“A Bar Song” and the NY Bar: Shaboozey, Drake, and scalable value in a financialized music industry

In their “Year in Music 2024” post to their station website, Jacksonville, Florida Hip hop station Power 106.1 declared that “Women Run The World of Hip Hop.” NPR declared around the same time that “Southern women are shaping the sound of hip-hop’s future.” Earlier in the year, BET observed that women outnumbered men in the “Song of the Year” category at their Hip Hop Awards five to four, and proclaimed that “these artists not only showcase the immense talent of women in rap today but also demonstrate that women are at the forefront of shaping hip-hop’s future.” I have shown how the performance of feminine resilience allows femme pop stars to exhibit the kind of “scalable” value-generation that financialized markets expect of good investments: because patriarchy sets women back, their performance has much more room for growth. Given the genre’s traditional association with the performance of hypermasculinity, these “women run hip hop” narratives are a version of such resilience discourse. 

In 2024, the only men in hip hop with breakout success leveraged the affordances of the financialized music and media industries to find other ways to create scale besides flipping feminized damage into a spectacle of resilience. Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” dominated the Billboard Hot 100. This hip hop-country hybrid tapped into what Andrew DeWaard calls the logic of “derivative media” to open out a single piece of intellectual property, such as a comics franchise, to as many markets as possible. Whereas “Old Town Road” did this with a series of various genre-inflected remixes, “A Bar Song” was designed to game the charts by appealing to a variety of different radio formats simultaneously. As Chris Molanphy reports,

the team promoting Shaboozey had an ambitious plan to get his hit on as many radio formats as possible. Simply put, it worked: Billboard reports that “A Bar Song” is the first single to crack the top 10 on the magazine’s Pop Airplay, Country Airplay, Adult Pop Airplay, and Rhythmic Airplay charts. (Those last two formats are stations that play current pop for adult audiences and those that play a mix of R&B, rap, and dance, respectively.)

Radio airplay is one of the factors contributing to a song’s position on the Hot 100 chart, so getting a song played on as many different radio stations as possible is a way to “scale” its chart-value (i.e., to increase its performance exponentially while not incurring additional costs at that same rate). Unlike the Marvel or DC superhero movie franchises, which scales the value of the underlying intellectual property by creating an endless stream of reboots and new versions, “A Bar Song” was written so that its stylistic pluralism allowed a wide range of demographically-defined radio audiences to hear the same song in different ways. Instead of resiliently flipping a low-status gender identity into scalable value, “A Bar Song” leans into the logic of the derivative to game the financialized music and media industries.

While “A Bar Song” ruled the charts in 2024, the men rappers who broke through The Discourse and drove engagement on social media were Drake and Kendrick Lamar. As Pitchfork’s Alphonse Pierre put it, “If you have a pulse, you probably heard that Kendrick Lamar and Drake got into a little spat that culminated with one making a countrywide anthem and the other putting out an unhinged rant listing all the reasons why they couldn’t possibly be a pedophile.” Pierre is writing about Lamar’s 2024 single “Not Like Us,” a virally-successful Drake diss whose title went on to become a meme (much in the same way Drake once did a decade earlier). From Biggie and Tupac to Jay-Z and Nas, there’s nothing especially new about rap beef itself. What’s new in the Drake/Kendrick beef is a financialized, platformized media industry on the one hand, and Drake’s litigious response, on the other. “Not Like Us” scaled on the streaming market to a degree that no other hip hop song had ever exhibited: it was the fastest that a rap song had ever reached each 100 million-stream milestone up to 700 million. This unprecedented performance was driven by the viral interest in the beef itself. As an article titled “How Kendrick Lamar Went Viral With ‘Not Like Us’ and How You Can Too” puts it, “social media magnified the rivalry, turning it into a spectacle that everyone wanted to watch.” The spectacle of the rappers’ mutual grievance fueled the viral performance of their diss tracks.

