Remember When Drake and Kendrick Lamar Performed Together in Arlington? We Do.

In case you somehow didn’t hear, Drake and Kendrick Lamar are beefing.

It all started off as a good, old-fashioned beef. Diss tracks are cornerstones of rap history, and when Drake and Lamar first began puffing up their chests back in March, fans of both artists were practically foaming at the mouth to see these titans go head to head.

In the past few weeks, however, Drake and Lamar’s beef has rapidly escalated from jabs about ghostwriting and corny pop song features to disturbing accusations of hiding secret children, infidelity, domestic abuse and pedophilia.

At this time, none of these claims have been substantiated, but “yikes” regardless.

There wasn’t always this animosity, though. In 2012, Lamar opened for Drake on his Club Paradise Tour, which came through Arlington in March of that year. It was the very first show at the University of Texas at Arlington’s College Park Center.

“Since the inception of College Park Center, we have envisioned bringing in top-name performers — especially those who have broad appeal to our students,” said UT Arlington president James Spaniolo in a statement released to the press ahead of the show. “We are pleased to attract a Grammy-nominated, marquee artist like Drake for our first concert."

Tickets could be purchased only by UTA students and cost between $35 and $80. These days, tickets for Drake and Lamar can individually go for hundreds of dollars.

Every piece of media about the Club Paradise Tour from the time describes Lamar as an “up-and-comer.” These days, it feels like a weird thing to say about the now-Pulitzer Prize winner, but when he opened in Arlington, he was still about eight months out from releasing his breakout LP, good kid, m.A.A.d city.

“Good kid, mad city” is also how he described his style of rap to reporter Bianca Montes when she interviewed him for The Shorthorn, UT Arlington’s student newspaper.

“Off the stage, the artist is small and humble,” Montes wrote. “He takes moments to process his thoughts before he speaks. He is a poet.”

When Lamar was asked by Montes what brought him to that current point in his career, he gave his now adversary Drake a shoutout.

“Drake has allowed me to come and see a whole new audience that I am not used to,” Lamar said. “This is a whole new world.”

Lamar’s most recent show in Dallas attracted 20,000 fans to the American Airlines Center in 2022. We hear he’s still all about being humble, though.

Drake was also throwing some love Lamar’s way as well while promoting the Club Paradise Tour.

“I wanna bring Kendrick, I wanna bring A$AP [Rocky, the second opener], those are guys that I love,” Drake told MTV ahead of the tour. "I just sort of showcased the music that I happen to love right now, and those are the two guys that I'm bringing out."

YouTube clips of Drake’s set in Arlington are predictably not the greatest quality. The images are pixelated almost beyond recognition and the audio is slightly painful to listen to with headphones. Still, the spectacle and infectious energy that Drake has come to be known for is apparent. You can catch a glimpse of a flashy, brightly lit backline and hear the kids in attendance screaming and singing along.

What’s more interesting is the comments section, where students who were there flocked to give their take on the show.

“We made history,” wrote a student named Mike. “This was the first concert ever in there!”

“So glad I got to attend this,” wrote another student. “Too legit, I love my school.”

We couldn’t find any comments from students who were opposed to the show. Given how the headliner was Drake and the audience was a bunch of college kids and the year was 2012, that doesn’t really come as a surprise.

A CBS News review of the show found Drake to be smug and called him “a child with a bank account.”

“His is the music of insanity, doomed to repeat the mistakes that form the foundation of his whiny emotive rap,” reads the review. (We can’t help but wonder what this critic thinks of the current state of Drake’s career.)

The review did also call Drake “undeniably smart” for playing college campuses and applauded his taste in openers.

After the concert in Arlington, there was an after-party at the now-closed Dallas nightclub Zouk that Drake was supposed to attend. It was apparently widely advertised that the rapper would be there and would perform. Neither happened.

“At roughly 1:32 a.m., you made an announcement that Drake wasn't feeling well — the flu, I think?” wrote an anonymous Observer writer who attended the party in an open letter to Zouk. “You encouraged us to get another drink, so we could 'wish him well,' but later you Tweeted that you were ‘so mad’ at him.”

The tweet this writer is talking about appears to be lost to time, but Drake’s apology post on Facebook is still up.
“Seeing a doctor about this stomach flu,” Drake wrote. “UTA gave me life! Sorry to all my family at Club Zouk that I won't be seeing tonight. Be back soon.”

The Observer also reported that Drake was widely rumored to be at XTC Cabaret the night of the afterparty and shopping at NorthPark Center that Sunday. We may never know for sure if it was a tummy ache or a lap dance that kept Drake away from his own afterparty.

Following their tour together and a couple of collaborations in 2012, Drake and Lamar’s relationship quickly soured and the seeds for what would become this ongoing shitshow were planted the very next year.

Regardless, those college kids who attended the show in Arlington have even more to brag about now. Not only did they “make history,” as the one commenter said, by attending the first concert at the UT Arlington’s arena. They can also say they witnessed Drake and Kendrick Lamar getting along before their historically ugly and messy feud.

As the kids were all saying that year, “Y.O.L.O.”