I write to you today from the great planet of Brooklyn, the place where Christopher Wallace might've first pondered his classic "What's Beef?" Beef, he'd agree, is what has left people dead from gun violence in Seattle all summer. RIP to the fallen. Beef is using those killings to target black spaces—but nothing new. Beef is the police killing us over and over and over. Beef is white supremacists tagging "White Lives Matter" on the tombstone of Alex Haley's grandmother. So beef, then, is: by all means necessary.

So was that strange and telling display we called Drake versus Meek really beef? Is it really beef when Seattle's Raz Simone targets Sol with his own version of Drizzy's "Charged Up"? Raz's video starts with the couple slick bars Sol slid him on "I Can't Stop"—which were of course a response to Raz's initial status-quo boat-rocker "Same Problems"—then goes in.

You can make up your own mind about the dude's possible motivations, the value of his beat choice, or the threat level of the video's eco-friendly set piece. You can't tell me, however, that his bars about Sol's stylistic limitations don't land hard as hell, or that they don't apply to a whole segment of Seattle's scene: "I know you rap, I know you thankful for the fans, but what the fuck else is it that you do?/ We've been waitin' for some time for you to go 'head and bring a message through."

And: "Y'all just rap about rappin', or rap about the come-up."

Medic!

Okay, so—this situation was definitely sorta arguably precipitated by Simone himself on "Same Problems." Maybe it's just a play by Raz to increase his profile by sniping a hometown hero, but shit, so was "South Bronx." Things like this are inevitable, necessary, and, Seattle-historically speaking, typically underwhelming. At least with "Charged Up," Raz has made sure that it's not that last thing.

Divisiveness is a thing, though. It's a thing I've heard a lot about since Marissa Johnson and Mara Willaford crashed Bernie Sanders's stump to tell the truth. It's a thing I've heard and thought a lot about since I saw the OG Dream Hampton call out the out-front (but unaffiliated with BLM officially) activist DeRay Mckesson on Twitter—after Bernie's folks agreed to meet with him. Yikes. (Note that the meeting, and any meetings Sanders's folks are scheduling with official BLM bodies, not to mention his turning up the volume on his racial-justice platform, were without a doubt precipitated by those women's actions at Westlake.)

And just like there's always been rivalries in rap—there was always disagreement on tactics (and straight battle lines drawn) within the civil rights movement. The Black Panthers, the US Organization, the SCLC, the SNCC. As you (better) know, a lot of the disarray in that movement was 100 percent on-the-books, state-sponsored demon shit. Don't for a moment think that they aren't trying to shut this shit down any-which-way they can in 2015. Internal critique is crucial and conflict inevitable, but repeating the mistakes of the past—and falling for the okey-doke—is something we can't afford.

God bless #BlackLivesMatter, the #BlackLiberationMovement, the United Hood Movement, and everybody everywhere fighting for our right to breathe.

Everything else is really just air.