To celebrate hip hop’s 50th anniversary, the New York Times published a big project, “50 Rappers, 50 Stories”. Joe Coscarelli, a reporter who worked on Eminem’s part for that feature, tells what surprised him during the conversation.
Joe and his colleague Jon Carmanica, who also worked on this article, came to the Ebro In The Morning show to talk about this experience. The reporter started with a fact that is widely known but often gets overshadowed by Eminem’s Rap God status. The fact that Marshall is a dedicated student of hip hop first and foremost:
He is a huge rap nerd. You know this but you forget. We did the Zoom, and he’s in his studio, and he’s literally in front of a wall of tapes. He has basically recreated his childhood cassette collection, and he had everything. He’s a huge nerd. His big thing is Naughty By Nature. He’s obsessed with Naughty By Nature. He loves Treach. He was like, “When those albums came out I was trying to get started as a songwriter and I quit rapping for the summer. I was like, I’ll never be able to do this”. And you can imagine young Em just like, “Man, fuck…” We were talking about how battle rap taught him which punch lines are gonna land and that’s how he mentioned “how you’re gonna breastfeed me, mom”. He was like, “I knew which lines to underline when I start recording because of the reaction I would get when I would battle in front of a crowd”.
Watch the video below:
