Since stirring up a fresh round of controversy and beefs with the unannounced release of his new album, Kamikaze, Eminem has remained silent—until now. Sitting down with Sway Calloway on Tuesday evening, the 45-year old rapper focused most of his time discussing the negative reactions to his last album, Revival.
Part one of the interview cut off before Eminem had a chance to answer Calloway's question about his beefs with Machine Gun Kelly and Joe Budden, but the end of the video includes a preview of his answer about MGK. Eminem claims that his reason for dissing Machine Gun Kelly was "a lot more petty" than MGK's infamous 2012 tweet about his daughter Hailie. He also confirmed rumors that he will respond to MGK.
"You know you go down the wormhole of YouTube and whatever, right?" Eminem said. "So I see, 'Machine Gun Kelly talks about Eminem's daughter' or whatever, right? So I'm like, 'What the fuck?' I clicked on it. Then he starts doing a press run, basically, about Hailie. I'm like, 'What the fuck? Yo, my man better chill.' So, that's not why I dissed him. The reason I dissed him is actually a lot more petty than that. Now I'm in this fuckin' weird thing, because I'm like, 'I've got to answer this motherfucker.'"
Eminem's full answer about the "petty" reason he dissed MGK will be revealed during part two of the interview.
Elsewhere during part one of Eminem's conversation with Calloway, he spoke about the accents he used heavily on Relapse, which drew ridicule from fans. "Relapse is something that I looked at in a couple years, went back to and cringed at," he said. "I was like, 'Oh, Jesus Christ, I didn't even realize I was doing that many accents.' For whatever reason, I just got into it and started on this weird serial killer vibe kind of thing. And started wanting to talk crazy and started bending words more, and the only way you could bend them was with this accent."
Eminem explained that he chose to drop Kamikaze without warning because he felt people had formed negative opinions about Revival before it was even released. "I feel like giving them no warning was the best thing to do," he noted. "When the Revival tracklist came down the pipe, it was overwhelmingly, 'This shit is going to be trash.' And nobody really wanted to be wrong about it. A lot of people had already formed their opinions."
He also told Calloway that he thinks some of the negative reactions to Revival came because the album sounded different than what other rappers were doing at the time. "Maybe because it doesn't sound like everything else and what most people are doing, maybe that was what tainted their ear," he said. "I remember a time in hip-hop where you had to be so different from the next person, or you were trash. There was a shift somewhere that happened that if it doesn't sound like everything else, then it's trash automatically."
Hinting at his current mental state, Eminem added, "There is something inside me that is a little more happy when I'm angry. As bad as it feels to be there, there's also something about it—there's a rush of it that I like because it inspires me to say something back."
See part one of Eminem's interview with Sway Calloway up top.
