He might look like something found in the dumpster at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. He might shamelessly plunder the sonics of decades of deep-fried and gravy-smothered hits. But despite everything about his presentation and performance, Kid Rock is not actually southern. 

If he were, he might have done the friendly thing and warned Eminem off of collaborating on “Heal My Faith,” a song on his recent Christian album “Halfway 2 Jesus.” He might have stopped his longtime friend and fellow Michigander from irreparable reputational damage. Instead, he let Slim Shady learn a hard lesson that true southerners know: You lay down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. 

“Heal My Faith” is genial to the point of being unmemorable, a bit of cringy Christian pablum that encourages loving someone even when you’re outside of the pit. It’s student-athlete core, a mish-mash of choirs, electric guitar noises over pounding drums that all sound like keyboard presets. Kid Rock’s contributions are entirely lifted from inspirational T-shirts, table scraps from rejected Jelly Roll songs. The result is that “Heal My Faith” offers very little to chew on — until Eminem shows up.

The boilerplate praise chug of the song has one upside: It forces the “Rap God” to slow down. Left to his own devices, middle-aged Eminem has been the hip-hop equivalent to masturbatory guitarists, his late-stage work full of technically impressive displays of chops that nonetheless lack the fun and melody of his radio hits. Hearing him enter the song with a flow that’s not indebted to a J.J. Fad outro offered a glimmer of hope. But it was short-lived.

On “Heal My Faith,” the rapper who first gained mainstream attention by lighting the pop chart’s sacred cows afire wonders why we can’t all just get along. It’s shocking stuff from the rapper who famously mused about dropping an “awfully hot coffee pot” on Donald Trump in a freestyle at the BET Hip Hop Awards in 2017. Now, Slim Shady seems to be saying, “We might believe in fundamentally opposed directions for this country. We might differ on the idea of extending dignity to all people, but can’t we put that aside for the sake of a new single you can buy?” 

You don’t need to hear it. You’ve already heard it. It’s the realm of purple state campaign ads and Earthbound Trading Co. bumper stickers. It’s junk, and Eminem seems to know it.

How else can you explain a verse that is 90% throat-clearing and preemptive dodges of the backlash he knows is coming? Eminem spends bar after bar defending his decision to even appear on the song, touting his decades-long friendship with Kid Rock and their intertwined history in the music industry.

He talks about their shared roots in Detroit’s music scene, and how their paths crossed again and again. He details an early CD release party at length, where the more established Kid Rock showed up to lend support to the emerging rapper. It isn’t until the closing lines of his verse that Eminem turns to God and the brotherhood of man.

“Liberal and evangelical can agree,” he raps. “It’s God first, home of the free.”

Reputation-wise, the collaboration does far more for Kid Rock than it does for Eminem. The former has long been fully consumed by Trump World, becoming more of a standby entertainer for MAGA events than a rock star. Eminem, on the other hand, once told fans who supported Trump to stop streaming his music. 

Rock told Billboard that he hadn’t planned to “drag [Eminem] into my political world,” but he had to have known  that was impossible. The nod from a supposed Trump critic removes a small bit of the stain on Kid Rock, but it also transfers directly to his collaborator.

Eminem might have been hoping to build a bridge with this collaboration, but at least according to his Instagram comments, his fans aren’t ready to get over it. One commenter assured him that it’s okay to cut off a friendship “over moral differences.” Another said Eminem’s line in the sand against Trump must have been “brushed back into the beach.” The rapper’s newfound neutrality, one wrote, still amounted to “choosing a side.”

---

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

---

You can’t feel too bad for Eminem, who’s had plenty of opportunities to see that who you rap with is who you are. After all, more than a year after her breakout single “What I Want,” which she recorded with the controversial country music star Morgan Wallen, the pop singer Tate McRae is still being confronted by fans and interviewers with questions about the pair’s collaboration. 

Wallen, who’s been given about as many second chances as gold records, has never explicitly identified himself as a supporter of the MAGA movement. But his history of using slurs on camera, the general nastiness of his dejected young man music and a massive social media tiff with “Saturday Night Live” have solidified him as an anti-woke warrior in the popular conception. 

“It’s crazy to think that one song could define a whole person,” McRae told W Magazine earlier this month.“There are many aspects of my personality that three-quarters of my audience has no idea about. You hope one day you figure out a way to show all aspects of it.”

There’s little chance that Eminem will face such questions in the future, if only because his career as a hitmaker is basically over. He was something exciting and fresh when he pantsed the pop culture landscape in the late 1990s, but joking about how much everything sucks is a young man’s game. Coming from an older man, it just sounds bitter and out-of-touch. 

Different listeners draw the start of his decline and the end of his relevancy at different points. Most agree that the zeitgeist of rap started to shift away from the stubbornly anachronistic rapper sometime around the end of the aughts. In 2013, he released a well-received album seemingly purpose-built to cap on his career, and then he just kept going. The 23-year-old McRae, on the other hand, will have her past decisions dug up by what remains of the music press after each new chart smash. Eminem may well be staring down a future where his regrettable decision to record contemporary worship dreck with Kid Rock generated his last real headlines. 