In late 2024, Drake announced that he would be taking his grievance from the mic to court. Not only did Larmar’s lyrics repeatedly impute that Drake had sex with underage girls, but many of the streaming records “Not Like Us” broke belonged, you guessed it, to Drake. First, Drake’s team filed a pre-trial petition announcing the intent to sue both his and Larmar’s label, Universal Music Group (UMG), and Spotify; he accused them of executing “a campaign to manipulate and saturate the streaming services and airwaves with a song, “Not Like Us,” in order to make that song go viral, including by using “bots” and pay-to-play agreements.” Given U.S. law, Drake would only have standing to sue in this case if these practices caused him undue harm. Thus, the filing argues that “Streaming and licensing is a zero-sum game. Every time a song “breaks through,” it means another artist does not…As Drake is Petitioner’s sole owner, and Petitioner owns the copyright to Drake’s entire catalogue, Petitioner suffered economic harm as a result of UMG’s scheme” (10). According to this court document, “Not Like Us”’s exceptional viral success harmed Drake by devaluing or inversely scaling the intellectual property assets he owns, i.e., his own song catalog. In early 2025, Drake dropped that line of legal action and filed a defamation suit against UMG which claimed that their promotion of “Not Like Us” and its lyrics accusing Drake of being a criminal child sexual offender “devalue[d] Drake’s music and brand” (4). Instead of clapping back at Kendrick with his own new diss track, Drake responded to “Not Like Us” with legal motions accusing UMG of illegally deflating the value of his song catalog and his reputation.

News of Drake’s legal motions went viral, but public sentiment about them did not break in his favor. A January 24, 2025 article in The Root proclaims that “Drake’s Karen Ways Get Called Out in Response to ‘Not Like Us’ Lawsuit.” “Karen” is a slang term for entitled white women who make a spectacle out of punching down on those with less status and power than they have. UrbanDictionary.com defines “karen” as “The queen of all suburban white moms. Will always want to speak to the manager” and “A white woman who always causes drama and racist af.” From graffiti artists running from cops in the 1970s, to sample lawsuits and gangsta rap in the 90s, to prosecutors’ current attempts to use rap lyrics in court as admission of criminal wrongdoing, the hip hop community has long had an adversarial relationship with law enforcement. This is why Drake’s litigious turn reads like entitled white lady behavior: it is, as one Black Bluesky user put it, “definitely not like us.” Another Bluesky user responded to the news of the suit with an image of the Confederate surrender to the Union. Transducing a rap beef into a personal injury lawsuit, Drake is seen to perform a type of whiteness.

In U.S. law, defamation is a type of personal injury claim. As the personal injury attorney association website Enjuris explains, in cases of defamation, “to prove injury, the plaintiff usually must show that the harm to their reputation resulted in economic damage (loss of business, earning capacity, or property). Some states allow non-economic damages (pain and suffering, emotional distress, etc.) where the injury is loss of standing in the community, personal humiliation, shame, or disgrace.” To be defamed is to experience a violation of one’s property rights and, possibly, a loss of status.

As critical race theorist Cheryl Harris has canonically argued, white people experience the benefits of white supremacy as a property right, such as the right to non-trespass. Harris calls this phenomenon “whiteness as property.” According to Harris, “the set of assumptions, privileges, and benefits that accompany the status of being white have become a valuable asset” (1713) that U.S. law treats as such, i.e., as property.  Though the idea that white people had a property interest in their white identity dates back to chattel slavery and the colonization of North America, it wasn’t critically thematized as such until 1989 – a little over a decade into the emergence of Critical Race Theory as a field of legal scholarship. According to Harris, the first critical legal scholarship to discuss whiteness as a  “property interest” is Derrick Bell’s 1989 paper in George Mason Law Review on Plessy vs. Ferguson. Harris’s landmark 1993 article “Whiteness As Property” takes this idea and traces its full history in U.S. law. Focusing on Plessy vs. Ferguson, Brown vs. Board of Education, and late 80s/early 90s anti-affirmative action suits, Harris argues that “whiteness shares the critical characteristics of property even as the meaning of property has changed over time.” (1714). Plessy treats whiteness as “status property”, limiting legitimate property ownership only to those of white status. Brown treats whiteness as “the settled expectations of relative white privilege as a legitimate and natural baseline.” (1714) In both cases, property right is framed as a “right to exclude” (1714), such as the right to exclude non-whites from property ownership, or the right to exclude non-whites from trespassing upon settled expectations of white privilege. 

