The artist Chance The Rapper called insane: “I was afraid he was going to actually kill me”
Chance The Rapper certified himself as a lyricist with his Acid Rap mixtape in 2013, which was the starting point for many fans coming across his music. That same year, he was lucky enough to be asked to support one of his heroes on tour despite being in the early stages of his career.
The Chicago rapper joined Eminem for a run of dates, but he only got to see him perform once due to several reasons. The first night, he was suffering from a headache and took a nap. After failing in his second attempt to watch him alongside Kendrick Lamar, he was successful in his third. Chance praised Em for his stage presence while performing his menacing track ‘Kill You’ off 2000’s The Marshall Mathers LP.
“I only saw him one time,” he told GQ. “The first night I got this terrible headache when I came off stage, fell asleep and missed the whole show. The second night, me and Kendrick were trying to get on stage but security was crazy. We tried to go out to the front pit but security wouldn’t let us in.
“The third night everyone got together and piled into the sound booth to watch it. It was ridiculous. When he played ‘Kill You’ I felt like the first time I ever heard it: this dude is mentally insane. He’s really doing it – I was afraid he was going to actually kill me.”
Chance once revealed that his two favourite Eminem songs are ‘Kill You’ and ‘Just the Two of Us’. “It was just subject matter and content, they both are very different ways of approaching a story,” he explained to Complex. “One is literally him telling you what he is going to do to you, and the other he is standing there like an actor—it’s hard to even describe.”
He continued, “That was one of the few revolutions in hip-hop, there was a point when I heard that and I was like ‘shit is different now.’ I gotta listen to this over and over. He is like a boxer about this shit-you know when niggas talk about the sweet science? He’s got that shit, he knows. He’s like a technical rapper. Eminem is the rawest shit of all time.
Chance also crowned The Marshall Mathers LP his favourite Eminem album. “That was just where he was like the darkest and the hottest,” he said. “I guess like albums are so crucial and I want to say Infinite was crucial, but specifically The Marshall Mathers LP is when I was like ‘Aww, yeah.’ That’s a lot of people’s point where they were like, ‘This is my favourite rapper, Eminem is my favourite rapper.'”
As for his favourite Eminem moment, he said, “He’s done like hella funny shit—the Mariah Carey shit was mad funny, and his random beefs. The Elton John shit was cool. I don’t know if this counts but the moment I saw a commercial for 8 Mile, like ‘What?!’ The Eminem movie version? Let’s go.”