Em’s feud with Moby was one of the loudest cross-genres beefs in the 2000s. There was more going on behind the scenes than we knew, reveals Moby.
The topic came up when the NME magazine was quizzing him on his own history, checking if “sex, drugs and rock and roll” really kill brain cells enough to wipe out the memories. Apparently not, at least if you are an ascetic vegan techno artist.
Here is a question about Eminem:
Which rapper used to shoot an effigy of you on-stage every night during his early 2000s US tour?
“That would be my fellow white-trash suburban peer, Marshall Mathers!”
CORRECT. AKA Eminem. His feud with you is well-documented and included dissing you on the track ‘Without Me’, in which he aimed a homophobic slur at you as well as the lyrics: ‘You’re too old, let go / It’s over, nobody listens to techno’.
“The only time we ever ran into each other afterwards was famously documented at the [2002] MTV Music Awards when my friend Robert Smigel, who voices Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, thought it would be funny to speak to Emimen and I together – Eminem spent the evening scowling at me and got so upset he punched the puppet! I hope if we met up now, he’d laugh about that because it was bizarre and strange!”
Surprisingly, Eminem’s hatred of you wasn’t a pantomime act. Half-way through the awards ceremony, he allegedly told you ‘You’re dead’ and gave you an unusual drawing…
“Yeah. I kept the picture — I had it framed! He handed me a drawing of him strangling me, and it was a really great illustration! What was endearing was that on the back-side of the paper, he had started drawing it then decided it wasn’t good enough. So he had a first draft on one side and then the fully-executed version on the other. For the longest time, no matter where I went, someone would yell out of a car window: ‘Nobody listen to techno!’. So I’d like to thank Marshall for introducing me to his legion of 13-year-old, future-Trump-supporting fans. None of these people were running out to listen to my music, so it did in a negative way introduce me to a weird demographic of right-wing Americans who otherwise I would probably have had no contact with.”
Looks like Moby is still bitter and defends his resentment by making sweeping generalisations about Em’s fanbase.
Let’s watch “Without Me”, a video where Eminem made his feelings about Mobt explicit, a video that has gained over 1.5 billion views on Youtube:
