In the latest episode of Tony The Closer, Benzino spoke about his upbringing in Boston, visiting his father in jail, being involved in hip-hop and beefing with Eminem.
“Do I regret beefing with Eminem? Hell no. We gonna be dead a lot longer than us when we was on this earth and it’s about the name you leave, the legacy you leave. When we went at Eminem it was not a go at him personally. It was not to go at white people. It was who I was and what I stood for. What I believed. And the position I was in.” said Benzino.
Then he continues: “Eminem thing started as me saying a couple of words on a mixtape that was buried like a number 19 out of 20. Somehow he heard it and really got crazy. Once that happened, he went on Hot 97 and said a whole bunch of s–t. That was a major platform. I did not appreciate that because I’m still street ni–a and I know he is not. Now, he’s on the platform and he got other people talk s–t about me and I’m like ‘yo this never happened before.’ I was not used to that. That’s why I flexed The Source power in there. What man is not gonna flex the power he got in any situation. I just did what everybody else would do.”
“I don’t live with regrets because. I believed that hip-hop was given to us to help out the melanated people and now all because a white man comes in and he’s supposed to get caught blank with special treatment. 500 years from now, people are going to looking at us, they’ll look at history and say ‘damn, this hip-hop artists doing great back then’ and then they are gonna see ‘who is most streamed and most sold’ and Eminem’s face is gonna pop. That bothers me because its out culture. Its ours. It’s black people’s culture. What should somebody else get the credit to be the face of it.”
“They want to give us Eminem and he’s the greatest, and he is the most… No! It’s not fair, man. My thing is.. The only regret I have is not going harder. We are different kind of rappers, lyrically. I don’t rap about what he raps about. I’m not into the rap like that. I didn’t grow up listening to rap like that. I could relate to what was going on in my hood. You don’t have to be super lyrical. I like lyrical people too. Nas, Jay, they could put words together good. But “kakakaka” I’m not into that rap type. No disrespect. When he was disrespecting me, he was disrespecting my street credit. And my street credit was A1 and still is.”
“When you look at Eminem and his fan, they are the most craziest disrespectful fans that we have in the culture” – Benzino added.
You can watch the interview below. An Eminem talk starts at 25:12 timestamp.
