Drake has announced that he will kick off his new tour of Australia on the same day that Kendrick Lamar is scheduled to perform his Super Bowl Halftime Show.
The Canadian rapper’s first Australian tour in eight years will commence on February 9, the same day his rival Lamar will be performing his high-profile show at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans.
The two musicians have been embroiled in a feud for much of the past year.
Drake made the announcement during a livestream on Sunday night (November 24) with Félix Lengyel, a Quebec streamer.
He did not make a connection between the opening date and the Super Bowl. Drake went on to say that the tour will include stops in Melbourne, Sydney and the Gold Coast and will continue “until, like, March something.”
“I’m just going to go to Australia for now. It’s been eight years,” he said. “I love it there.”
Earlier this week, Drake claimed that their shared record label secretly gamed the system to artificially inflate Lamar’s diss track “Not Like Us”, in which the Compton rapper accuses the former child star of being a “certified pedophile.”
Drake also claimed the label worked to suppress his own music.
In an eyepopping court filing obtained by The Independent, Drake, born Aubrey Drake Graham, says Universal Music Group (UMG) used a network of bots, in conjunction with a so-called pay-to-play scheme, to “manipulate and saturate the streaming services and airwaves” with Lamar’s smash hit song “Not Like Us,” all to Drake’s detriment.
Lamar, meanwhile, recently surprise released his sixth album GNX.
Fans were quick to identify developments in his feud with Drake. They singled out the fact that last May, Drake released a diss track about Lamar titled “The Heart Part 6,” which co-opted its title from Lamar’s series of “Heart” songs.
GNX includes Lamar’s own song “heart pt. 6,” an indication that Lamar has decided not to recognize Drake’s song. The track itself doesn’t comment on the feud.
Elsewhere Lamar tackles the controversy that arose after his Super Bowl Halftime Show performance was announced, to the chagrin of fellow rapper Lil Wayne. On “wacced out murals,” the opening track of GNX, Lamar references a classic Lil Wayne album from 2008 as he raps: “Used to bump Tha Carter III, I held my Rollie chain proud / Irony, I think my hard work let Lil Wayne down.”
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A few bars later, he adds: “Won the Super Bowl and Nas the only one congratulate me / All these n***** agitated / I’m just glad it’s on their faces / Quite frankly, plenty artist but they outdated / Old-a** flows trying to convince me that you they favorite.”
The lyrics reference the fact that Lamar’s success in being chosen to perform at the Super Bowl inadvertently let down Lil Wayne, who had been hoping to perform at the event in his hometown of New Orleans.
Additional reporting by Associated Press
