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It’s been one year since Kendrick Lamar took the Kia Forum stage in Inglewood for “The Pop Out: Ken and Friends,” the first in a series of highly publicized victory laps that have come at the expense of his deflated rival, Drake.

It wasn’t the chart performance of “Not Like Us” that declared Lamar the winner.

The reason Lamar was able to knock him out was because Drake’s authenticity couldn’t take a punch.

At the heart of Lamar’s surgical evisceration of Drake’s brand of artistry is a question all creatives must ask of themselves at some point: What am I doing this for?

Big Sean, whose 2013 project with Lamar is pegged as the starting point of the Drake beef, said there was significance to Lamar’s “pop out” appearing on Juneteenth, the federal holiday marking the end of slavery in the U.S.