Tom Hanks' son Chet shared a screenshot of a hilarious text exchange with his "Pops" about the feud between rappers Drake and Kendrick Lamar.
The music industry has been rocked by the ongoing rap battle between the two very high-profile hip-hop artists.
Wanting clarification, hip-hop neophyte Tom Hanks asked Chet—whom he referred to as his "Big Main"—to explain the drama behind the Drake/Lamar beef.
Chet obliged him with a lengthy breakdown in terms his old man might understand.
"Yeah, so Drake and this other dude J Cole been saying they along with Kendrick are the 'Big 3' in Rap," he began.
"Then Kendrick put out a song saying, 'F'k the Big 3, it's just big ME' initiating the beef."
"Then Drake was like, 'you got small feet cuz you're like 5 foot 5 or whatever.' And then Kendrick was like, you're a dead beat dad and made fun of his Canadian accent."
"So Drake came back and was like, 'oh yeah! Well I heard you beat your wife' but literally like 30 seconds later Kendrick put out a diss overshadowing Drakes diss where he pretty much methodically dismantled Drakes entire psyche and called him a pedophile for flirting with young girls and revealing Drake had another kid that he was hiding from the world, which turned out to be false."
Here is the first of two screenshots of Chet's text message.
@chathanx/X
Chet continued with the whirlwind tension between the artists.
"And Drake came back and was like, 'hahaha I gotcho a** I had people give you false info to make you look stupid' but it didn't even matter cuz then Kendrick just dropped another West Coast banger where he really went in on labeling Drake a pedophile that was pretty much the sonic equivalent of when you took me to your high school in Oakland and we walked in on the basketball game and everybody started going nuts."
He wrapped things up with:
"Like if you heard it you would just automatically know how to Crip walk with a stank face while clutching an Oscar in each hand with Marshawn Lynch, then dap him up and tell him 'Town Bidness' which solidified the win not only for Kendrick but the entire West Coast."
The 67-year-old actor's response was:
"Holy cow! These are fighting words. People taking sides?? Who's winning??"
To which Chet replied:
"Did you not just read what I said 😂😂😂"
Here is the second screenshot.
@chathanx/X
Lamar is a rapper from Compton who rose to prominence in 2012 with his album Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City. He has won 17 Grammys and a Pulitzer Prize for his musical accomplishments.
Drake, a Canadian rapper, first gained recognition as an actor in the teen drama series Degrassi: The Next Generation in the early 2000s. His music climbed the U.S. charts with 13 number-one albums and earned him five Grammys.
The pair used to be collaborators but have gone from trading wits to lyrically annihilating each other in their music on the topics of racial identity, industry status, and serious allegations of domestic violence and sex with minors.
Their beef reportedly stemmed from Kendrick's opposition to being considered part of the "Big Three" hip-hop artists, a term rapper and producer J. Cole used in last year's “First Person Shooter” to include himself with Drake and Lamar as the leading artists dominating the genre.
The long-simmering tension between Drake and Lamar came to a head in March.
In Lamar's verse from the hard-hitting track "Like That" collaboration with Future and Metro Boomin, Lamar declared:
Motherf'k the big three, [n-world], it’s just big me.”
Lamar's hubris in distancing himself from his colleagues initiated the endless jabs between him and Drake with 40 minutes worth of diss tracks over the past several weeks.
The Guardian's Tayo Bero said of the intense sparring between the rappers at the top of their game:
"In the course of the nasty back-and-forth, they’ve made women–women who are possibly survivors of sexual abuse, harassment or domestic violence–the collateral damage of their violent mud-slinging."
The summed-up backstory courtesy of his Big Main may have been lost on Hanks, but fans were here for his absolute dad energy.
Users found Hanks' response very relatable.
The Drake/Kendrick Lamar feud is a lot to unpack.
But kudos to Chet for doing his best in explaining it to his Pops, who wanted nothing more than to stay in the pop culture loop.