Eminem had moeite met ‘white rapper’ kritiek

Eminem heeft zich in een interview van zijn emotionele kant laten zien. De rapper spreekt zich uit over de moeilijke tijd die hij had in het begin van zijn carriere.

In een interview met XXL spreekt de rapper uit Detroit over zijn carriere. Die begon nogal shady door onder meer zijn huidskleur, zo zegt hij. “When things started happening for me, I was getting a lot of heat, being a white rapper, and XXL wrote something about that,” zegt Slim Shady.

“I remember going to one of those newsstands in New York when the magazine had just started out, and I bought that and a couple of other rap magazines. I flipped to the last page first and XXL was dissing me. What the fuck?”

In het artikel liet het magazine niets heel van de rapper. Hij vond de reacties daarop nogal heftig. “I don’t even know if I read the whole article — I was used to reading things like that about me — but it hurt because I felt they didn’t know me to make that kind of judgment,” gaat Em verder. “I had to deal with that a lot. I wanted to be respectful because what I do is Black music. I knew I was coming into it as a guest in the house.”

“Obviously, I was upset,” zegt de inmiddels 47-jarige rapper. “And it wasn’t just magazines. I had rappers left and right taking shots at me. I was used to that, too. Coming up through the battle scene, that didn’t mean shit to me, you know? I would go head-to-head with whoever.”

Eminem heeft altijd geprobeerd de kritiek geen invloed te laten hebben op zijn muziek. “I think what has worked for me is that my music has never been about the fact that I am white,” beschrijft hij. “I don’t try to lean into the, ‘Hey, I’m the white boy.’ I try not to make it a novelty. I rap from the heart, rather than trying to do a white version of the art form.”

Eminem had moeite met ‘white rapper’ kritiek.