Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [88]
Eminem responded with the mixtape singles “Nail in the Coffin” and “The Sauce,” which shed light on Benzino’s relationship with The Source and the biased critical praise Benzino has received in their pages. “Put me on your fucking cover just to sell your little sell-out mag. I ain’t mad, I feel bad,” Eminem raps in “The Sauce.” He also criticizes Benzino for “eating off his own son” in the same song, a reference to a group of child rappers called 3 Down that includes Scott’s nine-year-old son, Ray Ray. Eminem then went for the jugular, including Benzino’s own verses on his mixtape, followed by Eminem’s response cuts, allowing, like any battle MC worth their weight, the listener to judge. Benzino responded by sabotaging any legitimacy in his argument with increasingly personal, race-based slurs against Eminem, tagging Eminem “the rap David Duke, the rap Hitler.” Benzino attacked Eminem’s credibility by defining hip-hop as a storytelling tradition, represented by true-life gangsters who come from the harsh streets of the drug-dealing life, something Eminem has never claimed. Benzino’s series of anti-Eminem singles, which, for all of the magazine’s purported objectivity, were posted on The Source’s website while Eminem’s rebuttal tracks were not, translated into only fourteen thousand copies of his album Redemption being sold the first week of its release, despite a cross-promotion that included a free three-month subscription to the magazine. The sales figure was approximately four thousand more copies than Benzino’s last two albums’ first-week average.
“One of Benzino’s issues with Eminem is that Eminem acts like he’s a street guy, a hard gangsta, and that he’s not, he’s a fraud,” says Sway Calloway. “In rap, who doesn’t? Everybody’s been gangstered out or else they rap about stories that haven’t always happened. From the beginning, people have made themselves into superheroes in their raps. But, the thing is, Eminem has never tried to say he was a gangsta growing up, just that he grew up hard. The only point Benzino has is that Eminem was accepted in the industry and the world easier for doing the same things that black rappers have done over the years—and Eminem’s had more success doing it. There is validity to that because Eminem reaches new fans who probably grew up like him and look like him a little bit and can relate to him better than they’ll relate to DMX. To those fans, Eminem’s like a rock star, like Nirvana was. They can relate to him and it’s just cool and hip to be down with the guy who’s anti-establishment.”
Benzino is a representative of the problem he wishes to assail, the pressure of greed in an increasingly lucrative industry. Rumors have surrounded his involvement in The Source, from the influence he must wield to have warranted repeated coverage of a solo career of which sales have barely broken the 100,000 mark and of which the greatest sales numbers to date (with his former group, Made Men) top off at about 125,000. In addition, for all of his talk of racial impropriety, Benzino is half white, the son of a white mother and black father. While Benzino’s attack did not damage Eminem’s career, it did alter the public perception of what was once the bastion of hip-hop music criticism. In this way, perhaps, Benzino achieved his goal, managing to damage a white-owned media corporation that profits from hip-hop: The Source, founded by two whites, one of which, David Mays, remains at the helm.
“The Source is part of the same system Benzino is talking about, to be honest with you,” says Calloway. “It’s confusing, but everything they’re saying the system is guilty of, they’ve been guilty of, too. They had Eminem on the cover just as many times as Rolling Stone has to sell issues. And Rolling Stone is pretty clear about the fact that they don’t put too many black artists on