Kendrick Lamar and Drake beef

Kendrick Lamar’s show-stopping performance at Super Bowl on Sunday was, for many, a victory lap following his knock-out blow in a long-running beef with fellow rapper Drake.

The Compton star’s entire half-time set seemed to swiftly build to a performance of Not Like Us, his Grammy-winning takedown of Drake which was one of last year’s biggest hits… but is also now the subject of a potential libel case brought by the Canadian.

Drake was performing in Australia on Sunday, dishing out cash to several of his fans at a Melbourne show, before the whole world tuned in to watch his rival.

The origins of the argument go back more than decade. But here’s a quick reminder of where we are now and how we got here over a heated 12 months:

In March last year, producer and former Drake collaborator Metro Boomin’ and rapper Future released a collaborative album called We Don’t Trust You.

Hidden in the tracklisting was a song called Like That with an uncredited verse by Kendrick Lamar… and it was explosive.

In it, Lamar took aim at rapper J Cole’s previous claim – that himself, Kendrick and Drake were “the big three” – proclaiming: “big three – it’s just big me”.

After years of tension, the fuse had been lit.

Soon after, Drake appeared to address Kendrick’s verse at a concert in Florida.

He told the crowd: “I know that no matter what, it’s not a [person] on this earth that could ever [expletive] with me in my life!”

Two weeks later, J Cole offered his own reply to Kendrick’s verse, on a track called 7 Minute Drill, but he soon realised it had been a huge “mis-step”.

Speaking on stage at the Dreamville Festival in North Carolina, he apologised for the song, praised Lamar’s back catalogue and asked for forgiveness.

Drake then released a song called Push Ups (Drop and Give Me 50), in which he took aim at Lamar’s height, calling him a midget (he’s 5ft 4in tall) and a record label puppet who’s forced to collaborate with pop artists.

“Maroon 5 need a verse, you better make it witty / Then we need a verse for the Swifties,” he cajoled.

He also took issue with Lamar’s position in the hip-hop hierarchy, suggesting other artists had overtaken him.

More rappers, including Kanye West and Rick Ross got drawn into the feud. But Drake’s attention was solely focused on Lamar.

The Toronto star goaded his US adversary by dropping yet another diss track called Taylor Made Freestyle, which suggested Lamar was too cowardly to release music in the same week as Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department.

What’s more he used artificial intelligence to deliver the insults in the voices of Lamar’s heroes, Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg.

Lamar finally responded with a full-blown, six-minute riposte on record.

Titled Euphoria (a reference to the HBO show where Drake serves as an executive producer), it saw him brand Drake as “predictable”, a “master manipulator” and a “habitual liar”, while calling his sparring partner’s parenting skills into question.

“Let me say I’m the biggest hater,” he rapped. “I hate the way that you walk, the way that you talk, I hate the way that you dress.”

Less than 72 hours later, he followed up with a second song called 6:16 in LA.

In it, he claimed that someone inside Drake’s organisation was leaking damaging information.

“You must be a terrible person/ Everyone inside your team is whispering that you deserve it.”

In May, Drake shot back with a song called Family Matters, which took the feud to new heights.

On the track, he speculated that Lamar might be a perpetrator of domestic abuse (the star has never faced such an allegation).

Within 20 minutes, Lamar retaliated with a third diss track, Meet The Grahams, which opened with the ominous warning: “You [messed] up the minute you called out my family’s name”.

Each verse was addressed to one of Drake’s closest family members, listing the rapper’s supposed failures.

Among the claims, he said Drake had secretly fathered second child, and was addicted to gambling, sex and drugs.

Drake responded on Instagram by asking whoever had his “hidden daughter” to hand her back, adding that Lamar’s claims were a “shambles”.

But the Californian wasn’t finished and he dropped a fourth diss track, Not Like Us, in which he accused Drake of having relationships with underage women.

“Say, Drake, I hear you like ’em young / Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A minor,” he rapped.

Drake hit back a day later, angrily denying the accusations and daring Lamar to reveal proof.

“Drake is not a name that you gonn’ see on no sex offender list, easy does it / You mentioning A minor … B sharp and tell the fans: Who was it?”

Fast forward to January this year, and Drake decided to sue the Universal Music Group (UMG) for defamation and harassment, over its release of Not Like Us.

In papers filed in New York, Drake’s lawyers accused the record label of launching “a campaign to create a viral hit” out of a song that made the “false factual allegation that Drake is a criminal paedophile, and to suggest that the public should resort to vigilante justice in response”.

In response, Universal, which has been Drake’s label for more than a decade said his claims were not only untrue but “illogical”.

It also accused the star of trying to “silence” Lamar, who shares the same label, by taking their rap battle to the courts.

“Throughout his career, Drake has intentionally and successfully used UMG to distribute his music and poetry to engage in conventionally outrageous back-and-forth ‘rap battles’ to express his feelings about other artists,” the label said.

“He now seeks to weaponise the legal process to silence an artist’s creative expression and to seek damages from [Universal] for distributing that artist’s music.”

Which brings us to the Super Bowl. A couple of minutes into his half-time show, Lamar said: “I want to play their favourite song… but you know they love to sue.”

In the build-up to the big event, there had been questions over whether he would, or even could play it, legally-speaking.

Lamar leaned into the dilemma, teasing the song during his set, before finally giving the audience what they wanted.

When the song finally played, Kendrick self-censored the most contentious lyric. But he looked directly into the camera with a mischievous grin as he called out Drake’s name; and left intact the song’s notorious double-entendre: “Tryin’ to strike a chord and it’s probably A minor.”

That lyric echoed around the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, indicating that no amount of legal action could ever hope to diminish the song’s popularity.

In playing it, Lamar was expected to have reached more than 120 million TV viewers who had tuned in to see the game, as well as the likes of Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, Sir Paul McCartney and Stormzy who were inside the stadium.

The performance was further heightened by the surprise appearance of tennis star Serena Williams, reportedly an old flame of Drake’s.

Williams, a Compton kid like Kendrick, performed the Crip Walk – a notorious Los Angeles dance move – as the headliner prowled the stage.

In a review of the gig, the Guardian said the Pulitzer prize-winning rapper “delivered the final blow to his diss track nemesis”.

While over in the US, Variety noted how Lamar had quite literally declared “game over” in the battle.