Harris’s discussion of late 20th century legal debates about affirmative action suggest the emergence of personal injury as a third iteration of whiteness as property. Affirmative action’s core function was to give members of historically-marginalized groups preferential treatment to make up for the ongoing structural impacts of that marginalization; in this respect, its function was as much about the distribution of advantage as it was reparation or “corrective” compensation for past individual harm. However, Harris argues that “the property interest in whiteness has skewed the concept of affirmative action by focusing on the sin or innocence of individual white claimants with vested rights, rather than on the broader questions of distribution of benefits and burdens” (1780). Because affirmative actions’ corrective effects had the potential to unsettle white people’s settled expectations of relative white privilege, mainstream debates about the program centered exclusively on the issue of whether individual white people (men) deserved the loss of that entitlement through some quote-unquote sin against minorities. As she notes, ”lawsuits brought by white males claiming constitutional injury allegedly produced by affirmative action programs have proliferated and garnered support in many quarters” (1767; emphasis mine).  These anti-affirmative action suits treated such redistribution as an injury to plaintiffs’ civil person that deprived them of their “settled expectations” in whiteness as property, much in the same way that a negligent driver might deprive someone they injure in a car crash of things like full use of their body or future earning potential. Even though the wrong here is a constitutional matter, these anti-affirmative action lawsuits treat it as a personal injury lawsuit. “By disavowing the essential jurisprudential nature of affirmative action to be both corrective and distributive,” Harris argues, “conflict that is both private and public in nature becomes wholly privatized” (1783). Ignoring the distributive or fairness question and focusing only on the corrective one, late 20th century anti-affirmative action rhetoric and jurisprudence frames whiteness as property as a form of private individual grievance or personal injury. 

As contemporary rightwing moral panics about so-called “cancel culture” and “free speech” attest, whiteness-as-personal-injury remains central to the construction and experience of whiteness in the 21st century. This is why Drake’s personal injury lawsuit reads as an especially clear affiliation with whiteness: he’s performing the same sort of whiteness-as-property that right-wing influencers and politicians spout in their gripes about, say, women owing men sex or their entitlement to use racist, sexist, and ableist slurs. 

In a financialized media industry, personal injury is a structure that grants people who have traditionally not been damaged by patriarchal racial capitalism the capacity to claim a damage that they can flip into a scalable spectacle. Drake’s lawsuits have certainly created a spectacle, driven social media engagement, and kept him in the spotlight despite not releasing any new music. He may not be getting the sort of payout Kendrick got from his 900 million streams and counting, but Drake’s brand is nevertheless a highly visible asset generating money for platforms like TikTok and Bluesky. His performance of personal injury lets Drake tap into the scalability of resilience while avoiding its femme connotations.

Drake’s leaning into whiteness-as-personal-injury aligns him with alt-right figures such as “Black Nazi” Mark Robinson or the Latino ex-Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio (he allegedly has other things in common with Matt Gaetz). Just as Sam de Boise has noted that the alt-right adopts “an avowed openness to genre-based pluralism” amid an ongoing commitment to white “racial superiority,” it also accommodates some degree of demographic pluralism…especially to the extent that these non-white alt-right influencers’ performances of grievance make money for, say, the owner of X/Twitter, Spotify, Meta, and other companies who have cozied up to the current administration. It will be interesting to see if Drake goes full-out with his performance of grievance and does the stereotypical “I’ve been cancelled, boo-hoo, now I explicitly embrace the extreme right!” heel turn.