Two of the biggest rappers in the music industry are Eminem and Lil Wayne. The two artists have decade-spanning careers and have seen more success than many artists can dream of. In the early 2000s, Eminem said he nearly threw this away by dissing Lil Wayne in a song. He shared why he decided this would be a mistake.
Eminem said he wanted to diss another rapper
In 2006, Eminem began feeling jealous of Lil Wayne. He viewed him as a “genius,” but he once thought of himself as the stronger artist.
“I would hear lines of his, the way he’d connect his words, and I thought, ‘Man, I can do that s***. He ain’t that dope,’” he told Spin Magazine in 2010. “I’m hearing this dude say some clever, witty s*** and I’m not doing it, so I feel f***ed up.”
He decided to put out a diss track featuring Kanye West but ultimately decided against it. He believed the backlash would be too extreme.
“If I had done something like that? Where they were at and where I was at?” he said. “It would have been career suicide. They would have f***in’ murdered me.”
Eminem worked with the other rapper on the song ‘Forever’
Just three years later, Eminem, Wayne, and West all appeared on the song “Forever” by Drake. West and Lil Wayne reportedly rewrote their verses after hearing Eminem’s.
“When I heard Eminem’s verse on Drake’s s***, I went back and rewrote my s*** for two days — I canceled appointments to rewrite,” West said, per Genius. “I f***ing care!
Eminem believed they all approached the song differently, but found West and Wayne’s verses impressive as well.
“Everybody approached the beat different,” Eminem said. “Kanye was crazy, too, and Wayne. I just saw the beat differently than anybody else did; for some reason, I felt like the beat was a double-time beat, so I rapped faster.”
Lil Wayne said he felt worried about being on the same song as Eminem
Over the years, Eminem and Wayne have collaborated on “Forever,” “Drop the World,” and “No Love.” Lil Wayne said he felt nervous when he first reached out to Eminem about working together on “Drop the World” in 2010.
“I was scared, actually, when I called Eminem for a song,” he told The New York Times in 2023. “That is a monster.”
He believed that they approached music in similar ways, though.
“He must have the same thing I have with words,” he said. “Like, we can’t get them out of our heads. Every meaning, every aspect of them. Things that rhyme, we hear it. I already know the gift and the curse that he has. And I love to hear the way he puts it together.”
All of the songs they collaborated on eventually went multi-platinum.