It’s something the culturally savvy clown of Eminem’s early career would have been smart enough to avoid. 

The post Eminem’s Kid Rock collab shows the risk of cozying up to MAGA appeared first on Salon.com.

Being one of the greatest rappers of all time means having all-time feature verses on your resume. Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, Drake, Kendrick Lamar—all of them are known for completely hijacking another artist’s song to turn an ordinary song into something truly blockbuster. Eminem is no exception, tagging in on songs for the sake of competition to prove who’s the best.

We selected three instances where the Detroit MC absolutely stole the show on a song. Moreover, they’re all times where he’s on records with other rappers that are in the discussion for the greatest of all time.

Three Times Eminem Absolutely Killed a Guest Verse

“Forever”

The energy shifted drastically when Em joined Drake, Kanye West, and Lil Wayne on “Forever”. Perhaps it’s the breakneck pace at which he rapped, but even the simplest rhyme schemes feel contagious with how frequently he changed tempos.

Additionally, it helps that the other rappers on the song didn’t give their A game. Lil Wayne gives a par-for-the-course verse in a year where he was basically giving them out for free. Drake rapped in a lot of dad puns, and Kanye West was mostly just hilarious, saying “Super bad chicks givin’ me McLovin”. Eminem essentially had an open canvas for him to challenge their bombastic Boi-1da production.

“Renegade”

Less of a complete hijacking and more of a constant tug-of-war between two all-time rappers. Ultimately, it’s a matter of preference when picking between Jay-Z and Slim Shady. Where Hov zeroes in on the mindset it took for him to thrive, Eminem grapples with the perception and controversy around his name. Sure, he’ll rock the boat like usual, but ultimately, he looks at hypocrisy as the smoking gun for the media’s disdain.

“But there’s a huge interference, they’re sayin’ you shouldn’t hear it/Maybe it’s hatred I spew, maybe it’s food for the spirit/Maybe it’s beautiful music I made for you to just cherish/But I’m debated, disputed, hated and viewed in America/As a motherf**kin’ drug addict, like you didn’t experiment?” Em raps.

“Don’t Push Me”

Just because they’re good friends and he signed 50 Cent doesn’t mean that Eminem was going to take it easy on him. He spends the verse hopscotching through the blunt force of the drums, scoffing at anyone questioning his legitimacy as a rapper. He’s not just some poser, and he’s definitely not someone that kids can just emulate. Cosplaying is fun and games until someone actually dies behind it.

“Man these teenie boppers see me on these magazine covers/In these beanies and these rags living fantasies, frontin’ (C’mon)/Like it’s all fun and games ’til they shoot ’em up bang/And you see your brains hang and you see we ain’t playing,” Eminem snarls.

Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images for MTV/Paramount Global

The post 3 Times Eminem Completely Hijacked Someone Else’s Song appeared first on VICE.

💾

50 Cent’s next big project is the new Street Fighter film. The acclaimed rapper portrays one of the game’s characters, Balrog, in the film, and also apparently worked on the soundtrack. Interestingly, in a new red carpet interview, 50 revealed that his ol’ buddy Eminem had previously been working with him on some music for the film.

“Em, well, he put a couple pieces together for it,” 50 Cent said. However, Eminem ultimately “decided that” he had to prioritize work on his next solo album. “He kinda fell back on that,” 50 added.

Notably, this is not the first time that 50 Cent has talked about working with Em in the Street Fighter soundtrack. “I got some music that I’m working on. I did something currently: me, Eminem and 2Pac,” he told Today With Jenna & Sheinelle in July 2026. “They delivered it. It’s for the theme of Street Fighter, the movie. We worked on it and got it right.”

50 Cent and Eminem have a deep bond and strong friendship

Eminem and 50 Cent aren’t just musical collaborators; they’re also really close friends. While 50 is known for trolling other rappers and getting into beefs, he once told Jimmy Kimmel that he’d “never” beef with Em.

“Never with Em because he’s done everything for me,” he said back in 2020. “He provided my opportunity and from there… Dre is like to Em what Em is for me, and so having us together, it’s the coolest thing.”

For his part, Eminem was on hand for 50 Cent’s Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony, and he had some glowing things to say about his friend.

“I just wanna say man, I’m here today because this is not only a business partner to me, it’s one of the best friends I’ve ever known in the world,” Em said, per iHeart. “I would say that it’s much more fun to be his friend than it is to be his enemy because this guy is f**king relentless. And he won’t stop. And the same way that he’s relentless in his battles, he’s also relentless in his business.”

Eminem continued: “He’s an artist, an entrepreneur, an actor, a director, a producer; he can juggle, he’s great at Scrabble. He pretty much does it all. And he’s also helped me through a lot of hard times in my own life, and he’s always been there when I needed him. So 50, congrats on your star, man. Hollywood is making official what I knew from the beginning, what Dre knew from the beginning.”

Photo by Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic

The post Eminem Has a New Solo Album on the Way, According to His Long-Time Collaborator and Fellow Rap Icon appeared first on VICE.