Did Social Media Kill the Pop Song?

Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That” landed with the force of an atomic bomb. Released last month, the thumping diss track hit the Billboard Hot 100 in a flash but went dynamite across X, Instagram, and TikTok thanks to a surprise verse from Kendrick Lamar, the Compton rapper who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 and who is considered by many to be the best rapper alive today. It reverberated not just because of Lamar’s lyricism but because of who the lyrics were calling out: his friends turned frenemies, Drake and J Cole.