Idiosyncratic insult of the week comes courtesy of Drake, who used his appearance on a TV sports show to take a pop at what he sees as the increasingly genteel Jay-Z.
The pair have already have beef, as hip-hop disagreements have long been known, with Drake recently telling Rolling Stone: "It's like Hov can't drop bars these days without at least four art references! I would love to collect at some point, but I think the rap/art world thing is getting kind of corny." For his part, Jay-Z opted to respond in verse: "Sorry Sorry Mrs Drizzy for so much art / Silly me, rappin' 'bout shit that I really bought / While these rappers rap about guns that they ain't shot / And a bunch of other silly shit that they ain't got."
Thank heavens that wasn't the end of it. Excitingly, Drake now seems to have doubled down on his hip-hop version of Roy Keane's prawn-sandwich speech, choosing to restate his comparatively down-to-earth credentials during an interview with a sportscaster last weekend. "This is the people's team tonight," he declared of the Toronto Raptors. "Jay-Z's somewhere eating a fondue plate."
Clearly, what Drake is saying is that Jay-Z is now so grand that he not only holds his rap beef at arm's length, but on a fancy-pants skewer, twirling it in hot broth or oil before completing the timeworn ritual and burning his tongue with it.
Do let's hope this marks an explosion of 70s-dinner-party-related disses in hip-hop – an era of government-cheese-and-pineapple hedgehogs, of rum babamamas and black forest gat-hoes. At the very least, rap beef itself should be tarted up into something a little more nostalgically tizzy – rap beef bourgignon, say, or rap beef wellington. And Jay-Z obviously needs to respond in nostalgic kind at his very earliest convenience. Taking this stuff lying down simply isn't the way he arctic rolls.
