This Friday Eminem dropped surprise album with a lot of features on it. Special guests such as Black Thought and Slaughterhouse, Skylar Grey and Ed Sheeran did a huge contibution to the album. Not to speak of the album production. One of the artists surprised us a lot was Royce Da 5’9” with 2 tracks he produced on Em’s album.
“Darkness” and “You Gon Learn”, two quite different lyricaly, but with so many dope beats made Royce feel blessed as he said during his recent interview with Billboard: “Yeah, man. It’s a blessing. It’s definitely a blessing. You know, Marshall is my dear friend, but nothing comes free. He does everything that he does on a top-notch level. You have to earn your keep if you wanna get that spot. You have to work for it. You gotta qualify. He’s not going to just rap over anything. So for him to choose a couple of my beats to rap on, it’s an honor”.
Also, Royce shared these songs origin:
You know with Em, I sent him the “Darkness” beat and he wrote to it at the house. He called me and was like, “Yo. I got something to that beat. Send me the stems.” Em is a way more seasoned producer than me. He added like a lot of instruments on top of it and once he did that, after he laid his vocals, then it started to really, really become a record.
“You Gon Learn” was actually a song that I had for my album. I went in from where I was at with the album at that time and I played some of the songs that I had for him and he really messed with that one [laughs]. I can’t exactly remember how it happened, but I remember telling him, “You can have it if you want it? Don’t get it twisted. What’s mine is yours? You’re still my good friend.” I gave it to him and he did his magic to it. He added instruments to it, he added his shit to it, murdered it and that’s how the blessing happened.
They spoke about new collaboration “Overcomer” with Westside Gunn, the perfect fit for that track, and about the motive of dissing Yelawolf:
Well Gunn came in and he chose the sample. I was actually going to skip and go pass by it, but he was like, “Wait, what’s that?” I went back to it and he told me to loop that. I told him it was only two bars. He said, “Keep it looping.” Exactly what he rapped over was exactly what he told me to do. After he laid his rap, I laid the song around him. With the “All we do is slang dope,” I took that line out of his verse and I copied his vocals and stacked them on top of each other, and said it with him. Then, I just built the rest of the song around it.
Just like I said in the song, I’m not gonna put it on blast, [but] he could have handled it many ways. He chose to handle it how he handled it and that’s cool with me. Otherwise, I’m a very peaceful man. I pride myself in unifying. I feel like hip-hop is the one engine that can unify everybody. Really, really dope hip-hop music is something racists can agree on, everybody can agree on. For people who like Trump and don’t like Trump. Everybody can agree on a really dope Kendrick record. Everybody can really agree on a crazy Cole record. Through hip-hop that’s possible.
Yelawolf, man, that’s just negativity. I don’t look at it as something I want to hang my hat on. I’ve done that before. I know the ending to that movie. I know how to do that every which way. The easy part is trying to come to a resolution in these types of situations. It’s just unfortunate that you can’t just do that with everybody. That’s cool, too. I haven’t existed this long being stupid, remember that.
To check out the full interview click the link.
