UMG Rips Drake A New One, Says Drake Trying To Ruin Rap Genre Over “Not Like Us”

March 28, 2026

UMG fired back at Drake’s appeal, arguing his lawsuit would destroy Hip-Hop’s creative foundation built on wordplay.

Drake just got absolutely demolished in court documents filed by Universal Music Group over his appeal in the “Not Like Us” defamation lawsuit.

UMG’s legal team came out swinging on Friday, arguing that the Toronto rapper is trying to strip context from Hip-Hop’s most fundamental creative elements to win a case that should’ve stayed dead.

The music giant’s response brief makes it crystal clear: Drake’s attempt to treat Kendrick Lamar’s diss track like a factual statement is legally baseless and would destroy everything that makes rap music work.

Drake sued UMG back in January 2025 after Kendrick Lamar dropped “Not Like Us” in May 2024, the knockout punch in their brutal rap battle that called him a “certified pedophile.”

A federal judge dismissed the entire case in October, ruling that reasonable listeners understand rap insults aren’t statements of fact.

Drake appealed that dismissal in January, claiming millions of people actually believed the lyric and suffered real reputational damage. UMG’s lawyers basically said that the argument is nonsense.

“That is not the law, and Drake’s view would critically undermine a highly creative art form built on exaggeration, insult, and wordplay,” UMG wrote in their response brief according to Billboard.

The label pointed out that Drake himself had thrown equally vicious accusations at Kendrick, claiming he beat his fiancée and didn’t father one of his kids.

That’s the entire genre. That’s how rap works. You don’t get to suddenly pretend it’s literal when you’re the one losing the battle.

The legal team emphasized that “‘Not Like Us’ falls within a genre typified by inflammatory putdowns, epithets, vulgarity, and hyperbole.”

Ripping words out of context and pretending they’re defamatory statements has zero legal foundation. Judge Jeannette Vargas already established that hyperbolic opinions in rap can’t be defamatory because no reasonable person would take them as provable facts.

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