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of Hip-Hop” had covered the rapper before, starting with a piece in their “Unsigned Hype” column in March 1998, but their latest installment reflected a disintegrating relationship between two mutual admirers. The Source cofounder Jonathan Schecter, who sold his interest in the magazine in 2000, had released Eminem and Royce’s twelve-inch “Scary Movies,” and the rapper’s coverage in the magazine’s pages had been regular. The Source had the chance to be the first national magazine to feature an Eminem cover story and had taken steps toward it, but balked like so many of the record-label executives who had heard Eminem before Dr. Dre. A year later, in July 2000, Eminem was the first white face to appear on the magazine’s cover since its inception in 1988. The Rolling Stone cover story I wrote was the first in-depth feature in a national magazine about Eminem and proved to be far more thorough and revealing than The Source’s article. Since then, the magazine’s coverage of Eminem had been a game of catch-up. The May 2002 issue focused on the rapper’s family history by talking to peripheral players, at a time when Eminem’s past had been regurgitated ad infinitum. In addition, the rapper’s albums never ranked among the magazine’s “Five Mic” Hall of Fame, where even a cursory glance at the roster highlights the omission: the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill is the only album by white artists, and two albums (one from 2002) by Scarface, a skilled but not sublime rapper, are honored. Eminem had lived by The Source’s word in his youth and now, justifiably, felt disrespected. In the magazine’s “Quotables” column, copy devoted to the best rhyme of the month, Eminem felt his best rhymes never made it to their pages.

“It’s funny, it’s like that, though,” Eminem says. “Every rapper, especially me, always dreams of getting a Quotable in The Source. When that magazine first started, it was the bible of hip-hop to me. The first thing me and my friends would do is open it to see whose verse got the Quotable—whoever it was was God for that month. I’ve gotten them now, but the shit I’ve gotten Quotables for is, to me, not my best shit. I can’t believe I got a Quotable for my verse in ‘Forgot About Dre.’ To me, that’s nothing compared to my third verse in ‘Criminal.’ In all my songs, I try to start the song off real slow, then in the second verse I amp it up a little bit, and the climax is the third. I think that last verse in ‘Criminal’ is one of my best. Or my verse in ‘Fight Music’ on the D12 record. The things of mine that I like most get slept on, and the shit that’s routine for me ends up becoming Quotables. It’s weird.”

This was only the beginning. The Source and Eminem would become outright enemies a few months later. That day in the Townsend Hotel, Eminem kept coming back to the topic, angry that the magazine he’d been loyal to gave him superficial tabloid treatment. All evening and the next day, he said it didn’t matter, and yet he made statements about The Source ripe for bold print. I knew he wanted to slap the magazine in my article, to air his gripes in the same pages that had scooped The Source in 1999. I also knew that no matter how much of his venom I included, it would be cut by my editor. The bits I did include were cut—they were regarded both as free publicity and taboo; media featuring media-bashing was deemed akin to cannibalism.

The Source, to Eminem, was a betrayal after years of history, a mentor turning its back, then attacking. As the year 2002 drew to a close, Source cofounder and rapper Ray “Benzino” Scott called Eminem “Vanilla Ice 2003,” and he recorded a handful of tracks that lambasted Eminem as “the rap Hitler,” “the rap David Duke,” and the leader of a white coopting of hip-hop. Eminem responded with two blistering tracks—“The Sauce” and “Nail in the Coffin”—that buried Benzino lyrically and closed the door of The Source to Eminem and, unfortunately, other artists on his Shady Records, such as D12 and newcomer Obie Trice. Case in point: In the magazine’s “Top Thirty in Hip-Hop,” a list of the most powerful players