Today, Talib Kweli‘s People’s Party featured an appearance from Everlast, a veteran of the game who has experimented with several different musical styles. While the conversation is wide-ranging, around the one hour and five-minute mark, Talib mentions Everlast’s short-lived beef with Eminem, which was ultimately squashed after a few diss tracks from both parties. Everlast chuckles at the thought. “We were the only guys that battled on Napster, honestly,” he reflects, before Talib points out that Everlast actually got a shout out from Eminem on Marshall Mathers LP 2.
“It was never a stress factor,” admits Everlast. “The only time it became a stress factor is that I didn’t really expect, when we had our problem — it was purely personal, I felt slighted by him at our first official meeting, when I went to shake his hand and I got egged. Put what they’d call a subtweet in a Dilated Peoples song, which got them in trouble which really wasn’t fair cause they rode for me when asked about it. They were my boys, but they shouldn’t have even been involved in that.”
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He explains that Em actually noticed the diss, and he got a call from B-Real, who was at the time managed by Paul Rosenberg. “My brothers are managed by Em’s manager, and they were like ‘Em heard the record and he’s curious if you dissed him,'” remembers Everlast. “So he’s taken notice of me all of a sudden. [laughs] And my answer was ‘well, what if I say yeah?’ B-Real was like ‘you know he’s going to come at you.’ I was like, yeah whatever. Then I kind of forgot about it. He didn’t come back at me for a couple of weeks. And then he pulled out “Quitter.”
Everlast claims that the diss itself wasn’t overtly scathing, but it caused an unexpected predicament. As Eminem was getting bigger in alternative markets. “What I didn’t count on –cause me and this dude weren’t even in the same worlds right now, so this is just fun to me — is when [Quitter] bled into the alternative stations. I don’t think they did it on purpose, but the alternative stations were having their summer festivals and Christmas shows and they would want Eminem to play that. I got the feeling quite a few times that I wasn’t invited cause they wanted Em to play…It was just the facts and the politics of the game, and us being mad at each other might have prevented him from playing.”
He maintains that the beef was never truly serious, though he would have made one particular change pertaining to a lyric on the song that initially started it all. “I said something about Hailey’s comet, and I didn’t know his daughter’s name was Hailey,” says Everlast. “He got upset cause he thought I said something about his daughter, and I used that in the second diss — he was about to go to jail and I said I’d look in on your kid — I wouldn’t have done that. As a parent of two daughters, I wouldn’t have done that.”
For more from Everlast, check out the full episode of Talib Kweli’s People’s Party below.
