Eminem Tells Fans He’s Glad He Stays Off Social Media
Earlier this week, Eminem sat down for a Q&A session with some of his fans as part of SiriusXM’s “Town Hall” series. While there, he fielded a number of questions from an audience of SiriusXM listeners and moderator Sway Calloway. They covered topics including his motivation for making new album The Marshall Mathers LP 2 – spoiler: he said, “I just want to rap” – and how he feels about a high school teacher using his lyrics as a classroom tool (“If you can get away with that, then that’s cool,” he said).
Eminem goes deep on the making of ‘The Marshall Mathers LP 2’
But perhaps the most revealing discourse happened when Calloway asked the rapper how Internet savvy he is. At first, Eminem joked, “I am on social media all day, in front of a computer, blogging constantly. Yo, does someone got my laptop?” After the laughter died down, though, he opened up.
“I really try not to pay attention,” he said. “Put it this way: I want to keep my finger on the pulse of what’s going on, so I don’t want to be ignorant in that sense. But at the same time I can’t pay attention to what everyone’s saying. I would never be able to make music, I don’t think, if I just got caught up in that. ‘Cause I would probably get caught up in some ugly arguments with people. ‘Yo, drive to my house now. What the blip?’ It would consume a lot of my time and it would be very counterproductive to do that.”
Then he paused and admitted, “But I still do. And that’s what’s fucked up.”
The event coincided with the release of MMLP2, which came out yesterday. It also saw the release of “Don’t Front,” a bonus track available to fans who bought a bundle of MMLP2 and the video game Call of Duty: Ghosts. The track – which plays off a jazzy sample of Black Moon’s 1993 single “I Got Cha Opin,” with lines form Black Moon rapper Buckshot intact – has leaked. In typical Shady fashion, it finds Eminem self-promoting, rapping, “When names come up in the conversation of who’s the dopest, better throw mine in it.”