Eminem has never really shied away from saying awful stuff in his songs, either as an edgy gag or because he’s just really pissed about his mom or whatever, but he admits that he actually went too far on his new song “Fall.” Speaking with Sway about his new album Kamikaze (via Vulture), Eminem acknowledged that he probably shouldn’t have called Tyler, The Creator a homophobic slur. “I was angry when I said the shit about Tyler,” Eminem told Sway, and while he used to admire Tyler, Eminem was offended when the Odd Future rapper criticized his music on Twitter (social media is a big factor in modern diss tracks).
Specifically, Eminem’s “Fall” contains the line, “Tyler create nothin’, I see why you call yourself a faggot, bitch,” and he now says he regrets using the homophobic slur. “I felt like this might be too far,” he told Sway, “because in my quest to hurt him, I realize that I was hurting a lot of other people by saying it.” Eminem was even so sure that he had gone too far that it kept bothering him as he put the album together, and it got to the point where he decided to obscure the word on the song just so he could kind of get away from having said it because he realized it was wrong.
Here’s the thing, though: That’s bullshit. Based on Eminem’s own account, he had every opportunity to not release a song in which he used a homophobic slur, but he did it anyway. Now, just because he knew it was a mistake at the time and did barely any work to make it right, he expects some kind of credit. He didn’t apologize, he didn’t say that it was definitely wrong, he just said that this 27-year-old kid hurt his feelings so bad that he had no choice but to say a word he probably should not have said. What a hero.