When Eminem finally broke out, many music execs who’d passed on his demo months or years earlier realised they had missed the revolution. N.O.R.E. remembers taking a private flight with the Def Jam CEO to one of Eminem’s early shows – to see that the game was about to change for the whole industry.
N.O.R.E. dropped this tale during the Drink Champs episode with Bubba Sparxxx. Bubba has his own Eminem story to tell. Still, Noreaga’s experience was different and mostly showed how how powerful executives were beginning to understand the inevitable shift Marshall was bringing to rap.
I remember when it all shifted. I remember I was assigned to Def Jam, and Def Jam’s Lyor Cohen was my favourite CEO. That was the first time I ever got on a private plane; I was very embarrassed. He said to me, “We’re going to leave here at 4”, so I thought he meant the flight was at 4. I didn’t know we were going on a private plane. I showed up to the Def Jam at 1 o’clock. He’s like, “Yo, what are you doing here?” I said, “The flight is at 4. It’s going to take us an hour to get to JFK”. He’s like, “No, we don’t do no JFK”. I was like, “I don’t know what we doing!” He’s like, “Yo, we’re going to see The Great White Hope”. I don’t know who the fuck he’s talking about at the time.
This was Eminem’s first show after “My Name Is”, his first tour. So me and Lyor, we were going to see him. We took a helicopter. Boom. Like it’s normal. We fly. I don’t know if he was trying to get Eminem. I don’t think he was, but he was trying to get something. He wanted to see if it was real.
So, we went back there, and it was crazy because as powerful as Lyor Cohen is, he couldn’t get backstage. They had to look at me, and I was like, “Yeah, he’s with me”. I had to pay him back. They recognised me, and we went back there. This was early Em. This was in Rochester, if I’m not mistaken; it was upstate New York. We went to it, and I remember Lyor was like, “The game will change”.
Lyor Cohen, one of the most influential executives in modern rap and R&B, now serves as Global Head of Music at YouTube. Cohen began his career in the 1980s and later became president of Def Jam Recordings. He had the experience and instinct to recognise what Eminem represented. Yet he still had to watch it from the outside.