Kendrick Lamar was recently asked if he was dissing Drake during his BET Hip Hop Awards cypher. "I was having fun rapping," Kendrick Lamar says in the interview with New York radio station Power 105.1. "We was just having fun. Hip Hop is a sport. People are gonna dissect lyrics and that's what it's about at the end of the day. I've got nothing against Drake. He put out a great album again. He's doing his thing. He's part of this new generation that's doing this music."
Kendrick Lamar was believed to have dissed Drake during his cypher.
"Nothing's been the same since they dropped 'Control' / And tucked the sensitive rapper back in his pajama clothes," Kendrick Lamar says in his cypher verse. "Ha-ha, jokes on you / High-five, I'm bullet proof / Your shits will never penetrate / Pin the tail on the donkey, boy, you've been a fake."
After "Control" was released, Drake responded to the song in an interview with Billboard.
"I didn't really have anything to say about it," Drake said. "It just sounded like an ambitious thought to me. That's all it was. I know good and well that Kendrick's not murdering me, at all, in any platform. So when that day presents itself, I guess we can revisit the topic."
Drake recently spoke about "Control," saying that he lost respect for Kendrick Lamar's sentiments on the verse.
"He didn’t come in there on some wild, ‘I’m in New York, fuck everybody,’" Drake said in September. "I almost wish he had come in there on that shit because I kind of lost a little bit of respect for the sentiment of the verse. If it’s really ‘fuck everybody’ then it needs to be ‘fuck everybody.’ It can’t just be halfway.”
The Power 105.1 interview was held during the station's Powerhouse. At the event, Kendrick Lamar featured Lil' Kim during his set. Lamar introduced her as an "influential" emcee in the industry.