by each artists, culminating within the launch of Not Like Us on 4 Could, by which Lamar framed Drake as a “licensed pedophile”. The monitor proved immensely fashionable, topping the Billboard International 200 chart and successful File and Music of the Yr on the 2025 Grammys.
Drake filed a lawsuit in January accusing UMG of defamation and harassment, and alleging that UMG “permitted, printed and launched a marketing campaign to create a viral hit out of a rap monitor” that was “supposed to convey the precise, unmistakable, and false factual allegation that Drake is a felony pedophile, and to recommend that the general public ought to resort to vigilante justice in response”.
Drake’s swimsuit famous that the paintings for Not Like Us contains a image of his Toronto dwelling with markers used to establish the houses of registered intercourse offenders; and referred to a taking pictures that occurred outdoors the residence days after the monitor’s launch by which a safety guard was injured, and two tried trespassings within the subsequent days.
“This lawsuit shouldn’t be in regards to the artist who created ‘Not Like Us,’” the submitting by Drake’s workforce learn. “It’s, as an alternative, fully about UMG, the music firm that determined to publish, promote, exploit, and monetize allegations that it understood weren’t solely false, however harmful.”
In its movement to dismiss, Common argue that Drake fails to make a declare for defamation, saying that Not Like Us “conveys nonactionable opinion and rhetorical hyperbole, not truth,” and noting that the rapper has relied on UMG to advertise his personal diss tracks towards Lamar and others.
Drake’s lawsuit, UMG says in its submitting, “disregards the opposite Drake and Lamar diss tracks that surrounded ‘Not Like Us’ in addition to the conventions of the diss monitor style … diss tracks are a preferred and celebrated artform centered round outrageous insults, and they’d be severely chilled if Drake’s swimsuit had been permitted to proceed.”
“Lower than three years in the past, Drake himself signed a public petition criticizing ‘the pattern of prosecutors utilizing artists’ inventive expression towards them’ by treating rap lyrics as literal truth,” UMG’s movement continues. “As Drake acknowledged, in terms of rap, ‘[t]he closing work is a product of the artist’s imaginative and prescient and creativeness’.
“Drake was proper then and is mistaken now.”
Common additionally denies that its promotion of Not Like Us invited harassment of Drake, stating that the rapper is making an attempt “to contort violent metaphors within the lyrics into incitement”. “As together with his defamation declare, Drake seeks to sit back a type of creative expression that he himself has embraced,” the movement reads.
In an announcement offered to Selection, Drake’s lawyer Michael J. Gottlieb responded to Common’s movement to dismiss, saying: “UMG desires to faux that that is a few rap battle with a purpose to distract its shareholders, artists and the general public from a easy fact: a grasping firm is lastly being held answerable for making the most of harmful misinformation that has already resulted in a number of acts of violence.
“This movement is a determined ploy by UMG to keep away from accountability, however we’ve each confidence that this case will proceed and proceed to uncover UMG’s lengthy historical past of endangering, abusing and profiting from its artists.”
Supply hyperlink
