Eminem admits he went 'too far' with homophobic slur about Tyler, the Creator
Eminem knows when he takes things “too far,” which is why he’s issuing a mea culpa to fellow rapper Tyler, the Creator.
The “Lucky You” rapper received a lot of backlash for calling Tyler, the Creator a “f*****” on his new album, Kamikaze. On Eminem’s track “Fall,” he rapped: “Tyler create nothing, I see why you called yourself a f*****, bitch / It’s not just ’cause you lack attention / It’s ’cause you worship D12’s balls, you’re sac-religious.”
In an interview with Sway Calloway, Eminem apologized for using the gay slur. “In my quest to hurt him, I realized that I was hurting a lot of other people by saying it,” he said.
“I really did like [Tyler] … I just felt like there was a mutual respect,” Em told Sway of their initial friendship. But the rappers turned frenemies after the Odd Future co-founder started bashing his former idol on social media. “Just don’t go public with it and publicly express your opinion about how much my s*** is trash,” Eminem explained.
The “last straw” came when Tyler tweeted that Eminem’s song with Beyoncé, Walk on Water, was “horrible.”
“I was like, ‘Alright, I need to say something now because this is f****** stupid,'” Eminem recalled. “I’m not gonna be America’s punching bag, and motherf****** just wanna think it’s cool and safe to say whatever the f*** they want about me.”
Eminem continued, “With the Tyler, the Creator thing man, I realize now and I realized when I said it, but I wasn’t, like, in the mind frame — I was angry when I said the s*** about Tyler … every time I saw this kid, always so cool … but, I’m sitting back like, ‘man, at what point do I have to say something just to defend myself?’ And I think that the word that I called him on the album was, on that song, was one of the things where I felt like this might be too far.”
“The homophobic slur?” Calloway clarified.
“Yeah,” Eminem replied. “In my quest to hurt him, I realized that I was hurting a lot of other people by saying it and, at the time, I was so mad … but in the midst of everything else that was going on in this album, the things that it took to pull this album together and all that kind of s***, it was one of the things that I kept going back to, going, ‘I don’t feel right with this.'”
On “Fall” the word “f*****” is somewhat edited over, but a listener can still tell what’s being said.
“Before the album came out, I had the conversation with Paul and we spun the word back, but now I realize people can hear what I’m saying anyways,” Eminem said.
Tyler, the Creator has yet to respond to Em’s public apology.
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