“He can f*cking do pretty much anything, right?”
Eminem sat down for a wide-ranging discussion on Crook’s Corner, and the topic of his one-time collaborator, Kendrick Lamar, came up. In the new episode, the Shady Records head noted how the Compton rapper’s stylistic change-ups make him a “top-tier lyricist.”
“If I’m getting on a track with Kendrick, I can never tell what the fuck he’s gonna do because he’s such a chameleon of styles, and he can fucking do pretty much anything, right?” he told host Kxng Crooked. “And he’s so proficient at it. He’s so good at it that you don’t know what you’re going to get. That to me is like a top-tier lyricist because it’s like you can get your ass kicked any day. Certain rappers get on a certain song and it just depends.”
While the two rappers have only linked up once on 2013’s “Love Game” off The Marshall Mathers LP 2, this isn’t the first time Em expressed his respect for Lamar. On his 2018 album Kamikaze, the Detroit rapper name-checked his Compton counterpart on a couple of songs, while he included interpolations of “HUMBLE.” and “DNA.” on “Lucky You” and “Greatest.”
Over on “The Ringer,” he positions Lamar as an example of greatness:
I’m gonna crumble you and I’ll take a number two
And dump on you, if you ain’t Joyner
If you ain’t Kendrick or Cole, or Sean, then you’re a goner
I’m ‘bout to bring it to anyone in this bitch who want it
I guess when you walk into BK, you expect a Whopper
Meanwhile, Lamar gets a shoutout on “Fall”:
I inspire the Hopsins, the Logics, the Coles, the
Seans, the K-Dots, the 5’9″s, and oh
Brought the world 50 Cent, you did squat, pissed and moaned
But I’m not gonna fall… bitch!
Ed Sheeran previously told Zach Sang about how Em tested Lamar’s rhyming capacity when they worked on “Love Game”:
“Eminem heard that Kendrick Lamar was the best rapper and he invited him to the studio to get him on a song,” he said. “He arrived and Kendrick came with all his mates and Eminem said, ‘I just want you in the studio, just you on your own. And then my engineer is gonna come in and then record you doing it. But your mates aren’t allowed in.’ Eminem said that he did it to test Kendrick because he thought he had a ghostwriter.“ When Lamar wrote “a sick verse,” Em conceded that “he’s the best.”
Back in 2016, Lamar and Rick Rubin talked shop for a GQ cover story—and Eminem annotated one particular quote on Genius:
Genius News broke down how Kendrick Lamar switches up his style:
Watch the full Crook’s Corner interview above, and read all the lyrics to Eminem’s Music to Be Murdered By on Genius now.
