Big Sean is putting all the rumours about his alleged beef with Kendrick Lamar to rest, as he spoke to Joe Budden about his rumoured feud with the Compton rapper on Budden's "Pull Up" series. When Kendrick hopped on Sean's track "Control" in 2013 and called Sean out along with plenty of other rappers on his explosive verse, it was heavily assumed that the two were not on good terms. This speculation rose when Sean seemingly clapped back at Kendrick on "No More Interviews" three years later. On the track, Sean spits, "And I’m just not impressed by you ni*gas rapping fast / Who sound like one big asthma attack, but trash when I’m rapping it back / Who you put in your top five and claim they the saviour of rap / So many friends turn to enemies, they frenemies.” Sitting down with Joe on "Pull Up," Sean clarified that the diss wasn't aimed at Kendrick.
"I remember going online and seeing, ‘Oh, is he talking about Kendrick?’" Sean recalled about the "No More Interviews" lyrics. "Cause I was talking about people who rap fast. I wasn’t beefing with nobody. I was literally addressing a whole f*cking—I’m just rapping, ni*ga. It wasn’t like a specific person or else I would’ve said his name. So I see and I’m like, ‘That’s some bullsh*t.’ So I didn’t give no energy to it."
However, new developments occurred when Kendrick dropped "The Heart Part 4" in 2017. "Time goes on," Sean continues, "and then Kendrick, he dropped a freestyle and I don’t know what he said that made people like, ‘Oh, it’s about Sean.' So I hear the sh*t, I’m like, ‘What part they talking about?'" In an attempt to sort things out, Sean contacted Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith, CEO of Top Dawg Entertainment where Kendrick is signed. Top assured him that Kendrick was not firing shots at him. “I immediately hit up Top cause I got a relationship with Top. And they like, ‘No, it ain’t about you at all. That was just addressing to everyone. That was just to whoever. But don’t listen to the Internet, they just gonna throw 200 on it,'” he explained. “I’m like, ‘Alright, fo sho.’ Imagine I have that conversation, I’m like, ‘Alright I ain’t even gotta reach out to Kendrick.'"
Sean would come to regret never addressing the alleged diss with Kendrick, though, as their relationship was affected by all this beef talk despite neither of them having a problem with one another. "It got to a point where somehow, it was just a weird tension between me and him even though it was already said it was no beef because people made it that way," he explained. "Fast forward, I let the sh*t go. He let the sh*t go. He never talked about it. I never talked about it and I should've said something. I should've just came out and been like, ‘Nah, that ain’t it.'”
Ultimately, the two of them sorted out their issues, after Sean was reminded of the somewhat nonexistent drama by an executive for TDE, Punch. Sean and Punch were seated next to each other on a flight to North Carolina for J. Cole’s Dreamville Festival last April, when the topic of Kendrick was brought up. “He’s like, ‘You ever hollered at Kendrick?’ And then as soon as he said that…it was like, ‘Ohhh,'" Sean noted. "I damn near put it on the back burner in my brain. I’m like, ‘Damn. No, I never did.’ And he was like, ‘Man, you should’ve definitely hollered at him.'" Luckily, it wasn't too late for the two MCs to make peace. “Got his number and we communicated," Sean revealed. "The respect is mutual. It was literally nothing."