Eminem Opens Up About Snoop Dogg and Rihanna Lyrics on “Zeus”
Written by SOURCE on January 1, 2021
Eminem dropped in on Shade 45 Thursday for a track-by-track breakdown of his latest project, Music to Be Murdered By: Side B. When the conversation shifted to the song “Zeus,” which features a number of name-drops, Em discussed why he chose to include a few bars to publicly apologize to Rihanna for an offensive lyric referencing her relationship with Chris Brown.
“Honest to God, I told Paul this when it first happened. First, I don’t know how somebody got it. Second of all, I have zero recollection of even remembering doing that verse,” Eminem said, around the 28:00 mark. “Like, the rhyme schemes didn’t even sound familiar to me, so I was caught off-guard.” Em explains that it was most likely recorded during the “early stages” of working on the 2009 album Relapse.
Eminem believes the lines came at a time where he was re-learning how to rap after getting sober and was in the mindset of saying anything as long as it rhymed. Despite that, he said he doesn’t want to try and offer up a reason for what he said. “I’m not making excuses for it. I said it, and I was wrong for saying it. It was fucking stupid,” Em admitted.
Back in July, Snoop Dogg appeared on The Breakfast Club and made headlines when he said Eminem wasn’t in his top 10 of greatest rappers of all-time. Em said he understands that everyone’s going to have an opinion and a different top 10, but he just couldn’t get over Snoop’s last statement.
“Everything he said, by the way, was fine, up to a point,” Em explained. “Him saying Dre made the best version of me, absolutely, why would I have a problem with that? Would I be here without Dre? Fuck no, I wouldn’t. The rappers he mentioned from the ‘90s—KRS One, Big Daddy Kane, [Kool] G Rap—I’ve never said I could fuck with them.”
“I think it was more about the tone he was using that caught me off-guard ‘cause I’m like, where is this coming from? I just saw you, what the fuck? It threw me for a loop,” he continued. “I probably could’ve gotten past the whole tone and everything, but it was the last statement where he said, ‘Far as music I can live without, I can live without that shit.’ Now you’re being disrespectful. It just caught me off-guard.”
Eminem recalls receiving messages from people asking him how he was going to respond to Snoop’s remarks, and he was admittedly befuddled, saying, “I didn’t know what to do about it because it confused me ‘cause I’m like, bro, same team. We’re on the same team. And I have never in my career, my entire career, said a disrespectful word about Snoop.”
Elsewhere during the chat, Eminem talked about cancel culture, saying, “With me, it’s literally like every fucking every other day.” He continued, “I’m canceled for whatever the fuck it was. It’s funny because I see some of the same people… who bitched about things back then that I said and then going back now and saying, ‘why can’t he be that again.’ What the fuck. When I was that you had a problem with that too. I understand some of the shit but for the most part like for people who just sit online and they feel like they need to bitch about whatever it is to feel like they’re a part of something. With cancel culture, it’s like nobody really get’s canceled though.”
Check out the interview up top.
