Universal Music Group CEO Lucian Grainge is firing back at Drake’s demand to read his emails amid the ongoing lawsuit over Kendrick Lamar diss track “Not Like Us,” calling the request “farcical” and “ridiculous.”
In a scathing declaration filed in court Thursday, Grainge said it “makes no sense whatsoever” that the boss of the world’s largest music company would play a role in the release of a single song.
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“The proposition that I am in the weeds as to the release and promotion of any particular sound recording, from the thousands of UMG releases throughout the world, is farcical,” Grainge wrote.
The new filing came as discovery is underway in Drake’s lawsuit, which claims UMG defamed him by releasing Lamar’s scathing diss track that labeled him a “certified pedophile.” Last week, his lawyers demanded to see Grainge’s emails and text messages.
As the head of a huge corporation, Grainge says he’s used to such filings that seek to “waste my and UMG’s time and resources with discovery of the sort that Drake is seeking here.” But he also responded directly to the claim that he was personally scheming to help promote a record that Drake says was defamatory.
“I would like to make it quite clear that I had never heard the recording ‘Not Like Us,’ nor ever saw the corresponding cover art or music video, until after they were released,” Grainge wrote in the filing. “The proposition that I was involved in, much less responsible for, reviewing and approving the content of “Not Like Us,” its cover art or music video, or for determining or directing the promotion of those materials, is groundless and indeed ridiculous.”
Lamar released “Not Like Us” last year amid a war-of-words with Drake that saw the two UMG stars release a series of bruising diss tracks. The song, a knockout punch that blasted Drake as a “certified pedophile” over an infectious beat, became a chart-topping hit in its own right and won five Grammy Awards, including record and song of the year.
In January, Drake took the unusual step of taking UMG to court, claiming his own label had defamed him by boosting the track’s popularity, including through the use of bots and other nefarious marketing tactics. The lawsuit, which didn’t name Lamar himself as a defendant, alleges that UMG “waged a campaign” against its own artist to spread a “malicious narrative” about pedophilia that it knew to be false.
UMG has said those allegations were clearly meritless – that “hyperbolic insults” and “vitriolic allegations” are par for the course in diss tracks and cannot form the basis for a libel lawsuit. The company has pointedly noted that Drake himself was happy to make such attacks, including accusing Lamar of domestic abuse, until he lost the battle.
Last week, Drake’s lawyers filed a motion seeking to force UMG to hand over more materials in discovery – the phase in litigation where the two sides exchange relevant evidence. They say UMG has refused to fully cooperate, including with Grainge’s messages: “UMG’s insistence on shielding Grainge from document discovery is unfair, unwarranted and inconsistent with fundamental principles of discovery.”
But in Thursday’s response filings, UMG’s attorneys called that effort “a transparent attempt” to harass the company and its boss “out of spite.”
“The premise of Drake’s motion — that he could not have lost a rap battle unless it was the product of some imagined secret conspiracy going to the top of UMG’s corporate structure — is absurd,” writes UMG’s lawyer Rollin Ransom. “Sir Lucian is the CEO of a multinational enterprise; his days are spent determining and implementing global strategy, not vetting individual tracks or album covers or driving the release and promotional plans for any one recording.”
