A veteran rapper who frontlined House of Pain but got a Grammy for Best Rock Performance is also known to be the one who ended up on the other side of Eminem’s wrath. Their beef was officially squashed ten years ago but Everlast has some details to add.
It all goes back to 2000 when Eminem and Everlast met in the hotel lobby. They had their paths crossed before, hitting the same stage and working on the same soundtrack for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “End of Days” but that night something went wrong and resulted in one of the earliest documented feuds in hip-hop. Or, how Everlast put it:
We were the only guys that battled on Napster.
He talked about those events Talib Kweli on «People’s Party” and it seems like the story lost its edge over time:
It was never a stress factor. The only time it became a stress factor is that I didn’t really expect, when we had our problem – it was purely personal, I felt slighted by him at our first official meeting, when I went to shake his hand and I got egged. Put what they’d call a subtweet in a Dilated Peoples song, which got them in trouble which really wasn’t fair cause they rode for me when asked about it. They were my boys, but they shouldn’t have even been involved in that.
Everlast packed the line in his verse on the Dilated Peoples all star track “Ear Drums Pop (Remix)”:
Cock my hammer, spit a comet like Haley
I buck a.380 on ones that act shady
Later he explained that he did not know that the name of Em’s daughter and was not going after her there. But we know that this is exactly the red flag Marshal always reacts to and Everlast could be sure to get the response.
Just to see if we get noticed. And we got noticed. I’ve got from B-Real, ‘cause at that moment in time they were managed by Paul Rosenberg, Cypress Hill was. So my brothers were managed by Em’s manager, and they were like “Em heard the record and he’s curious if you dissed him”. So he’s taken notice of me all of a sudden. And my answer was “Well, what if I say yeah?” B-Real was like, “You know he’s going to come at you”. I was like, “Yeah, okay, whatever”. Then I kind of forgot about it. He didn’t come back at me for a couple of weeks. And then he pulled out “Quitter”.
It was not that scathing. I was like three years older than this guy, so I was laughing it off. But the problem was, he bled over into the alternative market. […] What I didn’t count on –cause me and this dude weren’t even in the same worlds right now, so this is just fun to me – is when it bled into the alternative stations. I don’t think they did it on purpose, but the alternative stations were having their summer festivals and Christmas shows and they would want Eminem to play that. I got the feeling quite a few times that I wasn’t invited cause they wanted Em to play… It was just the facts and the politics of the game, and us being mad at each other might have prevented him from playing.
Interesting, that Everlast only mentions “Quitter”, without acknowledging the first part of Eminem’s double-barrel shot – “I Remember”, which was the actual response to “Ear Drums Pop (Remix)”, to which Everlast, in turn, responded with putting “Whitey’s Revenge” on Napster. There was a line that aimed at Hailie again: “Better run and check your kid for your DNA”
So “Quitter” was Em’s reaction to “Whitey’s Revenge”. In any case, Everlast states that everything was done in good spirit without any real menace. However, he can see that it was wrong to get Marshall’s kid involved in their feud:
I said something about Hailey’s comet, and I didn’t know his daughter’s name was Hailie. He got upset cause he thought I said something about his daughter, and I used that in the second diss – he was about to go to jail and I said I’d look in on your kid – I wouldn’t have done that. As a parent of two daughters, I wouldn’t have done that.
Watch Everlast talking about his history with Eminem below:
