Yes, Mustard saw the viral video of the Amazon delivery driver dancing in the street to Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us.” And yes, he saw the kid in the blue dress shirt wilding out to the song in a clip from a recent Kamala Harris campaign rally. But the moment that really hit home for the hip-hop producer, whose work on “Not Like Us” helped Lamar land the knockout blow in his historic rap battle with Drake, was watching his 9-year-old daughter perform a routine to the track in a group recital at dance camp the other day.
“She was right in the front, and I’m like, ‘You guys are dancing to a diss song about Drake — at school ,’” he recalls with a laugh. “That was the best s— ever.” A festive, if savage, takedown set to a deviously catchy horn lick, “Not Like Us” has been virtually impossible to avoid since it dropped late on a Saturday afternoon in May — if you heard it that evening, you know exactly where you were — and vaulted immediately to the top of Billboard’s Hot 100.
Since then it’s racked up more than 1 billion streams on Spotify and YouTube, led to think pieces about race in the Atlantic and the New Yorker and inspired at least one brass band to turn the song into an attack on former President Donald Trump. In an era of increasing cultural niche-ification, when grabbing everyone’s attention is as difficult as it’s ever been, “Not Like Us” achieved something like true omnipresence this summer — one reason it’s a presu.