A hip-hop duo comprised of brothers Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi dropped a new album today that includes a highly anticipated track that uses a well-known hook from “Stan”.
Since Swae Lee shared a video on TikTok with him singing Dido’s heartwrenching melody, there were a lot of talks and hopes that Lee will make a song out of it. Now his fans might celebrate. Hints that young artists left on their social media about a successful sample clearance were indeed about “Stan”. Now it is on Rae Sremmurd’s new record titled “Not So Bad (Leans Gone Cold)”.
Eight weeks before the release, the duo recorded an interview with Bootlkeg Kevin, which he released on the same day as the album. Among other things, the brothers talked about connections between their music and Marshall. They started, of course, with “Stan”:
Swae Lee: We just got the clearance, shout out to everybody that was involved in that. It’s not an easy process. It’s not just one person, it’s not just Dido. It was a process, going through the clearance but we got the clearance in the perfect time for the album.
That song… I feel like the world formed that song. Because it was some viral stuff going on when I sang it and then put it on a beat and then the world just been playing, they wanted that version of the beat. The world’s really produced that song, the fans produced that song. It’s just they wanted it. We did a verse, Jxmmy did a verse. We actually had some people interested in getting on it and it was, I think, a good match.
Kevin asked with a hint of disbelief if they had even listened to Eminem in Mississippi only to hear both artists conforming it in unison.
So the brothers had some explaining to do. Swae Lee said that Em’s music was everywhere around them when they were growing up: on TV, in the house where their parents played music. For his brother, though, the exposure and the impact were more personal and more powerful.
Slim Jxmmi: [Eminem] was definitely my favourite. The way he was rapping was crazy. I used to like the way he wrote. I used to rap like him at one point in time. I’m a super Eminem fan. Especially, we had a video where it was like a hundred of him, “The Real Slim Shady”. It was really controversial. He was tight.
History went a full circle and now two brothers recorded a song interpolating a beat used in one of Eminem’s most famous songs. It is their sound, their voice, their style – laid over a foundation put down by Marshall.
But isn’t ironic that in 2020 Eminem rapped on “Premonition”, the intro to the latest Eminem’s “Music To Be Murdered By”:
Fans keep on pulling me one way
Haters pull me in another
Got more hooks in me than Swae Lee
And now Swae Lee cleared a hook from Marshall’s song for his own use.
Watch the video below:
