Ever seen an old dog near the end of his life working hard to get up a flight of stairs?
You know he’s suffering and should probably just stay put on his bed on the first floor. But he’s been going up and down those stairs his whole life and he’s used to sleeping by the foot of your bed, so dammit, he’s gonna give it his all to get up those stairs.
That’s what it feels like to listen to Benzino and Eminem trade diss tracks in 2024: Old dogs climbing stairs.
This week, Eminem reignited a beef that started back in the early 2000s, when Benzino and his cronies bogarted The Source magazine and did wild shit like give his rap group Made Men a 4.5 mic review, leading to a staff walkout.
Benzino did his best to use the magazine’s cachet to take down Eminem by releasing old recordings in which Em uses the N-Bomb and reminding everyone that he’s a “guest” in the culture as a white rapper. But no one was hearing Benzino in the early aughts when Eminem was, without qualification, the biggest rapper in the word.
For reasons unknown, Em dedicated several bars to Benzino in an otherwise short track called “Doomsday Pt. 2.” He came at Benzino’s strained relationship with daughter Coi Leray and his infamously neckless appearance.
“Now I got a riddle, one condition, you mustn’t laugh/ What is the opposite of Benzino? A giraffe/ ‘Go at his neck,’ how the fuck is that?/ How can I go at somethin’ he doesn’t have?”
Putting aside that these are some of the corniest dad bars Eminem has ever spat, why did he bother cracking open a beef that started when George W. Bush was still trying to figure out this whole Iraq War thing? Has he nothing else to do or talk about in his bid for continued relevance?
Just the same, Benzino was probably thrilled to hear Eminem bars come his way, as it gave him a reason to open the attic, dig into moth balls and dust off his mic for “Vulturius,” a minute and 25-second response over Jay-Z’s classic “Where I’m From.” He spends half the track attacking Em and the other half defending his relationship with Leray.
But while “Vulturius” feels like a quick attempt to get something out, Benzino dropped another diss track, “Rap Elvis,” in the time since I started writing this. “Rap Elvis” is a longer track in which he comes for Em, the D-12 crew and Royce Da 5’9.” But it contains more of the same tired bars accusing Em of being a culture vulture and disrespecting women that no one under the age of 35 will understand.
Benzino also gave Eminem 48 hours to respond or he’s “canceled,” which is completely risible considering Em has come this far without being canceled and likely won’t fall by the hands of the dude from “Marriage Boot Camp.”
Any little play this geriatric rap beef is receiving is because Benzino’s response is being compared favorably to Nicki Minaj’s dumpster fire of a diss to Megan Thee Stallion from earlier this week. If that’s the bar, we’re all in Hip-Hop Hell.
Benzino’s dual diss tracks – to which Eminem is unlikely to respond – should come as no surprise from a dude whose modus operandi is to keep up a public feud with his 26-year-old daughter, whose music career is ascending but who will probably forever regret bashing him in a record. Benzino is 58 years old – receiving an AARP card in the mail should automatically exclude one from engaging in internet feuds. Or rap battles.
As for Em, he promised years ago that he would bow out of the rap game when he noticed his prime was behind him. Considering his late-career oeuvre consists of stinkbomb albums quickly followed up by slightly better albums as a petulant response to everyone criticizing his stinkbombs, he didn’t fulfill his own promise.
I won’t say that Hip-Hop is a young person’s sport – I will always check for new music from my favorite quinquagenarian rappers like Nas, Jay-Z and Black Thought – but rap beef is for the kids. New rule: If you have grownup children, you shouldn’t be beefing on wax.