It’s been years since Benzino’s beef with Eminem had any natural spark in it. Benzino keeps blowing on coals, but smoke is not coming.
During his recent recorded conversation with Tony The Closer, Benzino once again was eager to talk about his spat with Marshall. He was much more coherent than during his previous meltdown, but it is clear that he still feels the same burning rage acutely.
When asked if he’d ever regretted beef with Eminem Benzino breathed out:
No. Hell no. We gonna be dead a lot longer than we were wherever we were on this earth, and it’s about the name you leave, the legacy you leave. When we went at Eminem it was not a go at Eminem personally. It was not to go at white people. It was who I was, and what I stood for, and what I believed. And the position I was in. If I had said that and I had nothing to do with The Source would anybody even care? If I was just a nigga from Boston, rapping, working at FedEx, and I said these things about Eminem, would anybody even give a fuck? They obviously care because of who I was.
I run The Source, but I also was a rap artist. The Eminem thing started as me saying a couple of words on a mixtape that was buried like a number 19 out of 20 songs. Somehow he heard it and really got crazy. Once that happened, he went on Hot 97 and said a whole bunch of shit. That was a major platform. I did not appreciate that because I’m still a street nigga, and I know he is not. If I know how I grew up and know that he would never disrespect me in person but doing this, so, now, it’s supposed to be rap. Now, he’s on the platform and he got other people talking shit about me and I’m like, yo this never happened before. I was not used to that. That’s why I flexed The Source power. But what man is not gonna flex the power he’s got in any situation? I just was gonna do what everybody else was gonna do.
I don’t live with regrets because I’m from Four Corners, most of my niggars are wiped out. I believed that hip hop was given to us to help out the melanated people. And now a white man comes in and he’s supposed to get carte blanche and special treatment. 500 years from now, people will look at history and be like, “Damn, this young niggas were doing back then! This hip hop shit was doing it!”. And then they are gonna see who was the most streamed and the most sold, and his face is gonna pop up. But it’s our culture! It’s us! It’s black people’s culture! What should somebody else get the credit to be the face of it?! In the 70s in Boston thousands of white people were throwing rocks at kids going to school through white neighbourhoods. I’ve seen what racism was! God gave hip hop to bridge the cultures anyways. But once they started seeing white kids come to the culture and deal with us, they say, “Oh, we can’t stop them but at least let’s give them a face that they could deal with. And I don’t like that. And I said something about that.
But Benzino insists that he has no issue with Eminem being white. He is fighting “white power” that unleashed Em on hip hop culture as if he was some kind of a secret agent of the establishment:
It has nothing to do with him being white! It’s the powers that give us the short end of the stick that take whatever we have to offer to theirs, disrespect us for it, march on us for it doesn’t want us to do it, then take it and make millions and billions of it. From our blood!
Having heard that Marshall was the most watched hip hop artist on YouTube in 2022, Benzino solemnly shook his head:
My only regret is that I didn’t go harder. Because exactly what I said was gonna happen — happened. We are two different rappers, lyrically. But “pe pe pe, masturbation on the face…” — I don’t rap like that, I’m not into the rap like that. I didn’t grow up listening to rap like that. I listened to the rap that I could relate to, with what’s going on in my hood. You don’t have to be super lyrical. I like lyrical people too. Nas, Jay, they could put words together, well. But “kaka kaka” I wasn’t into that rap anyway. No disrespect. When he was disrespecting me, he was disrespecting my street credit. And my street credit was A1 and still is. And I took it offensive. To this day when people make a mockery of people on the street selling crack… It’s not like I want to sell crack, what else I was gonna do to get some type of decent life? I don’t need him to make a mockery of that. He doesn’t understand that lifestyle and white people have to realise that. We kive different lifestyles. Yes, you can be part of hip hop but respect our lifestyle and how we are. Listen, I love things about white culture. When you look at Eminem and his fan, they are the most craziest disrespectful fans that we have in the culture. They go extra hard because they feel like they’ve been left out of hip hop and they have something to prove. Fine, you’ve got your Eminem, cool. But we’re over here.
The industry turned its back on me because of the Eminem thing. Because Jimmy Iovine and Eminem, they had it all. So everybody wouldn’t dare to say even if they thought I was saying the right shit because of what would happen to their musical career.
It is another, unnecessary confirmation that for Benzino Eminem has become an embodiment of the establishment, industry power, and racial oppression. That’s what he sees when he sees Marshall, regardless of what Em does. Benzino will not breathe freely until he can reach through his delusion. Will we ever witness it? Who cares?
