Pawns of war: misogynoir, hip hop and cancel culture

This article uses the 2024 rap beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake to examine the entanglement of misogynoir, hip hop, and cancel culture. The month-long sparring included a series of allegations, ranging from cultural appropriation, domestic violence, and anti-Black misogyny. We contextualize this dispute within cancel culture which has increasingly been used to describe accountability practices against public figures for wrongdoing. The emphasis on lyrics and symbolism within rap makes a semiotic analysis fitting, and we conduct a content analysis of the song lyrics and cover art to understand what linguistic and visual signs were used to articulate cancel discourses within the feud. We end by discussing how cancel culture is complicated within a misogynoir-istic hip hop culture where violence against women, Black women in particular, is often normalized. In their attempt to bash and expose each other to the public, both rappers use women as weapons against the other without an actual call for redress to the victims of the violences they are detailing. This feud was thus not driven by a concern for the alleged victims' safety or a call for accountability, but a game of heteropatriarchal showmanship wherein Black women are merely pawns of war.