Pop music, like the rest of American society, has reached the exhausted endpoint of the taboo-litigation mania that’s marred the past decade of our national life. Having reckoned with racism, sexism, and a host of other identitarian crimes, and then having decided the reckoning was too embarrassing in its overreach for us to continue or even to acknowledge, artists and fans have moved on to pedophilia as the final great faultline. Kendrick Lamar used February’s Super Bowl halftime show to accuse Drake, a rival hip-hop megastar, of “lik[ing] them young.” Like most rap diss tracks, “Not Like Us,” Lamar’s anti-Drake scorcher from the spring of 2024, contained not a single word of truth. It also had three long stints atop the Billboard Hot 100. Lamar’s performance of his slanderous mambo was the only real moment of drama and tension amid the Philadelphia Eagles’ unaesthetic beatdown of the Kansas City Chiefs.

Thank God for sex panics. “Not Like Us” is a colossal banger. But then a strange thing happened in the 18 months after its debut: nothing. Drake, at 81.5 million monthly Spotify listeners compared to Kendrick’s 80.5, has retained almost all of his pre-feud stature. The Toronto croon-rapper’s recent “What Did I Miss?” is now the No. 2 song in America. It seems the listening public enjoyed Lamar’s thunderous insult anthem without accepting its dubious truth-claims. Earlier this summer, Sean Combs, one of the wealthiest and least talented of hip-hop’s late ’90s exploiters, beat a federal sex trafficking charge, becoming the last major alleged criminal to be prosecuted by former FBI Director James Comey’s daughter.