Earlier this month, Eminem released his second surprise project of the year, Music To Be Murdered By: Side B. The album cut “Zeus” found Em apologizing to Rihanna about a disrespectful verse that he’d recorded about her that leaked online last year.
In a recent episode of his Shade 45 radio station, the Detroit rapper explained why he felt it was important to publicly apologize to his former collaborator on the new record.
“Honest to God — I told Paul [Rosenberg] this when it first happened — first, I don’t know how somebody got it,” Shady said of the leaked song. “Second of all, I have zero recollection of even remembering doing that verse. Like, the rhyme schemes didn’t even sound familiar to me, so I was caught off-guard.”
Eminem continued to explain that the leaked verse was probably created during the “early stages” of his 2009 album, Relapse. At the time, he said, he was re-familiarizing himself with rapping and would put together any lines that rhymed.
“I’m not making excuses for it,” he said. “I said it, and I was wrong for saying it. It was fucking stupid.”
Elsewhere in the episode, Eminem also spoke about “cancel culture” and the backlash he received over a few controversial lines in his initial Music To Be Murdered By album.
“With me, it’s literally like every fucking every other day,” he said. “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?’ Like, 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… [it’s] 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,” he added. “With cancel culture, it’s like nobody really get’s canceled, though.”
See a clip from the episode below.