He won all five Grammys “Not Like Us” was nominated for on Sunday, taking his career total to a whopping 21.
LOS ANGELES — Kendrick Lamar won song and record of the year for his diss track “Not Like Us” at the 2025 Grammys, taking home two of the night’s top honors.
“We’re gonna dedicate this one to the city,” Lamar said before shouting out Los Angeles area neighborhoods.
He won all five Grammys “Not Like Us” was nominated for on Sunday, taking his career total to a whopping 21. The other categories included: best rap performance, best rap song and best music video.
While the categories sound like they should be the same thing, the Grammys describe record to the year to be a “specific recording of a song and recognizes the artists, producers and engineers who contribute to that recording” while song of the year “deals with the composition of a song and recognizes the songwriters who wrote the song.”
It is the second hip-hop single to ever win in the category. The first was Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.”
Lamar will headline at Super Bowl LIX during the Apple Music Halftime Show, performing for more than 100 million viewers during one of the most-watched television events of the year.
He also just released a new album, GNX, and announced a 19-city North American tour this spring and summer. It’s his first release since 2022’s “Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers” and his sixth studio album overall.
Lamar’s smash hit “Not Like Us” topped Apple Music’s global song chart in 2024 and it was his first-ever No. 1 on the year-end global songs chart.
While popular, the song is drumming up a lawsuit from Drake who alleges Universal Music Group falsely pumped up the popularity on Spotify and other streaming services of the song that viciously attacked Drake amid a bitter feud between the two hip-hop superstars.
In allegations that UMG calls “offensive and untrue,” the filing says the record company “launched a campaign to manipulate and saturate the streaming services and airwaves with a song, ‘Not Like Us,’ in order to make that song go viral, including by using ‘bots’ and pay-to-play agreements.” It said the company and Spotify “have a long-standing, symbiotic business relationship” and alleges that UMG offered special licensing rates to Spotify for the song.
Universal Music Group said in a statement in response that the “suggestion that UMG would do anything to undermine any of its artists is offensive and untrue. We employ the highest ethical practices in our marketing and promotional campaigns. No amount of contrived and absurd legal arguments in this pre-action submission can mask the fact that fans choose the music they want to hear.”
“Not Like Us,” the wildly popular Lamar single released in May as part of a flurry of dueling tracks by the two artists, includes the lyrics, “Say, Drake, I hear you like ’em young, You better not ever go to cell block one.” It has gotten more than 900 million plays, according to figures listed on Spotify.
